Decency Loses Its Moral Force

When Louie Gohmert, the Republican representative from Texas, jabbed a forefinger at FBI Agent Peter Strzok during last week’s House Judiciary Committee hearings and asked, “How many times did you look so innocent into your wife’s eyes and lie to her?” one of the Democrats in the room cried, “Have you no shame?” The echo of Joseph Welch’s question to Senator Joseph McCarthy at the 1954 Army–McCarthy hearing seemed all too just: Just as McCarthy had targeted the U.S. Army as a nest of subversives—he claimed to know of 130 Communists in its ranks—so Gohmert and his colleagues hoped to use Strzok to undermine the credibility of the FBI in the eyes of the American people.

But because shame does not operate today as it did 70 years ago, last week’s events could not possibly have had an outcome comparable to that of the Army hearings. McCarthy’s popularity