"Have You No Sense of decency?"

These words, uttered by Boston attorney Joseph Welch to Senator Joseph McCarthy during Congressional hearings in the 1950's, were the ones that sank the Wisconsin Senator for good and sent him into political perdition accompanied by creeping alcoholism.

The modern equivalent, in that it definitively ended Donald Trump's campaign for the presidency, was his bus tour comment that, because he is a star, he can treat any woman he met as he wants, including grabbing them "by the pussy". This heretofore non-word in serious public discourse was enough to send the Trump candidacy into oblivion. Trump had said things of dubious taste during the campaign, but this was over the top. The remark (and others) demonstrated not only that the Republican Party had allowed to be nominated a man lacking the usual dignity expected in an American presidential candidate; but also, that American public discourse had developed a coarseness over the recent decades that is a disturbing development to those who have a sense of what American history has been.