So much of our national politics looks like bread and circuses that one can miss important shifts in the political zeitgeist. Joe Bidens descent to the second circle of #MeToo hell may be one of them.

Yes, we are learning again the high price of double standards and hypocrisy, which are always with us. But while the Democrats bucket brigades throw water on the Biden-Reade wildfire, look over there at something else thats in flames. It is liberal progressivisms nearly hundred-year-old strategy of using moral condescension as a crude weapon against its enemies.

A distinction is necessary. Morality is about right and wrong. Moralitys insincere cousin is moralism, which grabs virtue off the shelf as needed. About every 20 or 30 years, the progressives come up with another moralized argument to delegitimize their opponents.

The most durable political weapon the progressives ever created was the notion that capitalism is immoral. This interpretation of private economic interests was popularized as far back as the 1930s with Matthew Josephsons The Robber Barons, a tendentious history of late-19th-century American entrepreneurs, whose title stuck as shorthand for capitalism.

The progressives positioned capitalism not merely as flawed but irredeemably immoral and requiring controlby them. President Franklin Roosevelt recognized what a potent and repeatable weapon this was, coining the campaign phrase the Ishmaels and the Insulls, whose hand is against everymans.

Moralism became a progressive go-to tactic in American political life because it constantly forced conservatives to issue denials of moral failure.

By now the appeal is virtually robotic. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer this week outputted his thoughts that Republican plans to give companies wrestling with coronavirus liability protection are going to help big CEOs, but not the workers.

Next came the great moral event of the centurys second halfthe civil rights movement. Once past the landmark laws of the mid-1960s, Democratic politicians quickly transformed even that into a moralistic weapon, routinely asserting that Republican policies would roll back the moral victories of that era.

Leave it to Joe Biden, looking more than ever like an innocent abroad, to resurrect his partys legacy of protecting Jim Crow when at a fundraiser he cited his good Senate relationship with Old-South Democrats Herman Talmadge of Georgia and James Eastland of Mississippi.

During Barack Obamas first high-minded presidential term, he gave speech after mocking speech about the wealthiest and the 1%. They came in like moralistic mortar rounds. In 2011, a liberal group ran a TV ad against Paul Ryan, then House Budget Committee chairman, depicting him throwing Grandma off the cliff with his proposed Medicare reforms.

Then, no longer content with isolating its opposition as its moral inferiors, the American left began to overreach. It targeted basic beliefs that had bipartisan support, such as the consensus about First Amendment free-speech protections. The campus speech codes arrived first but then came the mobs that shut down talks by conservative speakers, claiming they had moral justification for suppressing these speakers views on race, women and ... pretty much anything.

This was an important turning point. Previously progressive condescension at least operated inside traditional moral categories. In recent years, it has decided it could get away with displacing even agreed-on norms of right and wrong with entirely novel claims, such as demoting centuries of due process for the accused with believe the woman.

Standard measures of credibility devolved into credulousnessbut again, primarily in the interests of deploying the new rules as a political weapon. The ideas, or sentiments, were secondary.

The weaponizing of sexual-abuse accusations for the Brett Kavanaugh nomination was so over the top and evidence-free that many people eventually went numb on the subject.

Has the time finally come to agree the American system has waded into deep water by using cheap moralism as a political weapon? It wont change, not unless people in positions of leadership speak up.

Just because Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is reinstating due process in campus sexual misconduct proceedings doesnt mean liberals have to remain passive and silent. Former Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman used to talk in clear terms about defending moral traditions, but the Democratic left drove him out of the party.

The Biden episode suggests that political moralism is losing its punch. Progressives will keep trying to intimidate their opponents this way because thats what they do. But nonstop media eventually sucks the energy out of everything these days, even its allies.

Other than the Democrats downloading pro forma support for Mr. Biden in hope of getting the vice presidential nomination, hardly anyone cares one way or the other about his guilt or innocence, or his accuser. The publics normal instincts of concern have been worn down into a cynical callousness. Can anyone count how many times Bernie Sanders called some part of American life a moral outrage?

What lies on the other side of the Biden double standard is no standard at all. We are getting close.

Write henninger@wsj.com.

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Joe Biden and the Moralizers - The Wall Street Journal