Directing shame outward “One of the great ironies about 2016,” writes The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last, “is that Hillary Clinton was right,” if impolitic, in how she described a third of the GOP. Over at The Atlantic, Peter Wehner writes about the attack of Trumpism we all witnessed last week by Republicans in the Tennessee House of Representatives. “[C]oming from a party whose sensibilities and racial attitudes are embodied by Donald Trump,” we should hardly have been surprised by their overreaction to Black activist members. Memphis wasn’t exactly hospitable to Rev. Martin Luther King in March of 1968, either. The more things change, etc. MAGA Republicans want not only to roll back the 20th century, they want to roll back Reconstruction. Nullification is back, fof heaven’s sake. Wehner suggests that the GOP knows it made a deal with “a demonic force” and is secretly ashamed: The human mind’s capacity to rationalize such things is extraordinary, but not limitless. Some Republicans have the sense, even if it’s only in their quiet moments, that they have acted not only hypocritically but dishonorably. And it gnaws at them. They know they would eviscerate any Democrat who did a fraction of what Trump did. They therefore have to expend enormous psychological energy to keep from becoming sick with themselves for what they have become. Shame is a toxic emotion, and it often causes people to direct hostility outward rather than inward. Tired from choosing to defend the indefensible, enraged at being called out, Trump’s supporters…