“A Robin Red breast in a Cage/ Puts all Heaven in a Rage.” So wrote William Blake during the revolutionary age that began in America and France in the late eighteenth century, thus identifying the revolutionary mind with which we have since become so familiar. It is a mind that not only focuses on random and arbitrary instances of what it sees as wrong with the world, but also presumes to speak in lieu of “Heaven” to anathematize such wrong. Blake’s revolutionary—it’s never clear how far he may be identified with the poet himself—is incapable of the thought that the “Robin Red breast” might not mind life in the cage quite so much as he imagines and could actually prefer it to an uncaged existence. Nor does the zealot care that there may be many worse injustices in the world needing attention and possible amelioration. He isn’t really interested in amelioration so much as the destruction or elimination of those he regards as oppressors, the worthy objects of his, and Heaven’s, “rage.”

Admittedly, children in cages are potentially more rage-worthy than a robin redbreast, but the promiscuity of the Left’s outrage under President Trump long antedates the children-in-cages topos—just as the cages themselves antedate this president—and encompasses so many lesser offenses against Heaven and nature that it appears to have become self-generating. Anything can be grist to the outrage mills. Mr. Trump’s insulting tweets against those who have maligned him are every bit as rage-inducing as the