Jonah: I want to know why “owning the insult” doesn’t seem to work any more. It used to be a standard ploy–not just “liberal,” but “Whig” (originally “cut-throat cattle rustler from the wild Scottish borders”) and “Tory” (orig. “illiterate Papist peasant from the remotest bogs of Ireland”). Yet nobody could now start a respectable party called the Bigots or the Statists. Why not?