By the end of last Wednesday I’m sure there were undiscovered pre-Neolithic tribesmen living in the Amazon who had taken to social media to condemn Donald Trump for his comments regarding a ban (or moratorium) on Muslim travel to America. Yet after all that, today's poll has him on 38 per cent among Republicans, the highest yet. Trump broke perhaps the biggest taboo there is in western universalistic culture, to endorse the idea of discrimination based on in-groups and out-groups, when today the only out-group it's acceptable to 'other' are political deviants, which is why 500,000 or so British people have signed a petition calling for the American's exclusion from this country. (I also suspect that mixed with genuine disgust, public moralising provides a dopamine reward, just as being proved to be right over an issue does, as Jonathan Haidt has written about.) And yet, although it's still unlikely that the Donald will become president, the public horror at his latest outburst does not seem to have harmed him. Is it possible that he's immune to public outrage? As a confederate has suggested, Trump may be the natural product of a politically correct liberal-Left culture that uses public shaming in order to crush dissenting opinions - and overuse of the antibiotics of shame has bred bio-resistant Trumps. https://twitter.com/MWStory/status/674559169752662018 In both the US and Britain the liberal-Left holds power in the public sphere, and this is largely because people recognise its authority. When there is an outcry because someone has caused offence with his or her opinion, then in almost all cases the people being targeted, especially members of the institution involved, give in. They not only often sack the person in question or condemn the offence, but recognise the moral authority of those taking offence. This also happens with the centre-Left giving into the more extreme Left, as has recently happened with the university protests at Yale and Missouri universities. (This of course only incentivises people to take more offence and to seek further instances of public shaming, to show their status and to get a kick out of moralising.) But Trump has managed to survive this to a certain extent, by simply not caring. In not recognising the authority of the liberal-Left on moral matters, which most conservatives implicitly do, he seems to be immune to public shaming. The implication of this is the decline of a recognised, shared public morality, which is what the liberal-Left currently holds. No society has ever existed without a widely accepted creed, the believers of which are able to assert moral superiority, which is why until relatively recently it was so difficult for any society to accept religious minorities. Even in sophisticated western countries, though, with the replacement of Christianity by ‘universal’ secular liberal-Left ideas ('American values' as Obama calls them) as the mainstream public morality, it’s very hard for people to tolerate those with widely different views to them. It’s why people considered racist or sexist or homophobic have to be driven out of public life, shame being the method most popular. But if members of the conservative minority creed simply refuse to accept the authority of those doing the shaming, what then happens? Lots and lots of shouting, I imagine.