Put President Trump in front of, say, thousands of Boy Scouts at their National Jamboree expecting to hear (as they’ve been hearing from U.S. Presidents for generations) an endorsement of good character and the Boy Scout way, and he’ll rip into his political enemies as if he were speaking at one of his rallies. What, exactly, is he doing?

He’s piggybacking. He’s making use of an occasion to do something for which the occasion was not designed. In doing, so he breaks no law and violates no formal rule, but he does violate a civic norm and transgress an informal but well-established boundary.

The President is hardly alone in this practice. Though historically frowned on, piggybacking is widely practiced today on both the Right and the Left, almost always with harmful results. Moreover, because it’s bipartisan and also because it’s such a pure expression of the age we live in, the practice remains somewhat opaque to us, difficult to discern as a widespread form of behavior that has a name and is dangerous. Let’s try to fix that.

The First Amendment protects the right of entertainment celebrities to use occasions of televised award ceremonies such as the Oscars to give political speeches in favor of left-wing causes, just as it protects the right of professional football players to kneel during game-day observances of the national anthem to protest police brutality against African-Americans. In both cases, we’re seeing the practice of using an extra-political platform to make political points. In both cases, then, we’re seeing people seeking to advance causes in which they believe in a way that’s legally permitted but neither fitting nor (to use another old-fashioned word) proper. In both cases, the conduct displayed is contrary to the purpose of the occasion.

Let’s go to Washington, DC. The rules of Congress permit either party to stonewall budget negotiations or refuse to extend the national debt ceiling and thus shut down the Federal government in pursuit of political concessions from the other party. Republicans pioneered this strategy during the Clinton and Obama years (“cut spending or else!”) and now Democrats are following suit in the Trump era (“legalize the Dreamers or else!”). What is happening here?  These members of Congress are piggybacking. They’re using one of their general constitutional duties—the duty to tax the citizens and pay for the government—to play games of chicken with each other over particular disputes. Imagine the teacher of a class of third-graders saying, “I know all you children want to go to lunch, but no one leaves this classroom until Billy hands in his homework!”

Let’s visit university campuses, where most of the professoriate is politically left of center and conservative students are usually in the minority. Whenever professors use their status as educators and grade-givers to make their progressive political views perfectly clear to their students, while also perhaps conveying at least indirectly their opinion that conservative political views are signs of an ill-formed intellect, no actionable violation has been committed, yet these professors are piggybacking. They’re using their platforms as educators to propagate their politics. The essence of piggybacking is the loosening of inhibitions, the blurring of distinctions. That’s what’s happening here. Piggybacking is me contriving to cook my dinner on your stove.

As examples go, we’ve only just begun. Look around you tomorrow morning with open eyes and you’re likely to see many examples of the practice, on your side of the political aisle as well as on the other. What explains it?

One answer is that piggybacking is a transgression and, especially on the populist Right today, transgression in the service of anger is the flavor of the year. I hear many pro-Trump friends say that, in their view, taking a blowtorch to today’s established political conventions is just what the doctor ordered, and the quicker, the better. Eviscerate an establishment norm? Wipe out a boundary that many fussbudget liberals appear to hold dear? Where do I sign?  How soon can we begin?

Another answer is that both contempt and fear can make the old platitudes seem like excuses for timidity, and on the Left today both contempt for President Trump and fear of Trumpism are so strong that the values least supportive of civic restraint—values associated with “resist,” “fight harder,” and even for some “by any means necessary”—are in the saddle.

Finally, and more fundamentally, once upon time in America most of us lived, or at least believed we lived, under the general influence of what some scholars called a “civil religion,” and what the great sociologist Peter Berger called a “sacred canopy.”¹ These writers were pointing to a set of moral and ultimately spiritual values that existed above politics and to which politicians were expected to be ultimately accountable. These sacred-civic values included honesty, civility, openness to other views, a commitment to reasonable argument in the search for truth, and the belief that all persons possess equal dignity. Political actors under this regime certainly fought each other hard and often unscrupulously, but they were expected at least to pay lip service to these overarching values, and could usually expect to be punished by society when they did not act in accordance with them.

According to many ways of measuring, in recent decades that civil religion has weakened significantly, displaced in part by an ethic in which political values are paramount and pursuing what’s thought to be politically good constitutes life’s highest purpose. If you want to hear a voice guided by the old civil religion, here’s the actor John Wayne (b. 1907) speaking in 1960 about newly elected President John F. Kennedy: “I didn’t vote for him but he’s my President, and I hope he does a good job.” To hear a voice guided by what’s replacing that civil religion, you could just turn on your television or glance at your Twitter feed, but here’s the radio personality Rush Limbaugh (b. 1951) speaking in 2009 about newly elected President Barack Obama: “I hope he fails.”² Which of these moral regimes do you think is more open to piggybacking?

Some caveats are in order. First, on a scale of violations of civic decency, piggybacking admittedly ranks fairly low. In addition, one-sided demands for civility are sometimes used by the powerful to seek control over the less powerful. For example, those in power frequently—and wrongly in my view—accused both A.J. Muste and Martin Luther King, Jr., America’s great 20^th century exemplars of civil disobedience, of inciting others to uncivil conduct. Finally, no value is absolute, including the value of civility. There are times when choosing civility over other values is morally the wrong choice.

Yet a decent political culture—in fact, civilization itself—depends significantly on sub-legal norms of restraint, and one of those norms is the idea of voluntarily keeping political words and deeds in their proper lanes. If you want to give a political speech, do it at a political gathering. If you want to insult a fellow citizen, do it from somewhere other than the Oval Office.

Stigmatizing what I’m calling piggybacking might be a small but meaningful step in our journey back from the wilderness. I’m for trying.  You?