Polarisation is often described as ideological. But its deeper cause may be moral – a loss of the capacity to recognise goodness in those who disagree with us, and the consequences that follow.

On 22 January 2026, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Donald Trump questioned the value of NATO: “We give so much, and we get so little in return.” His remarks framed long-standing alliances as bad deals, treating postwar Western solidarity as elite theatre.

What mattered was not only the provocation, but the reaction. For critics, it confirmed nihilism. For supporters, it signalled honesty at last. In neither case was there much willingness to recognise good faith on the other side.

Trump is not the cause of our current polarisation, but one of its symptoms. The postwar liberal West built a powerful secular moral framework grounded in law, rights, and institutions. These achievements were real and hard won. Yet over time, moral legitimacy became identified with adherence to its norms, while dissent was increasingly treated not as disagreement, but as deviance.

As the public role of religion receded, the moral vocabulary that once tempered judgement also thinned. Western culture became highly skilled at identifying violations, but less capable of interpreting motives, absorbing contradiction, or recognising moral complexity in those outside its approved categories.

A society that cannot imagine goodness in its opponents will inevitably begin to treat them as threats to be managed rather than fellow citizens to be persuaded.

Victor Hugo gave this posture a human face long before it shaped modern politics. At the centre of _Les Misérables_ stands Jean Valjean, a former convict transformed through an act of mercy, who spends the rest of his life trying to honour it. Set against him is Inspector Javert, a police officer devoted to law. Javert is not corrupt or sadistic. He does not pursue Valjean out of vengeance, but out of duty. He exists to identify criminals, pursue them, and return them to the authority of the state.

What is striking about Javert is how little interior conflict Hugo grants him. He does not deliberate. He acts. Upright, angular, rigid, his physical bearing mirrors his moral world. He is a man who has made law into a kind of metaphysical shelter, a structure that protects him from the ambiguities of human life.

The crisis that destroys Javert does not arise from lawlessness, but from an act of mercy. Captured by revolutionaries, Javert is condemned as a spy. Valjean is ordered to execute him, but instead cuts his bonds, returns his weapons, and releases him. For Javert, this act is intolerable: a criminal spares the representative of the law.

Hugo frames Javert’s response as structural rather than psychological. The moral ground beneath him gives way. His world is built on coherence: law guarantees meaning, obedience guarantees righteousness. When that coherence breaks, only two options remain: transformation or destruction.

Transformation would require reinterpretation, humility, and risk. It would require admitting that the moral order he has served is incomplete. Javert refuses adaptation and chooses destruction. His suicide is not only despair, but resolution – an escape from the unbearable tension of a world where goodness can appear outside the categories of the law. It is the final act of a man who would rather die than live without moral clarity.

This same logic is visible in modern secular moral systems when they encounter people or perspectives that cannot be assimilated. Rather than admit incompleteness, such systems drift toward expulsion, cancellation, and moral annihilation. Order is preserved. The transformative capacity of human beings is not recognised.

In contemporary political life, this impulse often appears not as cruelty, but as moral certainty. It was laid bare when Hillary Clinton described half of Trump’s supporters as “a basket of deplorables” - “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.” What mattered was not the accuracy of the charge, but its moral function: a large segment of the population was no longer mistaken or persuadable, but morally illegitimate. Once named in this way, they no longer required engagement. Coherence was restored. Transformation was abandoned.

What both Javert and Trump reveal, in different ways, is the loss of a shared moral grammar. Javert embodies law emptied of mercy. Trump embodies action severed from responsibility. One enforces without mercy. The other transgresses without restraint. Both flourish when the space for moral complexity collapses.

What is missing is a forgotten language that once saturated Western consciousness with restraint and mercy. In Les Misérables, this appears not as ideology, but enacted example. Valjean steals a bishop’s silverware, expecting punishment. Instead, the bishop calls it a gift and presses the candlesticks into his hands as well. Nothing is explained. Nothing is demanded. It is an act of grace. The power of the moment is that it interrupts the logic of deservedness, opening a moral horizon larger than the law.

Over time, this grammar of grace has been rejected from both sides. On the secular left, grace is dismissed as religious and archaic, its restraint caricatured as complicity. On the populist right, it is flattened into grievance and identity, stripped of its power to unsettle the self or call the powerful to account. In both cases, what is lost is the same: a way of taking the law seriously without treating it as complete.

In the Western tradition, this suppressed grammar of grace is articulated with particular clarity in the Gospel narratives, not as belief, but as enacted response. When pressed on whether it is lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, Jesus refuses the terms: “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” Authority is acknowledged, but exposed as limited in matters of ultimate meaning.

This posture is made concrete in Jesus’s encounter with a Roman centurion, an officer of an occupying imperial force. Seeking healing for a gravely ill servant, the centurion appeals to authority and faith. Jesus does not condemn him, but publicly recognises his goodness: “not found anyone in Israel with such great faith.” Like Valjean’s mercy toward Javert, goodness is acknowledged within a compromised system.

Seen in this light, the polarised postures of the present moment appear as mirror images. On the right, the language of insurrection, purging elites, and storming institutions seeks renewal through force and humiliation. On the left, the tearing down of statues, the blockading of streets, and the moral demonisation of the past seek power through destruction. Both seek purification rather than transformation, imagining that purity comes through exclusion rather than the grace enacted in the Gospels and Les Misérables.

Therefore, Javert and Trump are not opposites but mutually reinforcing extremes. Javert represents the moral absolutism of the liberal order, unable to recognise goodness outside its categories. Trump represents the chaotic disruption that emerges when that order exhausts its authority.

Jean Valjean stands elsewhere. He inhabits the law without treating it as final, and resists injustice without seeking annihilation. The tragedy of Javert is that he cannot live in a world where such a position exists. He chooses coherence over life.

The danger for contemporary Western culture is similar. A moral order that cannot recognise goodness in those who oppose it will always drift toward destruction rather than transformation. If we cannot move closer to Valjean than to Javert, our institutions may also choose collapse over renewal, coherence over life.