The events of the past 10 days, a firestorm ignited by the casually depraved murder of a Black man in Minneapolis, have been heartbreaking. The ugliness of that initial moment has spread and spread and spread, from city to city to the White House, where the president described our nation in terms more appropriate to an actual war zone and encouraged police officers to forcefully push peaceful protesters out of his path so he could pose in front of a church with a Bible in his hand.

The ugliness ...