Unkind words are the glory of our nation. Stirring speeches and memorable tributes have their place. You may even prefer them, but the right to fling rude words in the public arena is what makes a country great. Prepare for a diet larded with insults as partisans begin to cast ballots in this year’s presidential contest.

Normal people do not crave confrontation. They don’t yearn to spread thick layers of derision with a trowel as they make their way from Iowa to New Hampshire and then to South Carolina with a side trip to Nevada. Presidential candidates, however, do. It’s a way of life and those early states in the competition for nominating convention delegates bear a heavy burden on behalf of the rest of us.

A buffet of surveys suggest that contests in both parties are growing closer in the first two critical contests, Iowa and New Hampshire. Vermont U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, who became a Democrat to run for that party’s presidential nomination, is enjoying another surge after weeks of appearing to lose ground.

Sanders ought to prepare for the full force of whatever toxic brew the experienced hands in the often-tested Clinton war room concoct. The left wing impediment to Hillary Clinton’s coronation for the Democratic nomination is about to be buffeted by a torrent of abuse. He probably won’t be called a crazy stalker or a loon, like Bill Clinton’s inamorata, Monica Lewinsky was when that dam burst into public view 18 years ago.

No one on the Clinton team will likely say of Sanders, “Drag a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find.” That gem was directed at Paula Jones, the Arkansas state employee who wrestled an $850,000 settlement out of Bill Clinton to settle a sexual harassment claim.

Nevertheless, it will get rough. Sanders has gone easy on Clinton so far. He can afford to with Donald Trump hurling pointed abuse at Clinton from inside the Republican race. What a strange business politics is. A decade ago, the Clintons were all smiles and good wishes at Trump’s wedding—his third and to an immigrant, no less. Now Trump is calling Clinton “one of the great abusers of the world.” Who invites one of those to his wedding? And his “enabler” wife, as Trump recently characterized Hillary Clinton.

Vulgarian Trump will have sent sensitive college students scurrying to cut the cable cord and turn off any device that connects them to the world. There are no “safe spaces” as long as Trump feeds a Twitter account or holds a live mic. He is impolite, thin-skinned and reckless. His astounding ignorance of public policy, whether it’s simple or complex, barely makes an impression on his ugly surface.

Trump’s rancid act has left his Republican rivals stumped for an effective public response. And then there’s Chris Christie. The nasty comment is his calling card. He glories in New Jersey’s reputation for ill-mannered exchanges. It is his thin armor against recitations of his inconsistencies and manifest failure as governor of New Jersey. The sneer is his favored defense against nine downgrades in the Garden State’s bond rating since he took office in 2010.

There’ll be worse on the airwaves. The television ads from candidates and the committees that boost them will grow vicious. You may turn away, avert your gaze or change the channel. We all have limits to how much of it we can endure.

We can censure candidates for their views and the way they choose to express them. We may withhold our votes. We must, however, never silence them. Let them reveal who they are. We can take it. Do your worst. This is an important element of how the handful of people who aspire lead the nation reveal themselves to us in the great audition. The means of attack often tells us as much about the aggressor as the target. Poor Jeb, for instance, cannot land a punch on a marshmallow, and that tells us much of what we need to know about him.

The national cockfight often feels unseemly to civilized voters. Silence and unbroken pretense would be worse. Brace yourself, this is the tariff on freedom and this is the year it’s collected.