What happens when politics becomes culture

Daniel Greenfield writes in FrontPage Magazine,

...Cultural lefties are just as clueless about contradictions as deer are about cars. They don’t ponder why they once opposed gay marriage, but now support it. That’s just what the herd they’re part of did.
...
Politics is a process. Its product is a value system. That value system has taken the place that morality occupied among their traditionally religious ancestors, those Northeastern Protestants and German Jewish immigrants who built what they are wrecking. They may occasionally go to church or synagogue, but those brief visitations only reinforce their moral convictions about global warming, abortion, transgender bathrooms, immigration, gun control and the rest of the creed of the Church of the Left.

...MAGA hats, deliberately loud and unfashionable, infuriate them as the banner of an enemy tribe.

Trump Derangement Syndrome isn’t just about hating Trump. It’s a visceral disgust with the sorts of people they imagine would vote for him. And a horror at the idea of sharing a state or country with them. Ideological leftism may occasionally punch up, but cultural leftism always punches down.

The Trump era has gifted us an infinity of media lectures on the “threat to democracy”. And the conclusion is always that democracy poses a threat to democracy. All this deep thinking, its assorted conspiracy theories about lurking Russian bots on Facebook, is a convoluted way of getting at the idea that the real problem with our political system is that people outside the lefty cultural bubble can vote.

You know, people who actually believe in G-d, who own guns, and like their independence. Americans.

Our political system is built to be shared with people we disagree with. As ugly as things get, the system is designed to bear the load. It’s why we have checks and balances, the electoral college, filibusters, and a complicated system of electing people who are different and will be sure to disagree with each other.

You know, diversity.

The Founding Fathers made sure we had real diversity in our government long before that became a buzzword for leftist conformists whose idea of diversity is three races, a hundred ethnicities, forty religions, sixty genders, and one political opinion.

...Trump Derangement Syndrome isn’t just a reaction to President Trump. It’s a reaction to America.

Read more here.