Thoughtful piece as usual from @MikeGrunwald about metastasizing culture wars. Definitely worth reading. I guess my view is a little different. politico.com/magazine/story…
2. First of all, @MikeGrunwald is correct about so many points of contention being symbolic or trivial, e.g. whether people can say Merry Christmas. If it seems foolish to get excited over such matters, that’s probably because it is.
3. Symbolic or trivial issues are, to some observers, proxies for deeper anxieties — racial anxieties, as white Americans with small families age, but also religious anxieties as the Christian church fragments and weakens, and local anxieties as smaller towns decay.
4. Thing is, we already know how many of these anxieties will resolve themselves. The electorate will change as national demographics do. The Christian church will either renew itself from within, or it will fade away. Smaller towns will adapt to economic change, or they won’t.
5. So our discontents over culture may be better likened to a severe case of national indigestion than to war. Americans as a people are struggling to process an unsettling amount of change. The struggle has produced pain & resentment, and also a lot of aimless thrashing about.
6. Our true crisis is political more than it is cultural. It rests less on the issues that divide Americans than on the ability of public institutions, & especially government, to mediate these divisions. The political crisis, much more than the cultural one, is genuine.
7. In brief: freedom is at risk in America today. It is at risk from corruption, literal and moral; at risk from concentrated wealth that offers to corruption a constituency; and at risk from a public grown used to taking public institutions for granted.
8. We could lose this fight. The government is now led by people without a sense of public responsibility, zealous for little more than staying in power. This will be fatal to free government if not corrected. The correction must begin this coming Tuesday. [end]
