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It's been fascinating watching both Left and Right fragment in tandem, with factions on both sides digging in for war against each other and suddenly discovering they have more in common with factions on the other side of the Left-Right divide.
This isn't happening solely because of Trump, but it's happened faster during his campaign and presidency. A lot of masks are coming off. Tribal allegiances are superseding partisan cooperative arrangements. Formerly absurd hypotheticals are becoming our daily reality.
On the Left, you've got this war brewing between old-school Democrats and the new socialist vanguard, which has a habit of saying things out loud that voters aren't supposed to hear. Old triangulating strategists versus youngsters emboldened by the age of Obama.
On the Right, a lot of old fault lines are cracking, but one of the big problems is a chattering class that grew enormous during the Obama years as persistent but powerless critics, and grew comfortable with the role of "loyal opposition."
Not only did the intellectual Right suddenly become the proverbial dog that finally caught the car they were chasing, but they looked up from their mouthful of fender to see Donald Trump was driving the car.
The age of Trump just doesn't fit the intellectual Right's strategic vision. He's not the Republican president they ever thought they would have, and some of them didn't really think there would ever be another one.
Many conservatives focused on Obama and his allies for eight years as model adversaries, the perfect example of what conservatives are supposed to resist: arbitrary power, social engineering, cultural warfare, irresponsible spending, dodgy foreign policy, the works.
But in focusing so much on their political opponents in the Democrat Party, maybe some conservatives lost sight of where the *public* was going. They focused down the ideological barrel at adversaries and stopped thinking about their allies.
And one of the strange things about grappling with an adversary for years, focusing on that battle to the exclusion of almost everything else, is that you tend to *become* your adversary in some ways. You spend so much time in their heads that you see through their eyes.
This might all have been part of a seismic realignment that was coming anyway, as government grows beyond some fearsome markers and fuses ever more tightly with culture. People sense the stakes are changing. Political warfare is constant and all-consuming now.
Before, even politically aware people were mostly only involved with politics for a small part of their day. You could pick up a political magazine, read a few articles you liked, and assume most of those writers were pretty much on your side.
Not any more. Now we have more people consuming political media for more of their day. They might go online and discover that writers for a magazine they used to enjoy don't think very highly of them, or feel a greater affinity for people on the other side.
They might discover strategic concessions have been made on issues they still passionately wish to fight for. They might see Republicans and conservative leaders playing political games that have little bearing on their own daily lives.
It's the gap between NeverTrumpers preparing to fight all-out war for the "soul of the GOP," even if that means tactical alliances with the Left and tossing Democrats the White House for a few terms, and the people who think the fight in 2020 is for the future of the country.
I feel about all of this much the same way as I felt about disgusted calls for a conservative third party after McCain and Romney: we don't have TIME for that. We don't have time for reboots. We should be doing our best to win elections and change the course of the country. /end
