Category: Vox
Culture war
Excerpt
That sense of so much being on the line, of an entire way of life being under threat, means that partisan identification becomes an irresistibly powerful lure for voters. No amount of Democratic policy moderation on narrow issues of religious liberty is going to overcome this amount of deep partisan polarization. Dougherty is preoccupied by the case of the Little Sisters of the Poor, a small Catholic charity that sought exemption from Obamacare’s birth control mandate. But I’ll guarantee you that case is a lot less important to Trump’s evangelical voter base than the Wall.
Amoral masculinity
Consumption vs production
Excerpt
“A lot of what contributes to the well-being and life satisfaction and family formation, strength, and community strength coes down to the production side of the equation. Do I do something that is valued by others? Do I create something of value that contributes to the well-being of others? I think that is vital to all of these things that we care about much more at the end of the day than the consumption side.”
Never were ‘adults in the room’
Excerpt
While the last grown-up was unable to restrain Trump from imprisoning asylum-seeking children, abusing his pardon power for Joe Arpaio, abusing declassification power, undertaking a partisan purge of the FBI, cheering the French far right, or issuing apologias for neo-Nazis, he finally decided to take his stand over Trump making the perfectly defensible decision to withdraw US forces from a hazily defined open-ended mission in Syria that lacked any legal authorization.