All across our culture, we see instances of the overt politicization of issues that should not be politicized.
Take eating habits. For seven years now, the militant cultural Left has been engaged in a systemic assault upon a fried chicken restaurant chain, Chick-fil-A, due to its now-deceased founder publicly espousing a view on marriage policy that, due to our judicial supremacist culture and the subsequent constitutionalization of same-sex nuptials in 2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges, is now deemed verboten and beyond the scope of proper public discourse.
Take coffee consumption habits. Starbucks has been the subject of sundry boycotts over the years, from the anti-unvetted Islamic refugee Right to the anti-Howard Schultz partisan Democratic Left.
Or take musical listening habits. Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters has long overtly politicized his musical platform, due to his long-time advocacy of the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against the world’s only Jewish state. Taylor Swift, who for years steadfastly resisted the siren song of partisan politics, has recently seen fit to openly advocate for leftist measures and Democratic politicians.
The list goes on and on. The problem, as increasingly large segments and swaths of our society become politicized, is that we insidiously begin to lose our common cultural language. There is truly more to life than politics, as Erick Erickson frequently reminds us, and it ought to be deeply distressing to witness the continued degeneration of Americans from all political backgrounds into warring tribes who share so little — be they restaurant choices, television preferences, and film preferences — in common with one another.
Is it really too difficult for a conservative Republican to enjoy a Taylor Swift concert? (Hold aside here the fact that many of Swift’s more recent “musical” contributions are cacophonous drivel.) Is it really too difficult for a progressive Democrat to enjoy a delicious fried chicken sandwich from a fast food chain whose deceased founder publicly espoused his belief in a universally recognized biblical viewpoint?
But the exacerbation of our societal bifurcation into warring politicized tribes also has broader and more profound implications. Take Jew-hatred and Christophobia. The former is rapidly being normalized within the modern “intersectionality“-centric, Corbynized Democratic Party. The latter is rapidly being normalized throughout the secularist Western Left, more broadly — how else could a leading U.S. newspaper, such as The Washington Post, possibly publish a screed that responds to the massacre of hundreds of Christians on Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka by focusing not upon the culprit, radical Islamism, but upon purported “far-right anger” in the West?
How on Earth did we get to a point where a freshman congresswoman complaining about Jews’ alleged dual loyalties is not universally condemned? How on Earth did we get to a point where the slaughter of hundreds of Sri Lankan Christians on the holiest day in the Christian calendar is not condemned as strongly and aggressively as the equally repulsive slaughter of Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand? How did free speech, of all once-sacred universal American values, come to be politicized into a partisan issue?
It is true that our societal breakdown into warring tribes will have a deeply pernicious impact on our diluted ability to speak a common cultural language. But when that inability to speak a common cultural language transforms into an inability to universally stand for certain inviolable tenets of our social contract — that anti-Jewish and anti-Christian sentiment ought to be universally condemned, that free speech ought to be universally supported, and so forth — then we have a major problem on our hands. A problem, that is, of potentially existential nature for the longevity of the republic.