When Politics Becomes Your Idol - Note for a discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."

David Brooks, Oct. 30, 2017, New York Times; see also, on Brooks's divorce.

Image from article, with caption: A trump rally in Forida a day before the presidential election

Excerpt:

I didn’t get to Richard Linklater’s brilliant 2014 movie, “Boyhood,” until this past
weekend. That was the movie, filmed over 12 years with the same actors, about a boy
growing up in Texas. But I did have the advantage of seeing it in the Trump era. It’s a
sadder movie now. Different themes leap out at you, which were not as prominent in
the reviews written three years ago.

What you see is good people desperately trying to connect in an America where
bonds are attenuated — without stable families, tight communities, stable careers,
ethnic roots or an enveloping moral culture. There’s just a whirl of changing
stepfathers, changing homes, changing phone distractions, changing pop-culture
references, financial stress and chronic drinking, which make it harder to sink down
roots into something, or to even have a spiritual narrative that gives meaning to life.

You can see why, in the disrupted landscape depicted in the film, people would
form the sort of partisan attachments that are common today. Today, partisanship
for many people is not about which party has the better policies, as it was, say, in the
days of Eisenhower and Kennedy. It’s not even about which party has the better
philosophy, as it was in the Reagan era. These days, partisanship is often totalistic.
People often use partisan identity to fill the void left when their other attachments
wither away — religious, ethnic, communal and familial. ...

The excessive dependence on politics has to be displaced by the expulsive power of more important dependencies, whether family, friendship, neighborhood, community, faith or basic life creed. ...