A mild criticism of one of my very favorite pundits

I'm sitting here thinking about a Kevin Williamson essay I just read. The official thrust of it is the implications of a possible Senate-seat run by Mitt Romney. But along the way he makes some points I agree with, and some I don't.

A point I agree with is his assessment that the Republican Party has

become . . . whatever it is the grotesque and stunted political corporation still pretending to be the Party of Lincoln has become.

And this:

Trump’s substitution of sneering for analysis, his shallow anti-“elitism,” his attacks on free trade and on freedom of the press, his adolescent social-media habit: Republicans have not rallied behind him in spite of these things, but because of them.

Where I think he gets off-track is in pooh-poohing the notion of a cultural civil war. I can see why he embraces that formulation. He is, quite properly, trying to note how the goalpost for conservative purity has been moved from the end zone clear out to the back forty of the stadium parking lot. When you have Sean Hannity - and those ordinary citizens who find him a worthy observer of the national scene - trying to banish the likes of Ben Sasse, who clearly has more smarts and principles than Hannity could ever dream of posessing, we can say with certainty that Russell Kirk is dead.

Layer upon layer of cacophony has prevented us from making the kinds of distinctions we sorely need at this moment. The comment threads of opinion sites and social media are full of asinine blurtings such as that Paul Ryan is a leftist traitor. Again, Paul Ryan's understanding of free-market principles, Constitutional principles, the essentiality of a Judeo-Christian foundation for the nation's socio-political fabric, and the arcana of tax and budget policy completely eludes the cretins who think their dismissals of him are harbingers of a glorious turn in the history of our civilization.

It's litmus-test conclusion-drawing on steroids. And we're seeing it lead to such neurotic standards of purity that people who would otherwise recognize that they are in alignment become foes based on their takes on one particular public figure.

So far so good. What is glaringly missing from Williamson's survey of the lay of the land is the glaringly in-our-faces array of assaults on what remains of intellectual clarity and dignified living. When a LBGT group at Georgetown University (an ostensibly Catholic institution) can cause such a ruckus about a student-newspaper op-ed by a group that upholds traditional teachings about sexuality that the administration will hold a hearing to placate it, when a plaque honoring George Washington is removed from his home church because it made some parishioners "uncomfortable," when the national anthem is made into an ideological lightning rod, when ostensibly grown-up women gather in cities across the nation to wear "pussy hats," it seems to me that civil war is a valid characterization of where we are.

Williamson remains one of my top, I'd say, five most admired pundits on the scene today, and he is exactly right about how tragic the Trump phenomenon has been for the Republican Party, but he really needs to address why he does not regard the tide exemplified by the above-cited developments as anything less than frontal attacks on the most basic level of what America is about.