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Remember wedge issues? You still see the term from time to time, but its popularity has diminished since the 1980s and 90s. Thats probably just as well; Metaphorical expressions like this one usually confuse more than they clarify, although it seems to have been replaced by the equally figurative and probably more confusing dog whistle.

A wedge issue, if you dont go back that far, is a controversial topic used by one campaign to create dissension within an opposing campaign. If I sense that a significant number of my opponents voters disagree with him or her on some question, I will raise it in an attempt to get them to doubt their support.

The salient characteristic of a wedge issue, at least in the common usage by commentators and journalists a generation ago, is its substantive unimportance. The wedge issue was almost always a social or cultural issue: something about race, religion or sex. When a journalist referred to gay rights, say, as a wedge issue, the implication was usually that the candidate raising the issue didnt really care about it. The issue didnt affect voters lives in any direct or appreciable way, but the candidate forced it into the debate in a cynical attempt to disunite the other sides constituency.

This is more or less the way Thomas Frank uses the term in his 2004 book Whats the Matter with Kansas? Franks argument, if I could oversimplify, is that Kansas voters naturally tend to the left on subjects such as education, taxes and health care, but that Republicans have learned to use cultural issues school prayer, smut on the airwaves, abortion and so on to fool Kansans into abandoning their own interests and voting GOP.

Frank is far too cavalier about what other people should regard as their own interests: His argument reflects the ideological tendency of Americas commentariat, for whom fears of cultural transformation are always unfounded. But he has a point. There is no good reason that a statehouse election, for example, should turn on the question of euthanasia or transgender bathrooms. The winner will have no power to affect policy on such a question; its function in the race is that of a wedge, a non-germane controversy designed to shake the loyalties of the other side.

Now consider Donald Trump.

Let me put this point as plainly as I can, and do forgive the overstatement, if there is any. American progressives are playing the role of Republican-voting would-be Democrats in Thomas Franks vision of Kansas too paranoid or too thick to realize that the things upsetting them arent all that important. Trump himself is the greatest of all wedge issues, but in reverse: He distracts the other side and causes them, without their even knowing it, to ignore their own interests.

Exactly what is it about Trump, after all, that embitters progressives so badly? They will have noticed, surely, that his candidacy was opposed by the great majority of conservative intellectuals for the excellent reason that he is not, in fact, a conservative. That alone should keep progressives from despair. If we confine the discussion to policies and actual decisions what Trump will sign or veto, what hell actually do with executive power its not clear that progressives have all that much to fear. President Trump will probably nominate a conservative judge to the Supreme Court, but so, one assumes, would any Republican president.

Trump is far from a progressive, and he will effect policies that progressives abominate. But that hardly explains the panicked, visceral hatred to which many progressives have yielded. Mitt Romney stands to Trumps right on most points, and progressive Boston Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham issued an apology to Romney on the grounds that she now saw how bad bad can be.

There were of course excellent reasons to oppose Trumps candidacy, and there are legitimate reasons to worry about what the president might do in office. But that doesnt explain the turgid expressions of detestation issuing from many of his leftward-most adversaries. These unhappy souls fear and abhor Trump less for what he might do than for how he might act and what he might say. What troubles them, if Im right, isnt so much political as aesthetic:

Trump is proudly, ostentatiously nouveau riche. He embosses his comical surname on buildings.

He gloats about his successes and doesnt bother with the faux humility of ordinary political parlance.

He boasts of political conquests, as in former times he boasted of sexual ones.

He speaks ineptly about race (the blacks) and cruelly about the physical appearance of women he doesnt like.

He cultivates a preposterous hairdo, which he seems in all sincerity to believe is a physical asset.

His political pronouncements are brash, sometimes brutal, and he feels no obligation to make them consistent with one another, so immensely does he enjoy confounding his adversaries.

I regret all these things in a man who will be president of the United States. I find Trump hard to take even if, like reruns of an 80s sitcom, he grows on me. But most of what bothers me and I suspect most of what progressives detest about the man has mainly to do with appearance, attitude, style and language.

American progressives should decide which they would prefer: a principled and winsome conservative from whom they could expect few concessions other than rhetorical ones; or an ostentatiously moneyed agitator who says dumb things but who might shift left or right depending on the circumstances and his mood. If they were smart, they would take the latter. But Im not sure theyre smart.

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Why progressives shouldn't despair over Trump - Washington Post