When Politics Becomes Your Idol<br />There’s just a whirl of changing stepfathers, changing homes, changing phone distractions, changing pop-culture references, financial stress<br />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.<br />In the memorable phrase of the psychiatrist Jeffrey Satinover, idols ask for more<br />and more, while giving less and less, until eventually they demand everything and give nothing.”<br />Politics these days makes categorical demands on people.<br />It should be said that people on the left and on the right who try to use politics to find their moral meaning are turning politics into an idol.<br />People often use partisan identity to fill the void left when their other attachments wither away — religious, ethnic, communal and familial.<br />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.
