Nixon is not doing very well, which probably is an indication of the fact that while the Democratic party is vulnerable to raiding parties from the world of celebrity, it is not quite as vulnerable to going all star-struck as is the Republican party, where Ted Nugent and Scott Baio are names to conjure with. One suspects that that would change if Oprah Winfrey were to get into politics proper.

In reality, the Republican party and the Democratic party are mirror images of one another. On the Republican side, the tea-party movement, which broadly overlaps with what became the Donald Trump movement, is powered by populist disdain for a party leadership seen as complacent and morally compromised. The Democrats, too, have an angry base that believes the party is being led by sellouts, by Clintonites in bed with big business, by takfiris who have strayed from the One True Faith. In the Obama years, the populist Right became desirous of an existential cultural confrontation with the Left; in the Trump years, the Left desires above all the same kind of Kulturkampf, total war on every front, a pitched battle from sea to shining sea in which even the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Va., purveyor of fine farm-to-table dining, is a hotly contested front.

It’s a strange hill to die on, but these are strange times.