But the culture war has changed a lot since Pat Buchanan invoked the term in a 1992 speech. Today we’re often fighting over things that, even a decade ago, were peripheral to our discourse: what accommodations to make for people who identify as transgender, whether black lives matter or all lives matter, and whether “believe women” means weakening the presumption of innocence. Some of these debates are concrete, such as whether to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Others are more philosophical, such as whether traditional masculinity is harmful, or whether freedom of speech should be abrogated to prevent “hate.” Take the non-left position on too many of these matters, and you may find yourself grouped with the opposite side. Social conservatism used to mean that you wanted prayer in school, bans on abortion, legal curbs on offensive speech, and laws to discourage homosexuality. Today it can just mean you got off a stop too early on the wokeness train.

By 2006 standards, Americans are liberal. But for those who went along for the awokening, the view is different. Let’s go back, once more, to some numbers. Sixty percent think that admiring traditional masculinity is good, not bad. Sixty-seven percent (as of 2016) support the right to make offensive statements about minority groups, and even more support the right to make offensive statements about religion. Fifty-seven percent (as of 2017) have a lot of confidence in the police. Seventy-three percent are opposed to the use of race or ethnicity in admissions. Over 70% are opposed to abortion past the first trimester. Seventy-nine percent support requiring employers to verify that the people they hire are in the United States legally. And 60% think athletes should be required to stand for the national anthem.

Here we see the problem for Democrats. While much of Twitter condemns these views as deplorable, they are held by robust majorities of Americans. They’re far from the hard-right social views of someone like Pat Robertson, but they’re also far from the social views of Atlantic interns. Inconveniently for Democrats with aspirations for national office, the latter group sets many of the rules. Blue America has made such an abrupt leap in mores that anyone who acts like it’s 2010 is asking for career ruin. (Recall that MSNBC host Joy Reid felt compelled to blame hackers for things she had allegedly written about a decade earlier.) Joe Biden, never much for coherence to begin with, gets as much grief for joking about keeping a girl away from men as he does for flip-flopping on China.

How many old-school Democrats might find themselves tempted to bolt the party, if presented with a candidate offering Carlson’s pitch? Political scientists speak of the economically left and culturally right quadrant of voters as being underserved. But if the above numbers are representative, it’s not just an underserved quadrant. It’s the deciding quadrant. To put it another way, the center of gravity in American politics is among what you might call Deplorable New Dealers. For these voters, who lack a champion at election time, the question must be: Who is less hideous? Is it Republicans with plutocratic economics and retrograde social views? Or is it Democrats with fairer economics and hyper-wokeness?

You could argue that this dilemma has existed since the 1960s, when a commitment to civil rights cost Democrats their hold on the South, and that Democrats must stay true to social justice today as they did in the 1960s, lest they lose their soul. But you could also argue that the moral stakes have changed. Twitter and academia treat many of today’s crusades for liberation as the moral equivalents of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, but most Americans don’t seem to see it at that way. Many would be willing to live with some misgendering if they could earn five bucks more an hour and avoid being called up for National Guard duty in Tikrit.