I didn’t get to Richard Linklater’s brilliant 2014 movie, “Boyhood,” until this past weekend. That was the movie, filmed over 12 years with the same actors, about a boy growing up in Texas. But I did have the advantage of seeing it in the Trump era. It’s a sadder movie now. Different themes leap out at you, which were not as prominent in the reviews written three years ago.

What you see is good people desperately trying to connect in an America where bonds are attenuated — without stable families, tight communities, stable careers, ethnic roots or an enveloping moral culture. There’s just a whirl of changing stepfathers, changing homes, changing phone distractions, changing pop-culture references, financial stress 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.

You can see why, in the disrupted landscape depicted in the film, people would form the sort of partisan attachments that are common today. 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. It’s not even about which party has the better philosophy, as it was in the Reagan era. These days, partisanship is often totalistic. People often use partisan identity to fill the void left when their other attachments wither away — religious, ethnic, communal and familial.

Last week my colleague Thomas Edsall quoted a political scientist, Alex Theodoridis, who noted this phenomenon: “Partisanship for many Americans today takes the form of a visceral, even subconscious, attachment to a party group. Our party becomes a part of our self-concept in deep and meaningful ways.”