I’ve mentioned this before, but that video is a great demonstration of the point. Trumpism isn’t a political movement so much as a cultural phenomenon. Many Middle Americans revere an eccentric patchwork of sanitized nostalgia that they view as synonymous with “America.”
If you were to ask a group of run-of-the-mill midwesterners to list the most important American values, they’d include things like Golden Corral, water slides, cargo shorts, a specific arrangement of words spoken or sung in the direction of a specific arrangement of stripes and stars, Jesus, and four wheelers. They literally assume the superficial details of their daily lives are the important differentiators that make the US great. That wealthy, educated, stylish “elites” on the coasts ignore (at best) or mock (at worst) those cultural details is viewed as an attack not on passé provincial culture but on America itself.
Trump and MAGA are now part of that culture. He’s not so much a political figure as a cultural icon, the new Fat Elvis. His name and image are a brand that signals a shared culture, a way to advertise that you’re a working class Midwesterner who doesn’t cotton to all that fancy liberal coastal shit.
There’s nothing wrong with that culture, per se. The problem is when it acts to drive political divisions. Bannon was right about culture and politics as it applies to 21st Century America. We’re sorting ourselves politically along cultural lines.