I QUESTION THE PREMISE OF THIS CNN HEADLINE: Democrats say they’re ready for a culture war as Trump bans transgender people from military service.

Guys (and the 70 other optional genders on Facebook) – you are the culture war. And have been for over a century now. Or as Fred Siegel wrote in his 2014 book, The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class, “The best short credo of liberalism came from the pen of the once canonical left-wing literary historian Vernon Parrington in the late 1920s. ‘Rid society of the dictatorship of the middle class,’ Parrington insisted, referring to both democracy and capitalism, ‘and the artist and the scientist will erect in America a civilization that may become, what civilization was in earlier days, a thing to be respected.’”

So how has that been working out for all concerned?