Vaclav Havel wrote that successful political movements don’t start political. Instead, they begin focused on unique ideas about living. As the group gain members and sorts out its ideas, they develop a more comprehensive lifestyle which ultimately leads to a political conflict. But what happens when the group becomes untethered from its social origins and fixated solely on a political purpose?

Mark Hemingway at The Weekly Standard describes such a devolution taking place before our eyes in the Democrat Party:

Anyway, as the tension over the [Trans-Pacific Partnership] mounted, Obama couldn’t hide his frustration with Warren and so he called her out by name. “The truth of the matter is that Elizabeth is, you know, a politician like everybody else,” Obama told Yahoo News reporter Matt Bai. As insults go, this is a subtle but classic Obama formulation; it’s undoubtedly true that Warren is a politician and motivated by political concerns. But by drawing this contrast between the two of them, the implication is that Obama is motivated by something more pure than the mere political concerns of Warren and “everybody else.”