What’s up with the notion that we should automatically switch to meta-level reasoning and deontology when talking about these issues? Working in Trump administration is bad. Being gay is not. These things are not the same. Not because one is a choice and the other isn’t, but because Trump administration is actively harming people, whereas gayness is not. Yeah, this issue looks differently from the perspective of someone who thinks that non-whites and degenerates are ruining the society - but so what, they’re assholes and they’re wrong! Talking about this issue purely on meta-level is as misguided as talking about teaching creationism vs evolution, telegony vs actual evidence-based sex ed, and flat earth conspiracy vs actual geography in public schools while completely ignoring the issue that some of these things are wrong, and others are right.
It’s great to build institutions and processes with high inertia to ensure that no one gets too overpowered, and if your enemies come to power, they wouldn’t do as much damage, even if creating these institutions may impede your own agenda. But: (1) people keep overestimating the commitment that their enemies have to these institutions and systems. Nice emoluments clause you got there. Wouldn’t it be a shame if when it came to it, no one actually gave a shit about it? And (2) you can’t just do politics solely by building institutions on top of institutions - you need to use them to actually make the world a better place.
Or rather, sure, it’s OK if your cause area is institutions and nothing else - I’m fine with ACLU doing that. But it’s wrong to assume that politics end with institutions or that every single action must pass the deontological filter of “but what if people who think that the moon is made of cheese, and we are morally obligated to paint it green come to power and use similar tactics?” It’s actually OK to say that not all beliefs about the reality are equally true and not all ethical systems are equally good, and the ones that are better should be acted upon, whereas those that are worse should not.
If it’s just, like, “do I approve of this thing”, then I think this is fine, though I may want to see that someone can show their work (i.e. that their sense of right and wrong is principled rather than purely intuitionist). You can totally just look at it this way and there’s no problem; I think that most people think like this and then have to translate it into a procedural coalition-based language.
The problem is when you want a meta-level solution – by getting the government involved, or establishing general norms, or whatever. No, of course our enemies aren’t seriously committed to shared meta-level instutions (nor, to be fair, are we), but they’re far more committed to them than they are to our object-level judgments. And if we’re going down to object-level judgments, the government is definitely going to favour “person in the Trump administration” to “person who is gay”; this will likely continue even after the government cycles to enemies of the Trump administration, simply because the state has a legalistic desire to protect its prerogative. In many places, the public conscience would endorse that judgment; there it may not be kept well in check by proceduralism but it certainly won’t be checked at all by anything else. You can’t really compare it to creationism vs. evolution because you’re never going to get “evidence” in the way we have there – the bone of contention isn’t an underlying foundation of disputed facts that we can test (unless you just want to try to demonstrate that religion is wholly false, in which case good luck with that).
I agree that people shouldn’t be held to a proceduralist standard in their personal morality – morality doesn’t actually work that way, and in any case it’s personal. Probably I should have mentioned that earlier, as the OP does shade a bit into criticizing people’s personal judgments. But I disagree with the framing that the meta-level considerations are abstract and remote, while the object-level ones are pragmatic and immediate – if your levers for operating on a problem are primarily institutional, reasoning that obeys the institutional idiom and follows its rules are more practical, not less. What we think is really true as our personal moral beliefs, that’s the airy abstraction when it comes to society-level outcomes. Similarly, when you want to use your built-up institutions to do good, you generally want to do so by working with the meta-level rules, not against them, because those are the only mechanisms that allow institutions to have direct influence without rattling themselves to death or leaning on corruption-ridden side-channels (which can be effective, but rarely for morally uplifting shit).
I can’t speak for anyone else, but that’s where I’m coming from.
Total culture war is bad. And that’s not just about the current stupidities – the danger of culture war will always loom (unless you have sovereign monocultures, which is a cure much worse than the disease).
Procedural meta-level rules are the way you avoid total culture war. So long as the norm is “we will punish anything we believe to be bad with the full force of legal and social censure, and we will allow anything we believe to be good regardless without procedural restraint,” everyone will know that winning ideological allies and demonizing your ideological enemies is always going to be a top strategic priority. I hope we’ve learned by now that that’s no way to live.