DRINKING TO BLUR PARTY LINES:

There was perhaps a time in America when your political affiliation was a modest part of your identity, like your preference for the Rotary Club over the Lions Club, or for Fords over Chevys. Perhaps. If that time ever existed, it is clearly gone. Increasingly, politics is tangled up with your choices about everything from friendship to cars. The Republican who likes avant-garde novels and $200 nose-to-tail dinners, the Democrat who confesses to an unironic affection for Nascar and marshmallow Jell-O salad — these aberrations may be tolerated, but there will always be a little asterisk next to their names, denoting a suspicion that they are not reliable party faithful.

In such an environment, no detail of your consumption should be left to the happenstance of personal taste, lest you inadvertently signal some sympathy with the amoral cretins of the opposition. Your house, your clothes, your home furnishings — are all reflections of who you are as a person, which is to say, as a voter. Even your choice of wines may be safely left up to political ideology, now that National Review on the right and the Nation on the left have started offering wine clubs to their fans.

Naturally, I had to subscribe to both. I imagined a titanic showdown between the somewhat stuffy traditionalist wines of the heirs to William F. Buckley, and the strident cosmopolitanism of the Nation’s approach. Then I placed the orders, and realized that both wine clubs are supplied by the same third-party company.

There just might be a lesson there. . . .