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Notes -
Interesting, I wonder how much this connects with something I started noticing ~8 years ago and continues to be en vogue now among many people on the left, which is calling political things they disagree with "gross" or "not a good look." Both of which are obviously subjective aesthetic judgments rather than any sort of meaningful criticism, though they're always stated as if they're supposed to be taken as meaningful criticisms. I've written about the "gross" before, but I recall being absolutely befuddled by seeing other leftists use it to describe right-wing behavior in a negative way, because much of our activism in the prior decade had been about getting society to accept gay marriage and homosexuals in general, and one of the key arguments for the case had been that someone's personal disgust reaction should have absolutely zero bearing on the ethical correctness of that thing - i.e. just because you're viscerally disgusted by the idea of 2 men kissing, it doesn't make a romantic/sexual relationship between 2 men any less beautiful or less worth tolerating, if not celebrating, than one between a man and a woman.
This then connects with one theory that I had, which is that many of the fellow "liberals" fighting for gay marriage weren't fighting for liberalism at all, but rather was using it as a vehicle by which to push forward something that they themselves didn't find disgusting - theater and the arts are well known to have a very high proportion of gay people relative to the broader population, and as such one would expect that people in those groups would tend to have less of a disgust reaction, if any, towards their friends, coworkers, and other direct peers.
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