I was in India last week, researching India's Big Problem, which is that whenever young men feel cold in the morning, they start an open wood fire, right there in the street, right there in the city.  No wonder that Google reports weather conditions as "smoke" throughout the subcontinent.  Such a thing would not, could not, happen in the land of white supremacy.  No, siree.

So I could not bring myself to comment on Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah)'s foolish op-ed in the Washington Post complaining about President Trump's behavior.  I did not have the heart to do it until I had returned to the Land of the Free and the Brave and worked out at the gym with ordinary U.S. guys whose faces seemed innocent of the toxic masculinity of which we have heard tell.  Sen. Romney:

When he won the election, I hoped he would rise to the occasion[.] ... But, on balance, his conduct over the past two years, particularly his actions last month, is evidence that the president has not risen to the mantle of the office.

My dear senator, are you really the last person to the right of the last blue-dog Democrat in America to realize that the reason we have Trump is that the old strategy, that of Republican niceness, was an utter failure?  We have Trump because the success of the Reagan years did not result in a fundamental centrist move on the left.  We have Trump because the Bush "kinder and gentler ... compassionate conservatism" did not result in a kinder, gentler left; it led to Obama and the centralizing administrative-state nightmare of Obamacare.  We have Trump because this is a war to the knife.

Then Romney pontificates about moral uplift.

To a great degree, a presidency shapes the public character of the nation.  A president should unite us and inspire us to follow "our better angels."

Sorry, Senator.  You are dead wrong on this.  Politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion.  The national religion of America right now is a left-wing secular Puritanism.  And the left-wing Puritanism dominates the culture: what you and I are allowed to say.  And the left-wing Puritan culture dominates what politicians are allowed to say.  Where have you been all these years, Senator?

I have a dream – that one day, a president in America will be able to unite us and inspire us to follow our better angels.  That day is not yet. So the only thing a nonconformist president can do against America's secular religious orthodoxy is attack the left-wing Torquemadas and witch-burners.  With insults.

Then we come to foreign policy.

Trump's words and actions have caused dismay around the world.  In a 2016 Pew Research Center poll, 84 percent of people in Germany, Britain, France, Canada and Sweden believed the American president would "do the right thing in world affairs."  One year later, that number had fallen to 16 percent.

My experience is that if I read the foreign press, the only view I get about the U.S. is the MSM Democratic-operatives-with-bylines version of events.  Have you not observed this?  You, Senator, of all people, should know that in 2012, when it came to the character and life of a certain Mitt Romney, the MSM-Democratic-operatives-with-bylines cabal wrote nothing but lies, including "and" and "the."  So of course the peoples of Europe, trapped in the mindspace of lefty reports about the U.S., are dismayed.  Where would they find another narrative?

So, to repair our image abroad, says Romney, we must heal our tribal politics of "fear and resentment" and "repair our fiscal foundation."  Oh, dear, Senator. It makes me realize how far we non-elite racist sexist homophobe deplorables have traveled since the famous 2015 escalator incident at Trump Tower.  And how people like you have not learned a thing.

First we win.  Then we heal.  Then we fix the budget.  Anyone who doesn't get that, at this late hour, is a fool or a knave.

Before we win the political battle, we will need to win the cultural battle, and for that, I have written here and here.  We need a new religion to burn through the hearts and minds of our educated elite like a climate-change forest fire.

We will know when we have got there, because in that glorious dawn, Good Little Girls and daughters of architects like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will not become democratic socialists.  Because eww – or whatever the ritual term of disgust that will then reign among foolish well-born Mean Girls.

Actually, Sen. Mitt Romney is doing us a favor.  He is telegraphing that he can't be relied upon in the coming political battles, because he still does not get it.  That, I think, is sad for Romney's reputation, for the people of Utah whom he represents, and for the United States.

Christopher Chantrill (@chrischantrill) runs the go-to site on U.S. government finances, usgovernmentspending.com.  Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.