Someone with Fight or Someone with Principles?

What's the choice here?

We all like rooting for someone when they fight for a great cause. That’s the premise of most action movies. The good guy needs to stop the terrorists and save all the good people in Nakatomi Plaza — classic Christmas movie stuff.

But we also just like rooting for a guy fighting for no other reason than to see him win. This is the popularity of boxing. Sometimes they’ll add a story to try to make the fight more interesting (“This guy had to fight his way up from a hardscrabble life”), but that’s just icing on the cake. Everybody is going to cheer for their guy because it’s a fight.

So the question is, which one of these is politics these days in the Trump era: a fight with a cause or a boxing match where people are just cheering for the sake of the fight?

Back before the Trump era, many on the right were frustrated with Republican presidential candidates like Mitt Romney. It wasn’t like he was ideologically bad — he just didn’t seem to have the fight in him to punch back against the left-wing and all their minions — including the press. They wanted someone who would fight, and Trump definitely fights.

So now we have fight. And many of the popular pundits now are pugnacious over everything else. In fact, many of them you never hear talk about principle or ideology — just crowing about the latest victory or outrage. It’s politics with the substance of a boxing match. All fight, no story.

But you can see people prefer that to an action movie where the hero loses in the end.