This idea is backwards. What has changed is not that morality has been brought into politics, but that politics has been brought into morality. We used to broadly agree on morals, even if we disagreed on the particulars. But now morality is being discarded as politically inconvenient, and this is largely only done on one side.
The left isn’t bringing up morality as a trick, but because the right seems to have largely abandoned the values that we used to all have in common for political expediency. So many things that Trump has done are things that both sides would have agreed were wrong before. But he hates the libs and makes them angry, so everything he does is acceptable. And, if it isn’t, we’ll just create alternate facts so that it is.
Before, the left and right might disagree on whether something was bigoted, but both sides ageed bigotry is wrong. But such is largely not the case now–bigot has been redefined by the right to mean “intolerant towards other opinions,” rather than having anything to do with prejudice. I’m a bigot if I’m intolerant towards the belief that racism is acceptable. I’m not giving someone their “freedom of speech” if I speak out against their actions I believe are wrong, and my speech has any actual results.
The difference isn’t there with normal everyday people, really. I find that the values I have always shared with my conservative neighbors is intact, as long as it’s about things happening outside of media. But anything on the news, and that morality goes out the window.
It’s frustrating, as I’ve been raised in a conservative household, and though I’ve shed off my conservative values, one of those I never did was the commitment to morality above all else. Yet this seems to be absent in modern conservatism at large, even if it’s still available at the individual level.
Something has to be lost to square the circle of supporting Trump and holding onto our values, and it seems treating morals as always applicable has been what has been lost. Morals are subordinate to politics.