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Joe Biden wants the country to heal from its political divisions. But many people say they aren’t ready to reconnect with their estranged friends and family members.
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- Title
- Trump's Presidency Is Over. So Are Many Relationships.
- Authors
- Joe Pinsker
- Published
- Mar 30 2021
- Word count
- 1708 words
This is a bit of an understatement. The rise of fundamentalism over the past 40 years has changed the conversation from “Are you a Democrat or a Republican?” to “Do you think everyone should have equal rights?”
Those two questions have become entangled and that’s part of what is making the divide so deep. I’m not going to be friends with or talk to any of my relatives who think that some of my closest friends shouldn’t be able to marry or have a normal life just because they aren’t straight white people.
I mean how do you find common ground with people who believe that "the other side" is literally killing and eating babies. It's so preposterous and so divorced from reality it makes it impossible to have any other sort of discussion. This isn't, "I think rich people should be taxed less," or "I think we need to strengthen our military," or even "I believe Big Foot exists but has evaded us for years," or "The moon landing was faked." This is batshit crazy talk that paints anyone else as not just "an other," but as utterly evil. There's no reasoning with someone who thinks like that.
You're kind of getting at the other side of this conversation that has been bothering me lately:
I'm just so tired of wondering if my way of thinking is warped or not.
I'm tired because the answer is almost always no. But trying to treat these people as if they are normal, as if there is no problem with the way they act, the choices they make, and the things that they say - it all has a mental toll that I'm finding is increasingly difficult to bare.
Why do we keep pretending that it's OK that people are cheering for laws to be made that make it legal to mow down protesters with your car? Why do we not take actions against people who openly support fascists in government? What is the point where we say that it's not OK for people to act this way anymore? I feel like I'm going crazy because it's starting to make these people cheering for another civil war seem like they're making sense.
If there is one person on the Right who I have known the most, it was my father. My emotionally abusive father who was so poisonous that I cut him out of my life decades ago. I was finally vindicated as he was forced to get a psychological evaluation and was told he had an antisocial personality disorder - he was quite literally a psychopath. Just like I watched him mindlessly accept whatever they said on Fox News, I see others on the Right mindlessly accept whatever the far-right mouthpiece du jour is. I quite literally see a nation of psychopaths. And just like my father, none of these people are going to learn they have it until they've done more than their fair share of damage. Like it would matter anyways; psychopaths can still vote.
And I'm just. so. tired.
Because the truth of the matter is that there is no way we can 'get over' this. All we can do is what we've been doing: letting these people live their lives, no matter how much people get hurt as a result of them. We'll continue to let them bully us and push society into a dystopian anarchy. We'll let them replace our leaders with people who barely managed to pass the GED exam or who believe in Jewish space lasers, or are simply criminals.
I don't know what we can do to fix this situation, because most solutions that I can think of are frankly unethical. But I can't help but feel that the fact that we aren't doing anything more drastic to stop losing people to this brainwashing is simply because we value the status quo more than we do the ideals we continually spread.
I feel, deeply, almost every word of what you wrote, Akir.
I've seen something similar in my own parents, though they are a counter-example. They are lifelong conservatives who are now on the outs from many of their friends because they haven't leaned into sociopathy and hatred. My mom is deeply religious, and the foremost belief for everything for her is the Love of Christ. Everything she does is rooted in that Love. Up until recently, it was (presumably) the lodestar of her friends as well.
That has changed though. In the past year or so, my mother and I have had many conversations about her and her relationships with her lifelong friends. The parent/child role is outright reversed for many of these chats, as they have mostly been her seeking understanding, clarity, and guidance from me -- her child -- because she doesn't understand why and how so many of her friends feel the way that they do. After the events at the Capitol in January, she made it a point to ask each of her friends if they felt the election results were fraudulent. Each of them said yes. When I asked her about how she felt about that, she told me, in profound sadness, "it's very hard to love them right now".
I'm a harmonizer. I have been my entire life. I want people to get along with one another. I hate conflict. It scares me and saps my energy in a way few other things can. I get nervous and uncomfortable when I witness the conflict of others -- even if I'm not directly involved! I have spent a large portion of my life being the shock absorber for other people, maintaining peace because it is important to me that other people feel okay. For much of my life, I haven't minded this. I think it's essential that someone be the de-escalator; I think it's important that people try to turn the temperature down rather than up. Additionally, I feel like I have the temperament and skillset for it.
But I find my patience for it flagging, because it is very hard to seek harmony and be a shock absorber for people who are willfully creating shocks. It used to feel like social frictions were a product mostly of a misalignment of values or priorities -- everyone was acting in a way they thought was best, but there was disagreement about what "best" was. Now, however, I feel like there has been a distinct and significant shift in the direction of outright cruelty. There is a cherishing of malice and a valuation of harm that I can't ignore anymore, and that I don't even want to attempt to smooth over. I'll gladly be a shock absorber for a naturally bumpy ride, but don't fucking throw logs in the road, don't fucking laugh at me should I try to navigate them gracefully, and don't fucking cheer when dealing with those makes me tired and hurt.
In one of the early conversations with my Mom, she accused me of living in a "liberal media" bubble. My mom doesn't follow news media at all and isn't one to read anything like Breitbart or the like, but she does think that news media in general trends left. Like you, this made me question whether my way of thinking was warped or not -- whether I was one of those people being duped by echo chambers and modern disinformation.
Thus, I started checking in on right-wing news sites somewhat regularly. I wanted to see their take on the world, compare it against my own, and see what came of it.
Here's the truth of what I've found:
I could probably find a post very similar to yours written on one of those sites, but completely opposite in target. It would talk about how sociopathic and morally bankrupt the left is, and how we're past the point of no return. These are common talking points on those sites, and they have been for a long time. A very long time.
I'm not saying this to draw any sort of false equivalency nor to demean your words in the slightest, Akir (again, I feel them -- deeply). I'm saying this to call attention to the idea that I think what the left has begun to feel, in recent years and particularly as a result of the Trump administration, is what the right has felt for a long time.
On right wing news sites, the left and Democrats are constantly characterized as wholesale evil. We are every negative characteristic you can possibly think of. We are narcissistic, manipulative, conniving, spiteful sociopaths. Not individual people, mind you, but the entire left. Right wing news media creates a situation where people live in fear and anxiety and are so damn tired of our "abuse" of everything from politics to morals to language. Our hypocrisy is constantly pointed out; our moral bankruptcy is constantly featured.
It isn't true, of course. So much of what I see is either outright fabrication, or the result of spin so heavy it practically becomes a fabrication of its own. But it doesn't matter if it's true if it's believed.
And it is very much believed.
I think the way that the left is starting to see the right is the way the right has looked at the left for a long time now. Hell, I think half of the culture wars we see come from the fact that the left has finally learned to use the tactics of the right against them. So much of what they pioneered is now blowing up in their faces, but instead of that prompting some self-reflection, it just gets spun into further justification that their way of life and identities are under attack by malicious evil sociopaths.
Like you, I don't see a way out of this. I genuinely, honestly don't. Compassion, unity, and bridge building all seem like naive ideals when the people you're trying to build the bridge for keep deliberately setting it on fire. And the truly frustrating part is that they feel exactly the same way.
Those two feelings can't be mutually true -- if there are two builders then there's no arson, and if there are two arsonists, then there's no bridge. But right now both sides think they're the builder and the other's the arsonist. I think it's why you and I question what we believe -- are they really the ones setting the fire? Am I really building a bridge?
There's a person who I work with who is openly conservative. We chat from time to time, and there's never animosity. I'm patient with her. She's patient with me.
But this is a false equivalency: I am way more patient with her. I do a lot of bridge building with her. Meanwhile, she does a lot of fire-setting with me. I take it, because I'm a shock absorber.
The problem is that if I told her this -- if even politely mentioned that something she said was hurtful, harmful, or misguided -- she would immediately think that I am the one triggering the blaze. Her fires go completely unseen by her, whereas the slightest pushback gets interpreted as arson from me.
And I think that's what's most exhausting about all of this. I get to watch people gleefully pouring gasoline everywhere, all while knowing that if I even comment on their own behavior, I'll be put on trial for igniting things myself. I feel like I have to tiptoe around the extreme fragility of people living in an alternate reality, and it's infuriating that they see themselves as doing the same. These two things cannot be mutually true. Only one of us can be living in reality. In my reality, Biden is President, COVID is real, Trump is a jerk, and compassion is a virtue.
And I'm really fucking tired of having to pretend like those aren't true. I'm tired of having to try to keep the peace with someone who outright wants a war. I'm tired of having my own kindness used against me.
The way I see it, the confusion about who is doing wrong and who is doing right results from a misunderstanding of how many parties there are to the dynamic. It's not the left vs. the right - it's truth consumers, lie consumers, and lie creators. Then you need to determine who is consuming lies.
There's no indication that the 2020 election was significantly different than the other most recent elections. Foreign governments tried to sway things. Money played a huge role. Those were valid complaints in 2008, 2012, and 2016. In 2020 a not very popular incumbent lost a re-election campaign. All attempts to find evidence of the alleged fraud failed. Of course the winners slowed their talking about the role of money in elections. The winners aren't making so much of a fuss about the involvement of foreign governments in the election. But the losers didn't breach the capitol for those reasons. They aren't living in reality. And that's because they are long since primed to consume lies.
Consumers of the truth need to fight with creators of lies. The more we fight with consumers of lies the easier a target we become.
I really like this framing. It helps keep things in perspective.
What I’m left with though, is: how? Like, what can I do that would make The Gateway Pundit or OANN stop being awful and spewing their garbage? Is that even possible? I’m not asking these as challenges to you, but as honest questions. The lie creators feel untouchable to me, so what I’m left with are the people they reach.
And the problem there is that these sites are all self-insulating. Right-wing media has convinced people that it is the sole trustworthy source and all others are lying, to the point that its followers will outright reject anything that comes from another source or goes against theirs. It feels like an abusive relationship, where the abuser has isolated its victim and then convinced them that it’s just them versus the world, and nobody else is to be trusted. The victim is trained to be dependent on the abuser and respond with hostility to anyone trying to help them.
Like I said in my follow up comment, we need these lies to be illegal and to have an arbiter of truth. Thankfully we already have a system for determining truth. We just need the laws.
I just now saw and responded to that, only to return to see this one from you. Sorry! I’ve got us talking out of phase.
Replying to myself as I have a continuation on this stream of consciousness:
Is it a moral imperative to punish people for lying? Could we put courts in control as arbiters of truth (that’s the idealic point of courts at least) and imprison those that knowingly spread lies about things like election fraud?
I actually think part of the reason we see a lot more social hostility is because people have lost faith that authoritative structures will do their job with regards to accountability. If we can’t trust police, courts, and the government to punish wrongdoers, then presumably it’s on us to hold those wrongdoers’ feet to the fire. In the absence of leadership on that front, we instead feel obligated to create the social and personal costs for bad behavior ourselves.
Honestly, I feel a lot better having said all of this, and I greatly value your response because now it feels like it's not just me who feels this way.
Definitely not, and I feel the exact same way about your comment. It was such a relief to read something and go "yes, THAT's what I'm feeling!". Thank you for putting it into words.
It's all a grander version of the paradox of intolerance, isn't it? Fortunately here we have Diemos the benevolent dictator, and in the real world there's no such thing. Here we could all easily pack up and leave, there's no such ability in the real world. So how to address the paradox when the intolerant don't listen, we can't kick them out, and we can't leave?
Honestly, I’m still worried we are in for a low-grade insurgency. The right has far more guns than the center/liberals/left do, has a major presence within the military and law enforcement (access to heavier firepower, knowledge of tactics, able to sabotage), lives in rural areas (able to control food supply and transportation routes), and has a very strong motive/narrative (quasi-biblical ideas of reclaiming America).
I think we’re 10 years out from one if nothing is done to change things
FWIW, I know it's not easy but ... I moved from the US to the EU after Trump was elected. It's nicer here. Just sayin'.
Especially tough when my job is tied to the US court system. I could also never leave the support system I have here. It's so much easier raising kids with grandparents to lean on as much as I would love to live in Europe and use my French/Spanish.
Wonderful, introspective walk-through. I also love @kfwyre 's response, but I wanted to reply directly to yours.
At the risk of sounding arrogant, I know how to fix this. At least, I'm pretty sure...
Too many people still want to believe that this is a "new" problem, that the Conservative side was still--basically--rational prior to the rise of Trump. I don't buy that. For me, the "tipping point" was either the election of Bush Jr, in 2000, or the US response to 9/11, beginning 18 months later. Even that may have been too late. Regardless, this is a crisis that is at least 2 decades in the making.
That said, it is really worth remembering that--so far, at least--the Lunatic Fringe in the US is still a clear minority, and US demographics continue to trend in a direction that marginalizes these people and trivializes these positions.
The short-term solution, right now, is electoral reform. Come Hell or high water, the US Fed Govt must pass significant voter reform legislation that nullifies all of the stupid, desperate, Jim Crow BS that the Republicans have been relying on for decades to prop them up as a viable party. When everyone gets to vote, the Republicans lose ... and they continue to lose until they change their platform.
This is already a priority for Biden and the Dems, but I feel like it's still not enough of a priority. There are two good bills in Congress right now. Bluntly, fuck the filibuster. Do everything you can to get Congress (ahem ... the Senate) to pass both of those bills. Right now, this is more important than Infrastructure; it's actually more important than Covid care.
That ensures the Democrats stay in charge long enough to at least begin to address the real root causes. Whether they do or not is a whole 'nother can of worms (PS: I actually lean Republican ... or I would, if the Republican Party were sane).
I actually think the long-term solution is also pretty simple in scope.
Get money out of politics. No ... seriously. This is the truly root cause of, IDK, at least 80% of everything that is broken in US politics. My #1 choice for President in 2016 was Lawrence Lessig, who explicitly ran on a single issue of campaign finance reform. His "Lesterland" TED Talk is still worth watching to this day.
The US needs some kind of gatekeeper system for what qualifies as news and facts, and who gets to disseminate them. Unfortunately, I still do not trust any Govt to set up such a system, but at this point, it seems, nothing less will work. So, we need some kind of aggressive regulatory framework that makes the existence of things like Fox News impossible (or at the very least, forces such services to be clearly and explicitly categorized as opinion and/or fiction -- and not just "labelled" as such, but actively recognized as such by the vast majority of the populace). Perhaps that would involve a significant expansion of the powers and purview of the FCC, similar to the financial regulatory scope of the FTC. Something like that, anyway.
An aggressive revision of the US educational system (which has been getting steadily worse at least since I was a kid in the '70s, probably longer). Obviously, critical thinking should be higher up in the priority list, but it needs a much broader overhaul. And for that, it would actually need to begin with better training, education, treatment and payment for the teachers.
I definitely agree, but at the same time I do want to point out that those wild beliefs are definitely not held by the majority of "the right" today. This is not to minimize the fact that wild conspiracy theories are extremely prevalent on the right, nor to imply that they should be ignored. There are plenty of other reasons too that finding common ground is tough or even undesirable (e.g. why would you find common ground with someone who thinks you, or other classes of people, don't deserve basic human rights). But I do think it is inaccurate to suggest that Q-level conspiracies like that are the de facto belief on the right, and if we are at all serious about reducing polarization it's probably better to address the problematic tenets of the median right wing voter rather than some extreme example.
Again, I'm not claiming that those beliefs don't exist or exist at an "acceptable" level and thus should be ignored. I'm just saying that the median right leaning voter is not so far gone, which is important because it does mean meaningful policy action could still get through to them. Hell, a lot of Biden's actions so far regarding the virus and the economy are seeing ~70% levels of support which crazy to think about, and also goes to show that popular and immediate policies can reach people. If we just assume that the typical right leaning voter is batshit crazy, we're essentially conceding that policy doesn't matter for domestic politics because as you correctly point out, you can't reason with those people. I think policy still matters and it is therefore important for Democrats to enact popular policies.
Are you sure about that? According to this Ipsos/NPR poll:
From NPR's article on the poll:
I think it's worse than you imagine.
I was aware of polls similar to those when I made my comment. I don't think it really materially changes my point. First, I think there is a meaningful distinction between believe that there are Satan worshipping elites running a child sex ring vs that there was significant voter fraud in the 2020 election. Both have no basis in reality, but one presupposes quite a lot more, and is also more inclined to make an adherent view "elites" (i.e. liberals) as evil and something to be opposed. Furthermore, my point is again not that such beliefs are non-existent or even not relevant. It's just that the average right leaning voter does not believe them, which I think is more or less supported by that particular poll you posted. With regards to the Satan question:
It's simply not the median right leaning voter who believes this, regardless of if you consider just Republicans as right leaning, and less so if you take into account the fact that roughly half of those independents are right leaning as well. Obviously it's not fantastic that the "Don't know" cross tabs are so high, but that is different than belief, let alone fervent belief. Not to mention that the "don't know" cross tabs are not too different by party break down.
This is obviously just one example, and in general I'm not too excited to base an entire argument around a single poll. But even this one example is in no conflict with my original claims. Technically it supports them. I want to be really careful here and just stress that I am not claiming such misinformation doesn't matter or is nothing to worry about. I just don't think it's a) the majority of either side, b) particularly unique to either side*, or c) a particularly good reason to "give up" at trying to reduce polarization.
*I do think it is a bigger problem on the right, especially because the right wing media world seems to be much more toxic and willing to dabble in misinformation than the equivalent on the left. But again my fundamental claim here is not that the problem is non-existent, just that we are still at a point where the majority of people, regardless of party, can probably be reached via popular and immediate policy decisions.
Indeed, however I have noticed even amongst the more mild Republicans, there is a deep and visceral hatred for liberals/leftists. Even with people I know, really kind and caring people too, their top lip curls in disgust when discussing liberals and it seems their political identity is now mostly about hating liberals. In general, the most in-depth policy understanding they have is: "taxes bad", "government bad", or some sort of single issue thing like gun-rights/pro-life. It can take me days of talking with a person I know well to get them to open up to some of the policy ideas from the left, since there is so much background information/misunderstanding I have to work through to get the person open minded—only for it all to be quickly forgotten.
I think the pervasive hatred of democrats is an important key to mending these types of relationships. In some regards, I think the mistrust in democratic politicians is well-deserved and many on the left-hand side don't give that proper credit, but the absolute vitriol I have seen since the Trump era is just something else altogether.
Statements like this drive me absolutely nuts. Partially because I used to believe stuff like that back when I was an ignorant, sheltered teenager raised in a super religious community. But I would expect better from a communications professor.
Politics have never been impersonal, because they're at the core of who counts as a person, what rights they should have, and how we organize society. They have extremely real effects on peoples lives, more so for marginalized folks. Acting like they're a sporting event where you can just pick a team and move on is the height of "enlightened centrism".
These sort of articles always feel like they have the subtext of "and people who can't come together are unreasonable (because all stances are morally equivalent)". Maybe they should spend less time saying that everyone should get along and more time understanding the right-wing misinformation/hate machine that has brought us to this point.
If you strip away all the fancy language what they're really implying is that "You should be friends with people that don't see you as fully human." It calls for endless good will from the people who are victimized and none from the people doing the victimizing.
At least they dedicated a whole two sentences to saying that some differences are 'unbridgeable'.
Given how much harder it seems to be to make new friends as you get older, I feel especially sorry for Luna. Even moreso given how much crap she must have lived through in her time. For this to happen and possibly break up a friendship that's lasted longer than I've been alive...well, as Paul Rudd would say..."Yeah, that sucks."
I will admit to this. I cannot be friends with someone who still supports the Republican party. Up to last year, I felt there may have been hope, but at this point if you're willing to support the party that says Trump is still the leader of the Republican party... a man who, among other things, threw away the lives of half a million Americans because he had no actual plan to fight a pandemic that some nations are no longer even suffering from... then you're either willfully or unwilfully ignorant, and frankly I don't know which is worse.
That's not to say that Republicans don't have a right to be Republicans, to believe what they want to believe... they absolutely do. But to that end, so do I. And much like the JK Rowling debate, the Orson Scott Card debate, the Chik-Fil A debate, I don't wish to associate with people who would rather I did not exist.
This is a question I have struggled with over the last four years especially regarding my parents. I was raised in a very fundamentalist Baptist culture and as such was taught that moral issues were tantamount to everything else. "Do right 'til the stars fall" was a popular admonition in school and church. Our childhood was circumscribed by tenants such as "two wrongs don't make a right" and "guilt by association." In addition we were encouraged to adhere to a strict moral code of behavior and attitude.
When I reached adulthood I moved away from the specific brand of Christianity I was raised in, but I continued to believed those core principles. They were a commonality that I continued to share with my parents, some common ground.
With the election of Trump and particularly in the last year I have come to realize that while my parents and my childhood culture taught me to believe these things, they did not believe them to the same degree. When I try to use these same core principles to point out to my parents all of the reasons they should not support or vote for Trump it's dismissed as not relevant because of his stance on abortion.
Needless to say this has placed a strain our my ability to see our relationship in the same light, given that it has forced me to reevaluate how they raised me. The principles, by their very nature, either matter or they don't. I have come to realize that my parents are, and perhaps always have been, the same as the people they said that I should stay away from. They sold out their principles because their heart wanted what it wanted, righteousness and logic be damned. Which means they are human after all and for that I have compassion on them and will still love them. But it hurts me to see that man morally compromise my parents in their old age. It's hard not to hate sometimes, but I will not let him morally compromise me as well.