I agree with Ezra Klein on a lot. Heck, I even recommended his latest book.
However, he recently made a comment on his podcast the substance of which was that he thinks it’s nuts to cut off contact with a family member because of vastly different political views. To which I say, “The f*ck?!”
It is pretty much the archetypal essence of being an American not to cut off contact with a family member for stringently disagreeing politically but to cut off the flow of blood to the brain of a family member for stringently disagreeing politically. There are tons of examples of brothers fighting brothers, fathers fighting sons, etc., ad nauseam, in the Civil War over political differences.
Yne could argue that the Civil War was a special circumstance — good versus evil, slavery versus freedom, and the like — and it most certainly was unique in many respects. Yet, the Civil War is not unique at all in terms of American family members splitting with one another in matters of life and death because of differing political opinions, like American patriots antagonizing loyalist relatives in the American Revolution, for instance.
I am by no means saying you should go out and slaughter your relatives who disagree with you. What I am saying is that in the scope of American history it is quite a paltry consequence of holding a clearly incorrect political opinion just to have a relative decide you are no longer worth talking to.
I’ve just recently seen my brother for pretty much the only time of the year I ever see him anymore: deer hunting season back home. We used to be close. We went on a trip together every year. One time in Boston we bought a round of Sam Adams beer, snuck it outside, scaled the fence at the historic Granary Burying Ground cemetery, and shared a midnight beer with Samuel Adams himself, or what is left of him, on his grave (I think the statute of limitations has passed on anything related to that).
All the good memories aside, the last ten years have not been kind to our relationship. I am unabashedly progressive, and my brother is an unthinking reflexive MAGA gun nut whose mind has been pickled by the right-wing internet. He’s also not a very good brother: I don’t need to worry too much about insulting him because he doesn’t even care enough about his only sibling to spend six minutes reading this column every week.
I have not cut off my brother from all contact. I just don’t go out of my way to initiate it anymore, and make a point of challenging the more heinous viewpoints he expresses when we do encounter one another.
Like Ezra Klein, many people are averse to politics coming between relatives. I think such people lack charm. I have many, many friends who have helped me out and who I have helped out much more than has been the case with my brother. I have many, many friends who I enjoy spending time with more than my brother. I have many, many friends whose decisions have not contributed to the deaths of millions of people due to support for Trump’s second-term policies, to say nothing of the countless daily nonfatal miseries his supporters continue to inflict. To spend extra time with someone whose company you do not generally enjoy, who you find overall to be an odious human being, just because you share some DNA, reeks of eugenics to me.
For the sake of my aging parents, I still try to pretend to mostly get along with my brother for the three or four days a year we see each other. I will never forgive him and all the other fake patriots out there for what I see as being a traitor to the country and the Constitution, though. I think it is the obligation of every real American to either try to deradicalize such people, or, if that fails, to shame them back into the shadows.
So, as Thanksgiving approaches, remember you are not obliged to spend time with anyone you don’t enjoy spending time with. You’re not helping anyone by just letting MAGA relatives think they’re getting away with it. Finally, as for deer hunting (the Thanksgiving of rural America), I can attest that a whiny liberal ATL columnist can put a round right through a cervid heart at 100 yards with an old bolt action rifle even as a certified gun nut range instructor with a multiple-thousand dollar AR-15 setup registers a clean miss.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
The post It Is Not Only Alright To Shame, And Ultimately Ostracize, Your MAGA Relatives, It Is Your Patriotic Duty As An American appeared first on Above the Law.