Of course you shouldn't discuss politics with your family
What are you, twelve
A few years back, in a tapas restaurant in Nottingham, my brother and Dad engaged in a lengthy and from where I was sitting broadly incoherent argument about some aspect of predatory capitalism. Meanwhile my Mum and I sat next them in silence, while I eventually offered a comment of something like ‘Not sure this is how this is supposed to break down.’
For my mother and I are the political animals in the family, deeply invested in and passionate about European culture and history, and throughout my 20s and 30s, I had been far from shy in striding out into political battle with my family. Yet over tapas, just on the cusp of 40, I found myself preferring to maintain a neutral and bemused silence; tho I could, if I had wanted, strained myself to express an opinion on what they were saying, nothing felt better than the pleasure of staying out of it.
I have read articles from the US about how to raise political arguments with your family at Thanksgiving, with it almost presented as duty to engage politically with your loved ones. You only have a few hours a year to change their mind, the argument runs, and you need to make the most of your chance to redeem them.
To which I say: Are you mad?
Clearly, this is a symptom of the American polarization which has effectively split the country into two large blocks making pitches to the small but determining tranche of neutrals in between. Given the views of these blocs are so different, it’s not a surprise that the stakes of US elections feel so existential; looked at from a European perspective, it’s easy to suggest that there’s nothing wrong with the US a few decent and collaborative coalition governments wouldn’t sort out, getting all parties used to losing a bit. A further irony is that, despite American elections being such life-or-death affairs, it’s terribly difficult to get much done at the Federal level afterwards, making these contests a sort of epochal fight for the right to have your legislative agenda stymied.
There’s also something more purely American (read: idealistic) about the idea that there is a responsibility to turn family life into a space of public debate.
Believe me, I’ve been there. As a teenager, pepped up on communist apologia, I lambasted my parents for voting Thatcher, condemne their praise for any politician I disliked, raged against Dubya Bush. I’m the guy who hung a large Nicaraguan flag up on my wall at university in tribute to the Sandinista movement. Genuinely. A flag resurrected later on in my Berlin days as a increasingly flakey flag sellotaped to the wall of my bachelor pad, which was some kind of metaphor for the corruption of nobleish ideals.
Nowadays my days of relentlessly twisting every conversation to politics, of hating the centre-left with a passion, of seeing making things political as a duty, are strongly indexed for me with poor mental health. It’s not healthy to measure all external stimuli from the world by a single ideological standard, and my own times of ideological ‘commitment’ culminated, tho not only for that reason, in a nervous breakdown in my early 20s.
That’s what I still see as the great sadness of what remains of the cultural left; a tendency to measure everything in the world against whether it advances or impugnes leftist ideology; saying that ‘everything is political’ is, ironically, a position which owes more to religion than politics, in which the adherent clings on to the purity of their political faith and judges the world by the extent to which the faith is confirmed. Over time, an obsessively political worldview is a recipe for unhappiness.
But you only have one family. I’m not saying that’s easy – family is a sort of existential puzzle set for each and every one of us, or a chronic condition we’re born into we can try to ameliorate but cannot cure.
Of course, it depends upon what exactly that puzzle looks like; there are of course political families, where politics is one of the things discussed, one of the family concerns. A friend of mine, for example, says they calmly talked through the options in the Brexit Referendum with their parents, leading them to an informed vote; likewise, I convinced my own father that, despite his lifelong Euroscepticism, a Remain vote would be in my own best interests. He nobly put aside his hatred of Jean-Claude Juncker for his love of his son. Yet both these stories indicate to me that family life and family bonds are in the final analysis decisive over political concerns.
Families are hard. Indeed, my own has been sufficiently tricky that it robbed me of any desire to start my own, tho of course I know many who enjoyed worse upbringings who viewed their origins as precisely the reason to start their own loving unit. Whatever our families are tho, they’re ours – our unavoidable start.
I’m not going to reduce these impossible relationships to the crudity of politics, nor going to be too denunciatory to people who literally used to wipe my arse. Wherever possible, the huge sacrifices even halfway decent parents made for you need to be born in mind; to adapt a Chinese proverb, be nice to your parents, because they were born in a different time to you.
In a family context, political disputes – which usually, unless you’re an active politician, means positioning yourself in relation to things neither of you know anything about – are just a distraction from hearing about the times your family grew up in, or how they met, or the songs of their youth, or what people ate in the early 1960s; the things which they’ve carried with them from a time when you weren’t even about. Beyond a certain definition of yourself, capping out at about say 20, it seems a shame to sacrifice what may be limited chances to learn about all that. Parents do after all have an unfortunate tendency to die.
This is in perhaps part of a broader attaining of maturity, the moment you realise that people’s political beliefs have very little to do with how good they are. When it comes down to judging people’s characters, their politics comes about fifteenth on the list, probably just below their sartorial choices. Certainly below someone's quality of shoes.
You see this in how the left struggles with attitudes to Zionism; Zionism (using the left-internal definition as soley the desire to murder Palestinians) is bad, those who believe in Zionism are bad, and hence 90% of Jews, who identify as Zionists, go down as bad people. Purely to identify as a Zionist is enough to qualify someone as that, even tho it is the left defining for the Zionists what they mean by the term. This is, by the by, the root of the left's ongoing issues with Jews; it says it opposes Jews and not Zionists, but most Jews are Zionists. And hence bad.
Whereas acknowledging the split between character and political belief allows that 90% of Jews to be all kinds of things, with their Zionism – even if you view the belief in a Jewish homeland as monstrous, which to be clear I don’t – just an incidental detail in their busy and complex lives.
In reality, just as with religion, people can profess strongly or loosely all kinds of political beliefs without it having much impact on their character, especially because most people just don’t think about politics that much at all, particularly those who think any political tradition has a monopoly on right. For me, viewing your political tendency as entirely correct is just a sign that you haven’t read enough or lived enough yet; my own youthful flirtation with communism certainly didn’t long survive meeting people who grew up in East Germany.
I digress. Certainly I’m not denying, to return to our theme, that some ostensibly kind people can have some very nasty opinions; indeed, it may be where they go to get their cruelty out. And of course there are those who are on the surface kind and welcoming but whose views would cause utter havoc if implemented. You can break bread with them, but when it comes to the ballot box, you have to stop them however you can. And if the ballot box phase is over, you have to stop them by non-democratic means too.
Yet most of our parents and family members are not, to be clear, Nazis; they’re often just a little more reactionary from us, formed by their times, and they love us too. If we have two Reform-voting parents cooking their son or daughter dinner, and their reward for their troubles is a denunciatory political rant from their progeny, I don’t think it’s the parents who are doing the most harm there, whatever their electoral behaviour.
Of course, a traditional left argument would be that it is precisely the Reform voters doing the most harm and that the observation of social niceties is precisely why nothing ever gets changed, and that the child is only being considered awkward for telling the truth. It depends, I suppose, on how exactly we define our social responsibilities.
I’m sure you’ve heard that neutrality in the face of oppression takes the side of the oppressor; I’m just not quite so certain as others as to who the oppressor is. It’s certainly possible, indeed common, for people calling others oppressors to be pretty darn oppressive themselves.
Members of my family did indeed vote for Brexit. That vote has impacted me personally, limited my career options and made my immigration status in Belgium complex and anxiety-inducing. I suffer as a result of that decision every day. Nonetheless, I’m not at this stage going to attack those of my loved ones who supported it, or even raise it with them, not least because that vote cannot now be undone. If they were ever to turn against their decision - which was after all their own to make - it certainly wouldn’t be because of anything weird Uncle James, childless and divorced at 42, says to them.
Overall, I think politics is fundamentally too crude a filter to sieve our relations through. The best thing to view through a political lens is politics. Such rich familial relations, often full of memory and mockery and nuance, of power shifting and reforming, of relationships which evolve and devolve over time, require something more fluid and multifaceted than ideology to assess. Politics is, it has often been said, downstream of culture, and, if we want to solve the riddle of the families we have been dealt, culture seems a more promising route for that enquiry to politics; politics is what a society resorts to when it has forgotten how to do the human thing.
Very good. It took me at least another twenty years to get to that point, by which time both of my parents were dead.