Meditations on Political Arguments During the Holidays

Or, how I learned to stop being a terminally online weirdo and touch the grass.

The holidays can be a strange time of year. From the genuine love and enjoyment of time spent with friends and family to the forced commercialization that comes with the gift giving ritual, it’s a mixed bag of emotions and experiences. This is especially true in recent years due to the extreme political polarization in the United States these days. This year, I found myself in a strange situation: cast as the proverbial “conservative uncle defending Trump” at the family holiday party. The strange thing is, however, I’m not a Trump supporter and have never voted for him (nor will I ever). What was even stranger was that I wasn’t arguing with a niece or nephew, but my father-in-law.  

To set the stage for context, I was having a nice Christmas get-together with my in-laws. Snacks, gifts, catching up- all pretty boiler plate. I was standing near our bookshelves and discussing their contents with my father-in-law (who we will call “Bill” for the remainder of the article) when he noticed the book “Paris, 1919” by Margaret MacMillan which he had also read. For those who have not read it, the book recounts the history of the end of World War One, the treaty of Versailles, the formation of the League of Nations (a precursor of the UN) and the foreign policy of “making the world safe for democracy” that Wilson implemented. I said that Woodrow Wilson was, in my opinion, the worst president the United States has ever had to which he quipped that the title should go to Trump. I disagreed (if for no other reason that I think a president needs to have been out of office for at least 20 years in order to begin to put them into historical context) and the discussion devolved into argument masked as pleasant conversation in true Midwestern fashion.  

I retell these events not to dunk on Bill, I genuinely like the man and think he is an upstanding person, and a guy couldn’t ask for a better father-in-law. He has a long history of caring about social issues and being involved in his community which I have nothing but respect for. I only bring it up to highlight a strange new divide in the culture war and generational politics that I didn’t know I was a part of. It seems to boil down to boomer libs who still have faith in the system and the democratic party and millennial leftists who have seen mostly failure in their lifetime and want to try something new. I won’t relitigate the blow by blow, but it mostly boiled down to me saying “democrats did this bad thing, and they are in power and should be held accountable” and Bill retorting “but Trump/the Republicans!”.  

Now, I will admit I could have been more articulate. I may have had a few beers (okay, a few jack and cokes before they got there, too) and it was a Midwestern argument as I eluded to (for those not familiar, it involves trying to sound nice and keeping up the illusion of civility while internally seething), but we eventually gave up as not to ruin the party and I think because we also both knew consciously or subconsciously that we didn’t know what we were arguing about.  

So, much like David Byrne posits in the 1980 Talking Heads hit “Once in a Lifetime”, I had to ask myself: “how did I get here?” I’ll go back in time a bit to give a little context and backstory. I’ll apologize in advance since someone recanting their "personal political journey” is often as boring as it is narcissistic, but in this case, I think how unremarkable my journey was will lend some context to what I’m writing. Or at least, hopefully, make it relatable.  

I’m a millennial in my early 30s. I grew up in the US (with a brief “early life” in Canada) and came of age in a major city in the de-industrialized Midwest. My family was not especially political other than my dad being one of those 2000s Ron Paul libertarians and my mom being a little more conservative. But I didn’t have any particular political leanings other than some boiler plate liberalism that comes with growing up in the Bush era that was mostly boomer backwash such as “war bad”, “racism bad” and “gays good”. And hey, no major movement from there even now. War and racism indeed bad and while I don’t think being gay is inherently good or bad, they don’t deserve to be treated poorly or not have equal rights.  

These beliefs of vague liberal truisms were tempered with other truisms from my libertarian father. “Government bad,” “free speech good” and “drug prohibition bad” (but don’t do them). Again, nothing too crazy for the most part. These concepts were pretty ingrained in the cultural zeitgeist of the 2000s and what my understanding of the political climate was at the time. This was the era that birthed the terms “South Park Conservative” and “South Park Liberal”, after all. Granted, I was a young teen with limited understanding of the world, but I was insufferable from an early age and actually tried to keep up with politics and current events to the best of my ability.

Then, when I was in high school, Obama was elected. I distinctly remember watching the inauguration on our little kitchen TV and saying, “this is the first time I’ve ever been proud of my country.” Even though I wasn’t quite old enough to vote for Obama in his first term, I really bought into that “hope and change” shit. A lot of us did and some still do, to be fair. And hey, despite being disappointed in his first term, I assumed he was doing his best and any failures were probably those comically evil Republicans' fault, anyway. And for the rest of his presidency, I more or less checked out of politics and bought into the liberal myth of progress. After all, we elected a black guy, it’s smooth sailing from here on out! Who cares if the war that Bush started was still going on? NSA spying? Racial tensions increasing? A complete collapse of the global financial system that gutted the American middle/lower classes and none of the people responsible were held accountable? Minor details. I was sure when Hillary Clinton got elected it would all straighten out and the endless march of progress would continue. In 2016, I was with her. 

But of course, we all know how that went. 2016 was the year that the orange man cometh (cameth?) and decade's worth of built-up shit hit the fan. I think if you’re on this platform you’re likely pretty clued-in to what went on, but for me, the election of Donald Trump was a shock. Like many people, I didn’t really take him seriously until about three quarters into the votes being counted on election night when it really sunk in. He was a joke, right? That guy from “The Apprentice”, “Home Alone” and some admittedly pretty good Pizza Hut commercials is president? Also, apparently, he was a Nazi, and he was going to destroy democracy. I, like many libs, didn’t know how to deal with it and got into some pretty weird shit as a result.  

Again, I won’t bore you with the specifics of my war stories from the posting wars of that era since it’s an uninteresting read, but I’ll go in broad strokes. I didn’t serve on the Twitter front since I thought it was too normie, but I did get into the trenches of Reddit. I was a proud listener and supporter of revolutionary podcast broadcasters such as Chapo Trap House, Red Scare and various other leftie news outlets. I consumed and participated in the online discourse of Breadtube (a loose coalition of left-leaning YouTube content creators). I watched with glee when Slavoj Zizek debated and subsequently owned Jordan Peterson. I was even banned from Reddit for telling a neo-Nazi to drink bleach, which is kind of like the terminally online leftist's version of being killed in action during the siege of Stalingrad. I was determined in my efforts to defeat the fascists by posting alone like some kind of post-modern cross between Charles Bukowski and the Viet Cong. 

If that meant nothing to you, congratulations on being normal. If you knew what it meant and cringed, I’m right there with you. You may have also noticed, as I eventually did, that I did not mention doing anything in real life and you would be right. For better or for worse, I was terminally online from an early age. I got online in 2004 and started going to forums, chat rooms and message boards at an age that definitely messed up my social development, but that’s not unique for people of my generation.  Back in the 2000s and early 2010s the internet felt like a parallel world where we tech utopians could transcend the petty concerns of the normies and create our own society that was not based on location, race, or creed. We would stay anonymous and only have our ideas define us. “Pure ideology,” as a philosopher I later came to love would say. Again, I know it’s cringe, but that really was something that people believed at the time. Later I would learn that I was swilling yet even more boomer backwash- this time from the tech utopians of Silicon Valley who were often veterans of the 1960s culture wars that took refuge in cyberspace after their cultural revolution failed. Unfortunately, that doomed the online movement to fail just as the project of the 1960s failed in meatspace . However, I’ll get back to my main point of how online I was and how I came to “touch grass,” as the kids say these days.  

My interaction with Donald Trump and his supporters was almost exclusively online, I can only recall meeting a handful in the flesh. After all, I had moved to one of the most liberal cities in the US by this point and worked in the tech world. All my friends were liberals or identified as some hyper-specific brand of Marxist. All the media I followed pandered to this. So, when Trump was elected, I assumed (like many in my world) that there had to be some kind of subversion that caused it. It couldn’t be a legitimate election, so we searched for the true reason like a lefty Q-Anon. Was it this dastardly alt-right that I was starting to hear about? Was it the Russians doing a ‘heckin election interference? I had moved beyond the prescription opioids of the mainstream Democratic party and now gone on to the pure heroin of our savior, comrade and parasocial Jewish grandpa- Bernie Sanders. And I, like so many of my comrades, thought the victory of the revolution in the form of comrade Bernie was inevitable. Queue 2020 and the comical record scratch.  

2020, what a wild time, right folks? There is a lot I could say about this year and its fallout, but in the context of this article I’ll focus on one thing- the collapse and failure of the Sanders campaign. To me, this was the left hook that finally knocked me out politically after the right hook of 2016. Where 2016 broke me of the illusion of mainstream liberalism and drove me into the arms of leftism, 2020 broke me of the illusion that there was any path forward for traditional leftism. Orange man was defeated, but only by the liberal establishment thoroughly closing ranks in a vulgar display of power and Bernie was the collateral damage. The world was on fire, a pandemic was ravaging the globe, there were riots/protests in the streets, and I no longer had hope.  

At least that’s what I told myself at first. Demoralized, I lost interest in posting and largely logged off. It just wasn’t fun anymore; I didn’t want to be like one of those Japanese soldiers from WW2 that kept fighting decades after the Axis Powers surrendered. Instead, I ended up going outside (once they let us, that is). I did some volunteer work. I even worked at a food bank for a local church giving out food in my community at the height of the pandemic. This was much to the chagrin of some of my former comrades- after all, they could be racist, sexist or even transphobic! I never found out if they were and I didn’t care. I imagine the people who got food who otherwise wouldn’t have didn’t care, either.  

I tell this story not to show how moral I am, but to highlight a point. In truth, I only went to that church half a dozen times. But it did give me something valuable- talking to normal people and just doing the work and doing it for someone else. It ended up being fulfilling in a way that no DSA meeting ever was. Mostly because I created an actual tangible change in the world, at least in some small way. Funny enough, it reminded me of the church I was raised in and how we would try to give back to the community by giving out food, school supplies, do house/yard work for elderly people in our community and visit retirement homes to talk to people without families. I also remembered that my church was actually significantly more racially diverse than any of the afore mentioned DSA meetings I went to. Life’s funny that way sometimes.  

Before you get excited or filled with dread, this isn’t a story about how I found Christ- I’m still an atheist and overall, quite the degenerate. However, experiences like this made me live in the real world more and question things outside the binary I had been living in. I talked to more people and found that despite some real fuckery by the DNC, Bernie just didn’t have mainstream appeal to most people and that was the real reason he lost at the end of the day. I talked to moderate, normie libs and found that trying to rehabilitate Stalin was not only beyond the pale for them (and rightly so), but a completely pointless endeavor that would only alienate most people and make allies of people who were generally unhinged and incapable of creating real political change. I talked to people of diverse backgrounds who didn’t feel represented by either side and just opted to live their lives and ignore politics. I talked to conservatives and even dreaded Trump supporters. I didn’t agree with all of it, and a few were genuine bigots, but most were just fed up with the way the world was going and filtering those frustrations through a world view as limited as mine. And hey, maybe they are just as deep into their echo chamber as I was and just need to talk to someone outside of it in order to begin to change.  

All of these experiences led me to rethink a lot of my preconceived notions. I didn’t become a Christian or make a dramatic change to being a based, red-pilled MAGA supporter. I didn’t come to love capitalism and completely disown Marx. I did, however, start to see the commonalities in some of the complaints of my former enemies. Factoring out the genuinely hateful people, there was just a lot of frustration with being downwardly mobile and feeling like you don’t have a future. Similar to many of the people I knew on the left who were frustrated with the same thing but for different reasons. Fed up with a system that seems to have left them behind for one reason or another. Tired of working hard and destroying their minds and bodies to only just get by. Exhausted with there always being too much month at the end of the money. 

This isn’t a “we’re like, all the same, man” post. There are very real and unique problems that many people in the US face and will require different solutions. Race, gender and sexuality are not superfluous categories that should be ignored as some on the right would have you believe and the concerns of the conservatives in “flyover country” can’t just be dismissed as the moaning of racists who are bitter that they lost their “white privilege.” These are complicated problems that will require complicated solutions and there is no version of those solutions that makes everyone happy.  

This brings me back to my discussion with Bill. As I said, I don’t think we even knew what we were arguing about. But more accurately, I don’t think we knew who we were arguing with. Was I arguing with Bill, my kindhearted father-in-law? Or was I arguing with my projection of baby boomers who let things get to this point where the world is on fire, on the brink of WW3 and the only solution presented is choosing between a disgraced former game show host and a senile geriatric who struggles to finish a sentence? Was he arguing with his son-in-law who has been with his daughter for a decade and shared half as many holidays with him or was he arguing with some snot-nosed kid who’s letting the project of liberalism and democracy fall to a proto-fascist because he, like many in his generation, is entitled and not willing to be patient and make concessions for the greater good?  

It's hard to tell. I wish I could make some quippy comment to the effect of “man, we sure are different, but those differences are our strength!” or some such bullshit, but the time for platitudes is over. I’m done being ironic. I don’t know what’s going to happen in 2024, but if the last 8 years are anything to go by it won’t be anything good. Maybe the best we can hope for is putting aside our differences to just get along long enough to eat some damn turkey. Maybe that’s what America needs, too. Acknowledging the differences but putting them aside to focus on something bigger that affects all of us. Maybe, that will be enough.