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Notes -
Following up on this comment, I was recently working on an effort post that was loosely organized around "some people I have known." Specifically, I have been thinking about unenviable lives, people whose existence strikes me as excessively resistant to improvement of any kind, and how the way we structure society helps, hurts, or even creates such people. Some intended figures for inclusion were a man in his 50s who is a permanent American expatriate and recent convert to Islam; a woman in her 60s who lives in her car after burning through a six figure inheritance in the space of a single year; a man in his 40s whose whole life consists of playing video games and harvesting pineapples. All of their stories have culture war implications, I think, but one of them is culture war all the way down. This is Lana's story.
Requiem for a Friend(ship)
Once upon a time, before the world Awoke, I had a friend.
When I met Lana (name has been changed for all the usual reasons) she was a newly-minted attorney, freshly hired to the Office of General Counsel. A few weeks after being introduced at a university function, I ran into her at lunchtime. She was having a political discussion with another OGC employee and cheerfully invited my participation. This basic scenario played out again, intermittently, for several semesters, organically developing into a friendship that extended marginally beyond the workplace.
Over the years I learned that, when Lana first joined the OGC, she'd been married to another attorney--a family law practitioner of no particular reputation. They were religious Protestants but political Progressives. Lana's feminism was very 90s, in a way I find hard to describe today, but you can probably imagine it: makeup good, Barbie sus, "pro-child, pro-choice," but nary a mention of "patriarchy" or "rape culture" or "microaggressions." Critical theory was already a Thing, of course, but the battle of the sexes (as it was sometimes called) hadn't yet been racialized or radicalized in quite the way we see today. Anyway, Lana enjoyed--or seemed to enjoy!--that I was (approximately) an irreligious conservative. I think that, perhaps, by doubly violating her expectations (arguing against her politics without resort to Jesus, being unmoved by her appeals to Christian charity as a justification for bleeding-heart policies) I presented a novelty to her lawyerly (read: contrarian, adversarial) mindset. I appreciated her openness to discussion.
Eventually, Lana took a position elsewhere, but we occasionally caught up using whatever technology was in fashion. Email, Instant Messenger, social media. She proved to be an especially prolific Facebook poster after giving birth to a child and retiring from law practice to parent full-time (what she said then was that she never really enjoyed practicing law anyway--if memory serves, she was a literature undergraduate). Of course, social media is often a distorted lens, but what I saw was a pretty relatable mixture of joy and struggle, interspersed with the discussions of political interest that were the heart of many of Lana's friendships--including ours.
And then it was 2015.
It cannot possibly have been Donald Trump's fault that Lana divorced her husband. The problems she recounted in her Facebook overshares must have been simmering for some time: husband pressuring her for sex more than once a month, being a full-time mother had cost her her identity, raising a kid seemed like an impossibly difficult and objectionably thankless undertaking. But long-running disagreements with her Protestant friends over same-sex marriage came to an apogee in June of 2015, when Obergefell v. Hodges was decided--ten days, if I'm counting correctly, after Donald Trump announced his candidacy for President of the United States. That same month, Lana very publicly, very noisily separated from her husband--as well as her religious community, which she felt had taken "his side." The extended process of an acrimonious custody dispute began.
We sometimes speak of the "Great Awokening" and pin it to 2012 or 2014, but the first time I really noticed it influencing my personal life was during the 2016 election season (and aftermath). And what I noticed was not a vibe shift, but a shocking spate of relationship implosion. I had always thought of "blocking" people on social media as a tool created to weed out spammers, trolls, and perhaps the occasional stalker or abuser--not something anyone would ever do to friends, family, or even acquaintances, certainly not over something as trivial as political disagreement. But as 2016 progressed, Lana's Facebook posts grew increasingly vitriolic, and her tolerance for dissent all but vanished. "If you support Trump, just unfriend me now," she posted once. "Because if I see anyone post anything supporting him, I will block you."
Well, I wasn't a Trump supporter, so I didn't worry too much about it. At the time, I attributed this unbounded anger to Lana's personal circumstances, but by the time Trump won the election, Lana's divorce had been finalized for months. I suppose the official "end" of our friendship came in March of 2017. After months of watching Democrats scramble for any possible way to overturn the results of the election, from inducement to faithless electors to violent protests, I made a social media post highlighting several of the absurdities of the 2017 Women's March (in particular, its deliberate exclusion of pro-life women), and Lana put me on her block list.
I was sad about that, but by then our friendship had lacked an "in person" component for several years. I still had "in person" friendships with several mutual acquaintances, however, so I would occasionally get a second-hand update. At some point in 2018, Lana remarried--this time, to a woman. She had a couple of bad starts at getting back into law practice before finally settling back where she'd begun, doing lawyerly work for a (different) university. She gained two hundred pounds (ten of that in piercing jewelry), stopped shaving her legs (and started posting pictures of her unshaved legs to social media), shaved half her head instead, and colored blue what remained. Her Facebook posting, I was told, never slowed down, but became a stable mixture of "#NotMyPresident" and "I'm having another mental health crisis today" posts. (COVID-19 apparently heightened the amplitude in predictable ways, but in substance changed little.)
Then, not long ago, I got a message from a mutual friend asking if I knew of any way to contact Lana. They pointed me toward a post (now removed) on a subreddit I'd never heard of--a "suicide watch" subreddit. It is apparently a place for people to post their suicidal inclinations and get "non-judgemental peer support ONLY," whatever that means in the context of an anonymous internet forum. Under a pseudonym I recognized from our Instant Messenger days, Lana had posted that after a year of non-stop fighting (again, mostly over sex), her second marriage was coming to an end. All her friends had abandoned her and all she had left were online discussion groups with internet strangers, where she constantly faced accusations of being an awful spouse, awful mother, and all-around awful person. Our mutual friend was seriously concerned for Lana's well-being, but had been unable to get a response via social media, texts, phonecalls, or otherwise.
My first thought was that maybe I could find a way to get in touch with Lana--surely I owed her that much, for the years of friendship we'd enjoyed? Perhaps she was still active on one of her old accounts. But my second thought was that even if I could get in touch with her, there was a good chance I would only make her feel worse, in any number of ways. That put a damper on any inclination I might have felt to make any heroic effort on Lana's behalf, which in turn inspired some self-recrimination. I had to wonder: was my reluctance down to schadenfreude? Am I such a culture warrior that I would turn a blind eye to the suffering of a friend? After all, at minimum I could roll a fresh reddit alt and just... drop Lana an anonymous message of support. Would she see it? Would she care?
I won't tell you what I did, in the end. The point of this post is not to solicit advice, much less to inquire, with fluttering eyelashes, "AITA?" I will say that if my choice had any meaningful impact at all, I've never learned of it. I do have it on good authority that Lana is still alive, her second divorce final, and another same-sex romance underway. I can honestly say that I hope it works out for her.
Boo Outgroup
It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, in a way that is difficult to discuss anywhere but the CW thread of the Motte. Lana is a person, but Lana also instantiates a personality. She is not the only friend I lost from 2015-2017, but the further we get from those days, the more closely their lives come to rhyme. I have a comfortable life, and often I think that's a g-loaded task (so to speak), but by and large these are not stupid people I see, setting fire to their lives in pursuit (or as a result) of ideological purity. I would say "status games" but they don't seem to be accruing any particular status! Swap out "lawyer" for "analyst" or "educator" or similar and much of Lana's story could be told of a dozen of the relationships I've enjoyed and lost. A cousin at a family function, a high school acquaintance on Facebook, a former student dropping by my office; all rolling in the deep, and every time a Bayesian reckoning lands me on "Leftism is both a cause and effect of acute mental illness" I roll to disbelieve, because I know it can't possibly be that simple--can it?
Of course it can't--conservatives top themselves, too, after all! And this is, like, prime culture war fodder, "boo outgroup" of the most aggressive sort. I don't know whether it's "mistake theory" or "conflict theory" to assert that people who believe differently have a disease of the mind, but--
Seven or eight years ago, I had a somewhat surprising interaction with a colleague at a conference. We were having dinner and discussing politics, and it gradually dawned on him that I was not just being entertainingly contrarian--that I was honestly defending some views, mostly libertarian but some downright conservative, which I actually held. His response was presciently forecast in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality:
Well, okay, to be honest, he didn't actually accuse me of being insane. Rather, he refused to believe I am actually conservative. Weirdo contrarian libertarianism he could understand, but conservative? Never. In fairness, probably a lot of conservatives would refuse to believe it, too; my views on speech and sex and God and the like definitely put me on the outs with the diehards, but nevertheless I'm far too pro life, anti woke, pro federalism, anti public employee unions, etc. to ever fit in on the Left; it is a little difficult for me to even make a plausible bid for "centrist" without appending a caveat like "right-leaning." Even so--I simply was not believed.
That conversation got much less surprising by the fourth or fifth time it happened--most recently, just last week. I don't think I'm hiding the ball, here. I don't aggressively share my viewpoint in professional settings but neither do I bother to code switch for the benefit of others. And I have learned, over the years, that people really do just see what they expect to see. I'm a professor; once they know that, they make assumptions about my ideological commitments which even my own direct protestations are insufficient to counter. And this repeatedly inspires people to insist that I am putting on the affectation of conservatism; that I am clearly too smart, too educated, and too obviously sane to possibly see any value in right wing politics. Well, there's a lot I don't like about right wing politics! That's fair to say. Even so, I'm pretty conservative, especially as radical Leftism continues to push "classical liberalism" to the right of the recognized spectrum.
The obvious weak man here is just, you know, reddit commenters in default subs. These days it seems I can scarcely doomscroll for five minutes without encountering an entire thread of "no sane person can be a Republican" and "Republicans are all murderous sadists" and "I used to think tolerance was important, but there is no saving MAGA, we need to round these psychos up and put them out of our misery." Radical left wing violence is a thing! Presumably at least some of these posts are coming from Russian and Chinese botfarms, but most strike me as just the products of American public education.
Is there a forum for progressive cat ladies out there somewhere, where Lana is writing about her old friend, the professor? The one who used to be a mild-mannered contrarian scholar but who was radicalized by Harry Potter and My Little Pony fanfic and now moderates a forum for explicit wrongthink? I feel like, objectively, I've got the preferable outlook; I'm not suicidal, I haven't torched any marital or familial or professional relationships. I feel pretty sane, honestly. But I'm increasingly concerned that (1) I struggle to see sanity in my outgroup and (2) my outgroup struggles to see sanity in me.
In 1922, at the end of the Greco-Turkish War, about 1.2 million Christian Greeks relocated from (what is now) Turkey to (what is now) Greece, and about 400,000 predominantly Muslims relocated the other direction. There was a lot of force, and no small amount of death, involved in the process, but even so, the ethnic cleansing of the region (two regions?) has proven... surprisingly uncontroversial. Mostly forgotten, in fact. The "Cyprus Problem" is downstream from that conflict, of course, but even featuring as it does in the occasional Russian oligarch psychodrama, probably very few Americans have the first clue what a "Cyprus" is, never mind the finer details of the resolution of the Greco-Turkish War.
I do not think the United States is likely to be ideologically partitioned in my lifetime. But I am increasingly concerned about why that is the case. Greenland (population: 55,000) apparently warrants sovereignty and self-rule--but not California? Not Texas? (Not Taiwan? Not Israel? Not Palestine? Not Ukraine?) I think mostly that American citizens, fat on bread and satisfied with our circuses, are unwilling to sacrifice. Actually starting a war with the federal government of the United States would be suicidal, but I don't think the threat of military action is the primary deterrent to schism movements here--at least not yet. Rather, our prosperity is in part the result of our outsized global influence. While far behind China and India, we are nevertheless the third most populous nation in the world, an economic juggernaut despite the recent ascent of various others.
What will happen, if that changes?
What will happen, if it doesn't?
It's a problem for future generations, but at the same time I feel the desire to act, to do something about the rift that I see, to "reach out" and bridge the growing divide somehow--even though, if my actions have any meaningful impact at all, I am unlikely to ever know it. Talking about the problem (as we so often do here) doesn't seem to make it better. Not talking about the problem doesn't seem to make it better. Maybe if I were a billionaire, or a movie star, or a successful politician... but I'm not.
This is an oversimplification (inevitable, perhaps, when discussing Hegel) but Hegelian philosophy is sometimes explained through the metaphor of an acorn. An acorn is not an oak tree; a sprout is not an oak tree; a sapling is not an oak tree. And yet the oak tree is within those things, somehow. If we think of the bronze age as the sprouting of human civilization, and the renaissance as perhaps a sapling, then we begin to grasp the idea of our species progressing toward Hegel's "Absolute." The primary disagreement between Hegelians is whether we are each individually just along for the ride, or whether there is something we can do to accelerate the growth of our collective oak tree toward its final form. I am not much of a Hegel scholar--mostly I am aware of his work in connection with its influence on others, notably Karl Marx--but if I were a Hegelian, I think today I would side with those who suspect we're just along for the ride. Voltaire's Candide suggests we each tend to our own gardens, to not seek influence in the wider world. The older I get, the more I think that is probably good advice. But once Lana had a role to play in my particular garden, and now as a result of her own intolerance of diverse viewpoints, she does not. And, good or bad, inevitable or not--that makes me sad.
When I was a kid, in the 80s, where I lived, Ronald Reagan was the good czar, and all the lingering bad old strife from the 70s was going to be put behind us, because it was all a great misunderstanding, with the government getting way too out of line with the real Americans and needing to be put back in its place. And liberal was a dirty word to tar people with. I didn't understand what had happened, of course, but I could just feel it, overwhelmingly, from all the adults in my life.
As I got older and further from that past, it seemed less and less real, like some sort of giant ridiculous propaganda coup... especially by the Clinton years (New Democrats didn't look anything like what I had been told, right?) And especially by the awfulness of the George W. Bush years. It got really easy to think that all the adults in my life, back in the 80s, had just been misled by propaganda and that era's equivalent of Fox News.
All of which made the 2010s deeply harrowing and shocking for me, especially as I had already steered my adult life in the assumption that much of what I had been told as a kid wasn't true. But early in the 2010s, it dawned on me, watching the mounting personal wreckage of political radicalization from people in my own personal life, especially women of a certain sort, exactly why those adults I had grown up around had loathed the 70s so intensely. "The personal is political" might be an interesting airy political theory, but as a lived practice, it clearly utterly breaks a lot of normal people into quivering, non-functional shards who can't recover from it.
I have a half-sister, twelve years younger than me, who went very much through a similar arc to Lana (I have never been especially close to her). She started out quite conservatively religious. And now she's got three kids, lives in a polycule and her various gendered lovers with her despairing, rather unwilling cuckold husband, has gone down the double mastectomy route, is mainlining T and showing off her beard and armpit hair on social media, and writes borderline suicidal posts from time to time about how the only people who will respond to her at this point are online activist LGBTQ friends, as everyone in her normal life is done with her. I'm probably "misgendering" her here, but I blocked her a while ago on Facebook, so I really only get updates second hand through my sister. And my half-sister has a litany of internet disabilities and conditions, can't leave the bed most days, and has made nasty allegations about several members of her family about abuse in the past, none of which are backed up by any of her many siblings. It's horrible to watch, especially given the children involved. I think she would have had a rocky mental health experience in life no matter what, as it runs in the family. But she's clearly been stewing in social influences that make everything far, far worse, and amplify her hardest tendencies... And I've seen milder versions of this play out the last several years in other cases, too!
It's vaguely interesting that there's this "public" conversation about incels and online radicalization of young guys (which, I mean, sure, there's a plausible discussion there), and then meanwhile, there's this giant elephant in the room.
I think we see this sort of backwards. People who make their politics, religion, or sexuality the center of their personality generally are not emotionally healthy. TBH, I think we have an ongoing mental health crisis that’s manifesting itself through politics.
There used to be a normal way to do politics when I was a kid in the 1980s and 1990s. Sure people had an interest in politics, but it was nothing like today. For one thing, the thought of breaking a friendship over politics was something that didn’t occur to people. You disagreed, even argued, but you were still friends and still did things together. And furthermore, politics was just one thing among several that a person might be interested in. There would be other things, TV shows, sports, cars, art, music, and hobbies that took up most of people’s time and attention. It was a much healthier way to do politics, and frankly made for better politics. When people tune out, it’s possible for the leadership to stop posturing and campaigning and start governing.
If I may reframe this, healthy people do not make politics, religion, or sexuality the center of their personality.
People centering their personality around religion is an old, old phenomenon, and while often seen as annoying, it is very much something that society knows how to deal with.
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I mean I think it’s true of most things. Obsession is a sign of a problem. Most people tend to find a balance between interests, hobbies and life. I think this is part of the impulse behind the JBP advice to “clean your room” before you take on the great issues of the world. If you’re unhealthy, you’ll get obsessed and it takes over everything else, and probably make things worse.
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I'm not positive, but my impression is that this was a conscious turn by really important elite factions in the 80s, though. I don't believe it was "how politics was prior to the 2010s" - it was more like, what politics looked like once the Reagan detente offered up grill-pilling as an option for exhausted voters who were ready to move on from disruption and political struggle. No more fighting over politics - instead, America is great, nationalism is great, Wall Street is great, money and capitalism are great, religion and families are great, no more inflation is great, Hollywood images of peaceful race relations are great, local religious observances instead of national politics is great, Cosby Show instead of All in the Family is great. And especially, Boomers finally leaving their disruptive twenties and settling down to be stable and raise their families is great.
If you go back and read, say, "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, 72" by Hunter S. Thompson, or "Days of Rage" by Bryan Burrough, or really anything about the rise of the New Left in the 70s, there is a whole lot of familiar archetypes, topics, and styles of rhetoric.
I guess at this point I'm coming to believe that breaking the brains of a certain amount of people is an overtly desirable feature, not bug, of certain kinds of political agitation. Making people unreasonable can actually be a really effective strategy for forcing certain kinds of change through, because then powerful leaders can't (by definition) reason with those people, and thus have to give in to demands instead or find some other way of dealing with them. I feel like that's what I've been seeing, at any rate - people who would naturally be somewhat unstable having that massively amplified by forces that appear to be attempting to accentuate exactly those tendencies for a variety of reasons.
I absolutely agree with your prescription about what would be better, I'm just not sure if there's a way to get there from here. I think there were a bunch of factors that made Reagan exactly the right affable messenger for that turn in the 80s for a turn away from politics of a certain sort.
On a personal level, or a community level I think creating and maintaining “politics free zones” is a good idea. It can be anything from a gaming group or hobby group or just a group of friends who meet regularly without allowing political talk. Fostering the same kind of thing in family, friend groups, or business settings.
On a personal level, I think it’s unhealthy to spend more than an hour or two a day thinking about politics. As such after you’ve read that much news, it’s probably a good idea to just go do something else. Read a novel, draw, watch a drama or sports, dance, play a sport, hang out, whatever, but don’t marinate in political news. And I think personally reading news, especially from a good reputable source, is better than watching videos or getting it from social media. Reading is much less likely to be sensationalized or emotional.
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C'mon man, she's family. You don't have to name call like that.
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