Thanksgiving Dinner during election season can often be a family affair fraught with tension and heavy silences. Out of nowhere, a comment about a certain candidate or political party can raise unexpected hackles that can derail even the best planned holiday meal. While often uncomfortable, these holiday exchanges represent an American tradition of political discourse that is slowly dying out in an era of politicized media and electoral polarization.
That tradition, you ask? Why, viewing the other side of the political spectrum as real people, just like you. Nothing brings home the human reality of the other side as much as passing the stuffing to, if not pasting the stuffing out of, a family member whose political worldview is completely at odds with your own.
Take my Thanksgiving, for instance. This past Thursday I had the wonderful opportunity to break bread with my aunt and uncle’s family and friends on my father’s side in their beautiful Texas home located a few hours east of Dallas. My uncle … let’s call him “Jim” … is a rock-ribbed conservative of the old school variety you only rarely find outside the American South. In my eyes, he is not just from Texas, but he IS Texas – a sort of living embodiment of an entire state and state of mind that is one part honor, one part grit and one part hard work
As a Texas version of Dos Equis’ “Most Interesting Man in the World,” he is a man most men would admire if they knew him and would hope their sons grow up to be like if they don’t – a patriotic Vietnam veteran, a wildly successful telecommunications engineer and, by all accounts, a wonderful husband, father and grandfather. Yet, his political beliefs leave me baffled and disconcerted. Fox News is on continuously and both my aunt and uncle have confessed their admiration for Glenn Beck. How is this possible?
Turning to my aunt, my father’s sister, she is a retired nurse who has spent her entire working life – and much of her retirement as well – caring for others. She has a deep commitment to hard work, compassion and treating others with respect and dignity. Her deep Christian faith is not the faith of doctrines and creeds, but of actions and words that believe that helping others is why we are here on Earth. She is, in many ways, the closest thing to a living saint that I have met. How she can be a conservative, I do not fathom.
The values of Uncle “Jim” and Aunt “Jill” are in turn reflected in their rather remarkable daughter – my cousin “Kathleen.” Kathleen followed her mother into nursing and married a local youth pastor and, together, as husband and wife, they spend a great deal of their time caring not just for their two beautiful daughters, but for all the younger members of their church’s flock. Thanksgiving food drives? They’ll be there. Mission trips to Mexico and Native American reservations in North Dakota? They’ll be there. Will they take a late night text from a worried father of a troubled youth? Of course they will. As with my aunt, their Christianity is reflected in actions and deeds, not doctrines half remembered from Sunday services or campaign slogans. Theirs is a living, empathic faith I deeply admire.
Branching out
In all, I find the Texas branch of my extended family a remarkable bunch. What makes them most interesting, however, is the clues they give as to why they hold the political beliefs they do. How can they possibly believe the tripe that passes for American conservatism these days? They aren’t daft. Indeed, they are all educated, well-read and worldly in ways I never will be. So what makes them tick, politically speaking?
For one, in the stories they’ve related and the examples in their lives they’ve pointed to, it is clear that hard work, above all else, is valued and respected. People who don’t work are simply not regarded with the same respect as those who work even the lowest of jobs. As people who have worked hard themselves and have gotten ahead by dint of what they believe to be their own efforts, they resent “giveaways” to people who have not worked for it.
While this animus can be found in everyone, liberal or conservative, it is unclear to me why this hostility focuses on minorities and the poor and not the barons on Wall Street who have, literally, robbed this country blind. Once, while visiting an East Texas oil museum, my uncle admiringly called H.L. Hunt – a Texas oil millionaire who built his empire on the back of fraudulent real estate transactions – “a thief.” Success, it would seem, washes away sin and somehow sanctifies ill-gotten wealth.
In another exchange, Uncle Jim commented negatively upon the willingness of large corporations to shift factory work overseas to authoritarian countries like China. When I pointed out it was natural for profit-seeking companies in a competitive market to reduce costs in all ways possible, often at the expense of both workers and consumers, he argued back that the company he worked for – GTE – was a “good” company that did neither. Companies only act badly, he maintained, when corporate bean counters take over or the government intervene.
The irony, of course, is that GTE was part of the infamous “Bell System” – the private telecommunications monopoly that had a stranglehold on the U.S. telephone system for much of the 20th century. GTE was “good,” in other words, because it didn’t have to compete. When the system was finally busted up by a combination of government antitrust intervention and technological change that favored new entrants into the field of telecommunications, however, GTE and its sister bell company Bell Atlantic eventually merged together to form Verizon and began to act as ruthlessly as any other competitive company. Goodness, it turns out, is not an inherent part of capitalism or even capitalists, but of the system of rules and market structure they operate under.
I could point out more instances of cognitive dissonance like this over and over again, of course, but you get the point. Conservatives, I have learned, have created a worldview in which their preferred institutions, values and policy preferences are always correct, no matter what. Nuance and the detail of circumstances are not relevant. Indeed, the contrasting details I provided were likely the only source of alternative information my uncle had, given that talk radio and Fox News were constantly reinforcing his worldview. He was, like many conservatives, stuck firmly inside the bubble.
This bubble is why family get-togethers, over the holidays or otherwise, are so important. For progressives, it is an opportunity to get out among conservatives to see what the latest myths percolating among the right-wing grassroots consists of. It also gives progressives the opportunity to poke holes, ever so gently, into the bubble so that a few more facts trickle in. It also serves to remind us that our opposites on the political spectrum are people, too, family even. So, enjoy the holiday political discussions! If all goes well, everyone will get too sleepy from all the turkey before things get to acrimonious. If not, well, there is always football and pumpkin pie to serve as a distraction.