Burning Question Among Liberals: Should You Ostracize Your MAGA Relatives?

Do you ever get the feeling that liberals are desperate to keep living in the Truman Show?

At the end of that movie, Jim Carrey’s character was offered the chance to remain in his hermetically sealed but entirely fake world, and he chose to escape to reality. He took the metaphorical red pill that Neo did in The Matrix–choosing reality over fantasy.

Liberals choose the blue pill–to remain in their illusory world constructed by the Pravda Media–NPR, The Atlantic, The New York Times, CNN, and all the rest of what Ed calls “Regime Media.”

I got to thinking about this–again–after reading two different stories about whether liberals should shun their Trump-supporting friends and family. One in The New York Times, the other in New York Magazine. (I wonder why New York, a Bill de Blasio, AOC, and Zohran Mamdani-led city).

In the Times essay, David Litt reluctantly concludes that his shunning of a conservative relative was counterproductive–not that it was wrong, but that separating ourselves into different worlds wasn’t such a great idea. He had been doing so for more than a decade, so the impulse was there, but it turns out that having opinions different from oneself doesn’t make one evil. Litt hasn’t taken the red pill, but he is becoming reconciled to the fact that not everybody is just like him.

The New York Magazine essay, written of course by an AWFL named Sarah Jones, concludes the opposite. She is a big fan of the bubble, as are, I believe, most liberals. These are people who believe NPR is objective–totally nonpartisan!–and that anybody who supports Trump is an ogre who should be shunned.

His defense of “neutral ground” is a profoundly liberal argument, and it is reminiscent of Barack Obama in particular. After a gunman nearly assassinated Gabrielle Giffords in 2011, President Obama blamed “discourse” for the tragedy, in part. The nation was “too polarized,” he said, and “we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do.” So much has happened since then — like the rise of MAGA and a resurgent far right that has killed and will probably kill again — and somehow we’re still talking about discourse. The 2009 beer summit lives on, at least in Litt’s world; the rest of us are moving on. I suspect that Shannon Hill’s son knows what I learned years ago, which is that neutral ground does not exist. Not in a family, or in a friendship, or anywhere else. A human being cannot step into some magical circle and cease to be who they are.

Instagram therapists won’t help you navigate your most fraught relationships — but neither can Litt or commentators like him. Sometimes the act of knowing a person leaves you with no choice but to move on without them. If my parents liked Alligator Alcatraz, I’d no longer speak to them. If they were rude to my LGBT friends, I’d block their numbers. Though shunning won’t work as a political strategy, there are still natural consequences for the way we speak and behave. It’s good, actually, to have values and draw lines accordingly, even if there’s a chance someone will overcorrect. Politics never stopped at the family front door. Why pretend otherwise?

Jones is, above all, incurious about why others think what they do. She knows exactly why people think what they do–everybody in her bubble does–and she thinks that she knows the world outside of New York. She has a good job, is insulated from the consequences of her opinions, and looks out at the rioters who are chasing down Jews and thinks “MAGA is violent.”

She lives in a world where the majority–yes, the MAJORITY–of Democrats and 70% of people who consider themselves liberal think that killing Donald Trump would be justified, and sees MAGA as murderous.

The bubble is comfortable for her. Government spending is compassionate, censorship is necessary to keep the hoi polloi from getting uppity, and NPR is reality.

Perhaps living in a bubble–in bubble wrap, really–is comforting. I wouldn’t know, because conservatives live steeped in a world where every elite institution calls us an existential threat, Nazis, racists, and during COVID literally wanted to put us in concentration camps and take away our children.

We don’t have the luxury of living in a bubble, and many of us consciously chose to take the red pill. We did so for many reasons, of course, but unlike Jones I see things like this and am appalled.