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The Guardian: It's time for a new approach to dealing with Trumpy relatives during the holidays
The Guardian - (archived: https://archive.ph/4q64d ) It’s time for a new approach to dealing with Trumpy relatives during the holidays
Jill Filipovic
Tue 24 Dec 2024 06.00 EST
As Donald Trump prepares to enter his second term as president, one thing is conspicuously absent (other than Ivanka): the proliferation of articles about how to handle Trump-voting family members at the holidays.
During Trump’s first term, holiday time was a bonanza for pieces about how liberals could rid their lives of Maga members. Now those pieces are still published, but they seem fewer and farther between, and take a different tone. Instead of focusing on why it’s OK to cut off your Trump-voting family members (although a few do still take that tack), they largely emphasize how to get along, find common values and enjoy the holidays without politics. The narrative eight years ago – that Trump voters are irredeemable and should be marginalized – has given way to pleas for understanding and finding common ground.
There are two ways to read this shift. The first is capitulation and normalization: that liberals are doing exactly the same thing as too many business leaders, reporters and elected officials in treating Trump like any old politician – or, even worse, folding to his demands before he’s even in power and breaking historian Timothy Snyder’s first rule of resisting tyranny (“Do not obey in advance”). In this view, those willing to overlook their Trumpy relatives’ beliefs and choices – choices that do, in fact, imperil American democracy and a great many people around the world – are collaborators with evil.
The second way to read it is, I think, closer to reality: that the Trump coalition is now more diverse, which means that more Americans are tied to a Trump voter, and that the strategy last time around of attempting to shame and marginalize Trump voters clearly didn’t work, and may have only made the problem worse.
Data is still coming in, and exit polls are notoriously unreliable, but early indications suggest that Trump made huge inroads with Latino voters and significant ones with young and Black voters as well; the only voters he seemed to not do better with were white ones. It was perhaps easier to tell a simple story about racism and sexism in 2016 that made it in turn easier to demand a mass purging of Trump-voting (and by definition racist and sexist) family members and friends.
/snip
Jill Filipovic
Tue 24 Dec 2024 06.00 EST
As Donald Trump prepares to enter his second term as president, one thing is conspicuously absent (other than Ivanka): the proliferation of articles about how to handle Trump-voting family members at the holidays.
During Trump’s first term, holiday time was a bonanza for pieces about how liberals could rid their lives of Maga members. Now those pieces are still published, but they seem fewer and farther between, and take a different tone. Instead of focusing on why it’s OK to cut off your Trump-voting family members (although a few do still take that tack), they largely emphasize how to get along, find common values and enjoy the holidays without politics. The narrative eight years ago – that Trump voters are irredeemable and should be marginalized – has given way to pleas for understanding and finding common ground.
There are two ways to read this shift. The first is capitulation and normalization: that liberals are doing exactly the same thing as too many business leaders, reporters and elected officials in treating Trump like any old politician – or, even worse, folding to his demands before he’s even in power and breaking historian Timothy Snyder’s first rule of resisting tyranny (“Do not obey in advance”). In this view, those willing to overlook their Trumpy relatives’ beliefs and choices – choices that do, in fact, imperil American democracy and a great many people around the world – are collaborators with evil.
The second way to read it is, I think, closer to reality: that the Trump coalition is now more diverse, which means that more Americans are tied to a Trump voter, and that the strategy last time around of attempting to shame and marginalize Trump voters clearly didn’t work, and may have only made the problem worse.
Data is still coming in, and exit polls are notoriously unreliable, but early indications suggest that Trump made huge inroads with Latino voters and significant ones with young and Black voters as well; the only voters he seemed to not do better with were white ones. It was perhaps easier to tell a simple story about racism and sexism in 2016 that made it in turn easier to demand a mass purging of Trump-voting (and by definition racist and sexist) family members and friends.
/snip
3 replies
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