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Political Divide Splits Relationships — and Thanksgiving, Too

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D

Dalek

Member
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/11/1....html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0&referer=

WASHINGTON — Matthew Horn, a software engineer from Boulder, Colo., canceled Christmas plans with his family in Texas. Nancy Sundin, a social worker in Spokane, Wash., has called off Thanksgiving with her mother and brother. Ruth Dorancy, a software designer in Chicago, decided to move her wedding so that her fiancé’s grandmother and aunt, strong Trump supporters from Florida, could not attend.

The election is over, but the repercussions in people’s lives may be just beginning as families across the United States contemplate uncomfortable holidays — or decide to bypass them — and relationships among friends, relatives and spouses are tested across the political divide.

Democrats have dug in their heels, and in some cases are refusing to sit across the table from relatives who voted for President-elect Donald J. Trump, a man they say stands for things they abhor. Many who voted for Mr. Trump say it is the liberals who are to blame for discord, unfairly tarring them with the odious label of “racist” just because they voted for someone else.

“It’s all one big giant contradiction in my eyes,” said Laura Smith, 30, a small-business owner in Massachusetts who was attacked on Facebook by a relative for voting for Mr. Trump. “She’s saying to spread the love,” Ms. Smith said. “But then you’re throwing this feeling of hate toward me, your own family member.”

Many Democrats harbor their own feelings of being under siege.

“It felt like a rejection of everyone who looks like me,” said Ms. Dorancy, 29, a naturalized American who immigrated from Ghana about a decade ago. “It was a message to me that ‘You are not equal in our eyes. You do not deserve a place in our country.’”

So she and her fiancé looked at their guest list and decided to hold their wedding in Italy, a distance too far for the relatives to travel. “I just don’t want them around me on the most important day of my life,” she said.

Some relationships remain intact, of course.

Kate Kingery, a Republican in Denver who sells sporting goods, has kept good relations with her Democratic friends, despite their despondence over the election. One is coming to spend a few days in the mountains with her this week. Ms. Kingery, who grew up on a farm in rural Minnesota, said she sympathized with her Democratic friends’ worries.

“I understand people’s fears, I really do,” she said. She would not say whom she had voted for. She added: “I really don’t think it’s going to be that bad. I don’t think they are going to change gay rights, women’s rights or other people’s rights.”

Conversations on those and other delicate issues can be both important and painful, but the reality of American life is that they are happening ever more rarely. Over the past several decades, the United States has become increasingly segregated by class, with college-educated people marrying, living and socializing apart from less-educated Americans. The result has been that Americans have lost touch with one another, sociologists say, and helps explain why each side is so baffled by the other.

“If you went to Thanksgiving dinner 50 years ago, you’d be very likely to have dinner with people from a different walk of life,” said Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard and the author of “Our Kids,” an investigation of class divisions in America. “Today, there are far fewer people who are different from us around that table.”
Click to expand...

As the cultural divide becomes deeper, fewer Americans cross it.

Misty Bastian, 61, an anthropologist at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., is originally from rural Tennessee. Since serving in the Air Force in the 1970s, she has lived all over the world and earned her Ph.D., two milestones that have set her apart from most of her extended family.

She said that she had sensed a “parting of the political ways” from her family for a long time, but that her support for Hillary Clinton seemed to be “the last nail in the coffin.”

The other day, a cousin who had “Trump proclivities” put a post on Facebook that she described as “all about Trump triumphalism.”

She felt that the post was directed at her and that its message was: “You’re a liberal elitist and I don’t have to pretend now that I have to listen to you.”

Ms. Bastian added: “I feel like I’ve been living with a lot of people wearing masks, who have been hiding their true selves, and now with this vote, their true selves are more apparent.”

She has kept up visits to Tennessee, but now says she has no desire to go back.

“I don’t want to be part of the grand narrative that the ‘liberal elite’ doesn’t get the working class,” she said. “I am from the working class. I’m now pretty solidly middle class. But to my relatives, I’m elite, over-educated and too well read, an alien.”
Click to expand...
 
2

23qwerty

Member
You gotta be racist as hell or remarkably stupid to actually vote for him. Not surprising someone wouldn't want to be around that.
 
JeTmAn81

JeTmAn81

Member
I don't think shutting out your family helps anyone. You should stick around and fight the good fight while at the same time not allowing toxicity to run your life.

23qwerty said:
You gotta be racist as hell or remarkably stupid to actually vote for him. Not surprising someone wouldn't want to be around that.
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure my dad voted for him. He's a doctor, so he's not stupid. He's not a racist either, though he's no fan of illegal immigration.
 
N

NoblesseOblige

Banned
I had already stopped celebrating Thanksgiving but if I hadn't then I'd be picking up OT hours during it this year so I could avoid the garbage politics of some my family.

JeTmAn81 said:
He's not a racist either, though he's no fan of illegal immigration.
Click to expand...

Hmm. Guess we'll just have to take your word on that one!
 
C

Crabernacle

Member
“I understand people’s fears, I really do,” she said. She would not say whom she had voted for. She added: “I really don’t think it’s going to be that bad. I don’t think they are going to change gay rights, women’s rights or other people’s rights.”
Click to expand...

One candidate promised to appoint Supreme Court Justices who would overturn most of those rulings, but I'm sure he was just being ironic. Yeah, I'm going to take a wild guess who she voted for.
 
2

23qwerty

Member
JeTmAn81 said:
I'm pretty sure my dad voted for him. He's a doctor, so he's not stupid. He's not a racist either, though he's no fan of illegal immigration.
Click to expand...

220px-Ben_Carson_by_Skidmore_with_lighting_correction.jpg
 
T

totowhoa

Banned
I'm also missing thanksgiving.

As the white dude in an interracial relationship with a largely rural family... Facebook hasn't been pretty, and I have no interest in seeing them right now.

I know most mean well, but they live in a bubble and lack consideration for others at best.
 
N

NoblesseOblige

Banned
JeTmAn81 said:
Umm. Do you know someone around here who knows my dad better than I do? If he held genuinely racist views, I would know it and I wouldn't say otherwise.
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Hence my saying we'll have to take your word on that one? Regardless of how suspect it may sound (and getting defensive about it just raises it).
 
J

.JayZii

Banned
I'm not sure if I will have this problem with my extended family or not. Getting off of facebook makes everything a surprise!
 
R

RainForce

Banned
Fuck, completely forgot about Thanksgiving. My mom is going to bring up politics, I just know it and it's going to be awful.
 
K

Kthulhu

Member
Dishwalla said:
I love that I don't have this problem in my family.
Click to expand...

I wish I didn't have this problem.

My uncle can't stop bringing up politics at Thanksgiving, but he's an NRA nut that sounds like he listens to Info Wars.

And the whole family listens to him. I had to derail a conversation about every mass shooting being a false flag operation by bringing up that I had subscribed to Amazon Prime.
 
B

BigDes

Member
JeTmAn81 said:
Umm. Do you know someone around here who knows my dad better than I do? If he held genuinely racist views, I would know it and I wouldn't say otherwise.
Click to expand...
Yeah but my Dad is rarely a compelling argument in pretty much any topic.

Unless it is a topic of whose dad would win I a fight.

Then the answer is obviously my dad I mean come on
 
E

EdibleKnife

Member
JeTmAn81 said:
I'm pretty sure my dad voted for him. He's a doctor, so he's not stupid. He's not a racist either, though he's no fan of illegal immigration.
Click to expand...

Well your dad threw Muslims, women, LGBTQ+ peoples, and minority races who are citizens under the bus for the sake of Trump's vague promises about his now half-wall, half-fence.
 
E

echoshifting

Banned
Yeah this hits close to home. We just found out a couple of days ago that my folks invited a couple of hardcore Trump supporters (who are not family) to Thanksgiving. We are still trying to figure out what we are going to do. It's sad that the divide is so deep, because this holiday is supposed to be all about coming together, but deep it is. That is the reality. If politics come up, it is going to get really, really ugly, and I'm not sure that's better than not going.

What I'd like to do is ask my folks if we can just ban politics at least at the dinner table, and if it comes up, get up and walk away. But I'm not sure that's a realistic expectation of our reactions, and my wife is very reluctant to go at all.

Sucks. This is my favorite holiday.
 
H

HvySky

Member
JeTmAn81 said:
I don't think shutting out your family helps anyone. You should stick around and fight the good fight while at the same time not allowing toxicity to run your life.
Click to expand...

No two lives are the same, and a blanket statement like that isn't necessarily true or will apply to everyone. I've distanced myself dramatically from my own family since they outed themselves as Trump supporters and just all around kinda racists. I feel better now than I have the past 20 years. "Shutting out" is a strong way to describe it, but sometimes space can do a whole lot of good, permanent (foreseeable) or temporary.

Planning on volunteering on Thanksgiving and Christmas instead of the usual family dinners.
 
prag16

prag16

Banned
23qwerty said:
You gotta be racist as hell or remarkably stupid to actually vote for him. Not surprising someone wouldn't want to be around that.
Click to expand...

Knock it off with this nonsense. I know several Trump voters who are neither stupid nor racist. Spend some time outside the echo chamber. The more you call people racist who aren't, the less impact you'll have when trying to stand against actual racists.
 
D

Dryk

Member
Crabernacle said:
One candidate promised to appoint Supreme Court Justices who would overturn most of those rulings, but I'm sure he was just being ironic. Yeah, I'm going to take a wild guess who she voted for.
Click to expand...
"I don't think Republicans are going to keep doing the things they've been doing for decades now that they have control of all three branches of government"

COME ON
 
W

WhiteRabbitEXE

Member
JeTmAn81 said:
I'm pretty sure my dad voted for him. He's a doctor, so he's not stupid. He's not a racist either, though he's no fan of illegal immigration.
Click to expand...

I'm sure your dad is a generally swell guy and he loves you and you love him.

But the absolute literal best case scenario is that your dad was remarkably ignorant of who and what his vote supported, to an extraordinary extent. The next best scenario? Your dad, while not personally endorsing the hateful, racist, sexist, Islamophobic, homophobic, and generally bigoted positions Trump and his camp represents, is willing to condone them.

There are no better alternatives.
 
D

Dalek

Member
echoshifting said:
Yeah this hits close to home. We just found out a couple of days ago that my folks invited a couple of hardcore Trump supporters (who are not family) to Thanksgiving. We are still trying to figure out what we are going to do. It's sad that the divide is so deep, because this holiday is supposed to be all about coming together, but deep it is. That is the reality. If politics come up, it is going to get really, really ugly, and I'm not sure that's better than not going.

What I'd like to do is ask my folks if we can just ban politics at least at the dinner table, and if it comes up, get up and walk away. But I'm not sure that's a realistic expectation of our reactions, and my wife is very reluctant to go at all.

Sucks. This is my favorite holiday.
Click to expand...

It's my favorite too. But my wife's family insists on bringing up Republican stuff at every turn.
 
N

NoblesseOblige

Banned
prag16 said:
Knock it off with this nonsense. I know several Trump voters who are neither stupid nor racist. Spend some time outside the echo chamber. The more you call people racist who aren't, the less impact you'll have when trying to stand against actual racists.
Click to expand...

I'm sure they're not stupid or racist to you, but that doesn't mean they can't be racist or stupid!
 
E

EdibleKnife

Member
prag16 said:
Knock it off with this nonsense. I know several Trump voters who are neither stupid nor racist. Spend some time outside the echo chamber. The more you call people racist who aren't, the less impact you'll have when trying to stand against actual racists.
Click to expand...

You're right. Maybe they're not "racist" as you'd like to classify it, but supporting it is condoning it no matter how much people would like to deny it. Supporting Trump when the xenophobia and racism within his party was known means condoning it.
 
A

Alucrid

Banned
“I understand people’s fears, I really do,” she said. She would not say whom she had voted for. She added: “I really don’t think it’s going to be that bad. I don’t think they are going to change gay rights, women’s rights or other people’s rights.”
Click to expand...

hmm
 
K

Kthulhu

Member
WhiteRabbitEXE said:
I'm sure your dad is a generally swell guy and he loves you and you love him.

But the absolute literal best case scenario is that your dad was remarkably ignorant of who and what his vote supported. The next best scenario? Your dad, while not personally endorsing the hateful and racist positions Trump represents, he's willing to condone it.
Click to expand...

You'd be surprised how many people are like this. Pretty much every Trump support I know is like this. That or they have been conditioned to hate Hillary so much, that they see his tangerine ass as the lesser evil.
 
T

The Right Deal

Banned
Me and my girlfriend attended an eight-person dinner with her very conservative family the other night. We were sat in a large booth and I was dead center. Her dad loves bringing up politics. It was one of the most uncomfortable situations I've ever been in and I'm really not looking forward to Thanksgiving with my right-leaning family
 
J

- J - D -

Member
My mom actually called me and said that maybe me, my gf, my sister and her fiance shouldn't come home for Thanksgiving this year because she's worried we'll verbally attack the Trump supporters in our extended family (on my step-dad's side) who always come to our big family Thanksgiving gathering every year.

I think maybe she's right. It's not like I need another excuse not to see my step-dad's family and I know for certain things will get really heated once discussions inevitably turn to politics. It's just too raw right now -- too close.
 
H

hao chi

Member
I'm really glad that none of my friends or family members voted for Trump that I know of. My mom is a Republican, but even she didn't vote for him, and admitted to me that Hillary would probably be a better president.
 
M

MogCakes

Member
Luckily for me, my friends and family are all center-left leaning. My mother was particularly devastated by the election result, being a die-hard Hillary supporter.
 
K

Kyuur

Member
prag16 said:
Knock it off with this nonsense. I know several Trump voters who are neither stupid nor racist. Spend some time outside the echo chamber. The more you call people racist who aren't, the less impact you'll have when trying to stand against actual racists.
Click to expand...

I always wonder when posts like this come up; what is an 'actual' racist? Do you understand that you don't have to be outwardly hostile to minorities in order to be racist? That you can ultimately have good intentions but still be racist?
 
Mistake

Mistake

Member
prag16 said:
Knock it off with this nonsense. I know several Trump voters who are neither stupid nor racist. Spend some time outside the echo chamber. The more you call people racist who aren't, the less impact you'll have when trying to stand against actual racists.
Click to expand...
Some of my closest friends voted for him, and I've known them most of my life. I don't consider them dumb by any means, and I understand their reasons for what they did. It's just that their global perspective is different from mine. Will that affect our relationship in any way? Hell no
 
B

besada

Banned
My wife decided to skip our traditional Thanksgiving with her parents because she couldn't stand the idea of fighting about Trump with them. So I don't have to go, which is the best silver lining for this whole thing I've run across so far. One year without bland food and tedium.
 
E

echoshifting

Banned
Kyuur said:
I always wonder when posts like this come up; what is an 'actual' racist is? Do you understand that you don't have to be outwardly hostile to minorities in order to be racist? That you can ultimately have good intentions but still be racist?
Click to expand...

Pretty much. Caring about the second amendment, or the supreme court, or what-the-hell-ever more than the rights of minorities, women and other marginalized groups is racist, sexist and bigoted, period. Passivity is bigotry sometimes.
 
M

Massive Duck. C.M.

Banned
“I don’t want to be part of the grand narrative that the ‘liberal elite’ doesn’t get the working class,” she said. “I am from the working class. I’m now pretty solidly middle class. But to my relatives, I’m elite, over-educated and too well read, an alien.”
Click to expand...

This is the thing that gets me the most. When people say we're being too mean to working class people who voted for Trump and that they should be reached out to and educated, what do they think the end result will be? If you come up in an echo chamber of rejecting facts and then climb out of it or are brought out, you'll have more disdain for it and rightfully so. It's easy to understand why people do what they do; it doesn't mean you have to shrug your shoulders at it.

I don't even deny the idea that there's a liberal echo chamber too but it's a lot closer to reality. If your main news source has a "Black Crime" tab then you can eat a dick.
 
R

ryutaro's mama

Member
JeTmAn81 said:
I'm pretty sure my dad voted for him. He's a doctor, so he's not stupid. He's not a racist either, though he's no fan of illegal immigration.
Click to expand...

But it is safe to say that for your smart dad, the candidate he voted for being a racist POS wasn't a deal breaker for him.
 
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