CRUISING THE ROAD TO TOLERANCE WITH MY MAGA COUSIN

I’d like you to meet my cousin Jaime. Frequent visitors to this space may have stumbled upon his occasional retorts (here and here) on my leftist pontifications. Jaime is a God fearin’, gun totin’, Trump lovin’ kind of guy.  If Hillary Clinton had ever met him, she would have quickly certified him as one of the deplorables. And Jaime would have worn it as a badge of honor.  

Well, Madam Secretary, I know Jaime Nelson.  We grew up together. Our fathers were brothers, and our families are close. Jaime Nelson is no deplorable. He’s a good man with a gruff exterior and a big heart. He is also a passionate supporter of Donald Trump and his policies, an agenda that many of us view as anathema to all that we hold dear.

This essay is neither a tribute nor a rebuttal to my cousin.  It’s an examination of a widening and dangerous fault line in our current combustible political culture. How do we – or, even, should we – maintain personal and familial connections with those whose world view so diametrically conflicts with our core values. 

We have never had a moment quite like this one.  The Gore-Bush debacle in 2000 was hard-fought, but did little or no permanent damage to family relationships. The reaction to Obama in 2008 was more visceral. Yet, as Republican pollster Frank Lutz told the New York Times, “With Obama, people hated him or people loved him. But you weren’t evil for how you felt.”  In recent polling, Lutz found that at least a third of those questioned said they had stopped talking to a friend or family member as a result of disagreement over Trump.

Carolyn Lukensmeyer is the director of the National Institute for Civil Discourse, a conflict resolution consultancy. During the 2012 presidential election, she said her outfit “got not a single message from anybody in the country about incivility.” Once Trump was elected, however, she said her business skyrocketed with pleas for help from clergy members, corporate CEOs and other organization leaders whose constituencies were at each other’s throats. “This is now deep in our homes, deep in our neighborhoods, deep in our places of worship and deep in our workplaces,” Lukensmeyer told a reporter. “It really is a virus.”

Unfortunately, there is no easy vaccine for this virus.  The divide over Trump and his policies cuts deeply through the bone and into the core of our marrow.  To many of us, Trumpism is a vile form of hatred, of women, of racial and ethnic minorities, of the LGBTQ community and others at the margins of our society. Jaime and his fellow Trumpers, however, see themselves marginalized by the political establishment. They have a sense of being left behind by a system that has little regard for native-born American white people who worked hard, only to be looked down upon and shoved aside by immigrants and diversity programs. They feel hated and ridiculed by many of us who resist Trump and his politics of hate and ridicule.

Here is the question: Can we passionately oppose Trumpism and still maintain a connection with the MAGA people in our lives?  Before answering, let me make this even tougher by using Cousin Jaime as an example. Here are two of his recent Facebook posts, both generated by a conservative site.  The first is a picture of an enthused and energetic Beto O’Rourke. The copy reads: “Obama: Now Available In Vanilla”.  Then there’s a picture of Obama and Hillary Clinton embracing under this heading: “This is the only time you will ever see a Muslim hugging a pig.”

Pretty vile, right? They go against everything we bleeding heart liberals believe in.  Why not hit the unfriend button?  Yet, after knowing Jaime for nearly 60 years, I have much more data about who this guy is. He is more than his Facebook page. He has showered my family with repeated acts of kindness over the years.  He’s also posted anti-bullying messages on Facebook, along with this sage piece of advice, attached for unknown reasons, to a picture of John Wayne: “Just because I disagree with you doesn’t mean I hate you. We need to relearn that in our society.”

Yes, I cringe a bit at a few of his political posts, just as I do with some posted by fellow liberals. Like this one: “At this point, if you still support Trump you are either rich, racist or just plain stupid.”  Or this one: “Why I am not a Republican: I don’t hate women. I don’t hate minorities. I don’t hate the poor. I don’t hate gay people. I’m not greedy and I’m not a traitor.”

As for the question posed a few paragraphs ago, the answer is yes, I believe it is possible – and necessary – for us to maintain personal and family connections with those whose politics we abhor.  The basic tenets of liberalism are based on the values of treating people with kindness, dignity and respect.  One of the main reasons Trump drives us up the wall is that he dehumanizes large groups of people.  He sees Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers. He wants to ban all Muslims and black and brown people from “shithole countries.”  Writing friends and family members off on the basis that all Trump supporters are stupid or racist is playing a card from our opponent’s hand.

Obviously, every situation is different. I’m not sure I could sit down at the dinner table with a relative who donned a white hood and carried a tiki torch through the streets of Charlottesville chanting “Jews will not replace us.”  But that’s not everyone in MAGA World.  I suspect Cousin Jaime disagrees with at least 90 percent of everything I have written in this space. Yet, his comments have always been directed at the substance of my content, never an attack on me. The fact that we can vehemently disagree about Trump but still care for each other is a rare ray of hope at a time of intense division and animosity.

In another context, we of the progressive persuasion, have stood steadfast in our belief that our country should build bridges to the world rather than wall ourselves off from it. Regardless of what happens in 2020, the eventual healing process for this virus of division is going to take a long time. Between now and then, we need bridges, not walls, in our relationships with those on the other side of this political divide. As my cousin says, we can choose to disagree without hatred.  For the sake of our country, our families and our own quality of life, that’s a far, far better road to follow.