Optimism is in the Air
Not to mention assassinations
It wasn’t until 2016 that elections began creeping into our family gatherings. Everyone in my family was fractured. I was Team Hillary, my sister was Team Bernie, and my brother was Team Trump. It seemed to mean so much all of a sudden how we voted because how we voted decided which side of the war we were standing on.
In 2016, we were a family and house divided. It was so bad that some family members did not show up around Thanksgiving, the year Trump won. I was one of them. I sat on my couch instead of spending time with my family. I didn’t want to hear, “I told you so.”
I allowed Trump’s win to also disrupt my mourning of the death of my father as my Bernie-supporting sister, and I screamed about the election with my dad’s dead body not yet cold. I still can’t believe it mattered that much.
I was hoping Trump’s win would shatter the mass delusion of so many on the Left. It has destroyed so much of our culture, our unity, our sense of ourselves. Even when I was a loyal Democrat, I could not go along with hating and shunning Trump supporters. My brother had voted for Trump, after all.
My brother explained to me why he’d voted for Trump. He was a contractor who was being outbid by those who crossed the border illegally. It was killing his business. Only Trump would confront the problem. That sounded reasonable to me and it didn’t mean he was a “bigot.”
Four years after that election, we didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas, thanks to lockdowns. But I can’t imagine what that would have been like.
So this year was the first time since 2016 we’d all been together after a major election. I wasn’t sure what to expect this time. I was worried about how people would treat me now that they all knew I voted for and supported Trump. My mother had said I “went to the dark side,” and I’d already gotten in one screaming match with my older sister a month or so earlier.
There were about 20 people at our Christmas Party. What I noticed wasn’t so much a sense of loss, sadness, or even foreboding about the future now that a “fascist dictator” had won. Instead, there was a lightness. There was unmistakable collective relief. It felt okay to be ourselves for the first time in a very long time.
Some members of my family did the Trump dance and laughed about it. It wasn’t something to hide. It wasn’t the elephant in the room. How odd, I thought, and what a difference from whatever “that” was we all just lived through. Could it be really over?
We were celebrating. We weren’t terrified or paranoid, and we weren’t depressed about the state of the world. My nephew, who lives in Thailand, even said that now that Trump won, he’d spend more time in the US because the new administration supported his industry (crypto).
That’s not to say everyone at our Christmas parties was MAGA. But it didn’t matter who was and who wasn’t or how anyone voted. No one treated me like a pariah.
We stayed away from politics mostly, or at least I did. I didn’t want to get into it about transgender issues or the border. This wasn’t about everyone agreeing on everything, but it was about how the tribalism - at least in real life - has ended.
It wasn’t without weirdness. There was intense adoration and focus on the new hero of the Left, the assassin Luigi Magione, who has been arrested and is now on trial for shooting a healthcare executive. He’s become a hero, especially to women and younger family members.
It made me think of Walter Kirn’s prophecy in his podcast with Matt Taibbi, America This Week, where he said that it was a little too convenient that Mangione had emerged now, in the wake of a shocking, humiliating defeat of the progressive Left. They needed their own populist hero, and they got one.
That made me wonder where all of this is going. It did seem to me like Mangione had given many members of my family a reason to keep the fight alive. It also reminded some of them that they’re the side fighting the good fight against the billionaire oligarch machine. It has birthed a new version of the Bernie movement, but this time with someone much younger and better-looking, one that appeals to Gen Z.
A family member even had Mangione as her screen saver on her phone.
I don’t think she, or anyone in her generation, condones murder. They just need something and someone to believe in that makes them feel something other than hopelessness. I wondered if we’re headed into a new era of political violence not unlike the 1970s.
Even if Charles Manson himself wasn’t driven by ideology, his supporters were convinced he was. That is why it was so easy for them to kill the rich. The Weatherman also believed violence was the only answer to wake people up. Is this the dawn of a new phase in our ongoing war?
One thing seemed clear to me with everyone I spoke with, no matter their politics: everyone was sick of the Left. I could sense that that was their collective relief, even if institutional change won’t come fast enough. That was the uniting force - the “woke” had wrecked everything, especially movies.
But I was happy to be around them and not have all of them hate me. It was nice to see that politics isn’t everything, at least not anymore.
“ I don’t think she, or anyone in her generation, condones murder.”
But that’s exactly what they are doing, by trying to turn him into some kind of hero.
Just as they did with the drug-addled felon George Floyd. How’s that worked out for us?
It is a screwed up mentality bordering on a very dangerous precedent that is not good for anyone, no matter how much lipstick you try to paint on it.
I had Christmas dinner at one of my friend's house. We've been friends for 30 years. He's always been a good Massachusetts liberal. His extended family was there, all New England transplants. I've gotten to know them over the years from holiday gatherings: a couple of lesbians, an uncle that I've watched transition to an aunt over the last 10 years and his/her wife of 30 years (does that make 4 lesbians? kinda confusing), an aged aunt and uncle that are very much hippies, and a smattering of other friends. The dinner conversation did turn to politics eventually. I heard "insurrection" muttered, the trans gentlemen said he and his community were resigned to becoming invisible again, the aged hippy aunt said she was turning off the news and focusing on gardening the next 4 years. The lesbian couple was thankful they were in CA where their rights would not be diminished despite what will surely be Trump's persecution of the gay community. I of course kept my mouth shut, just listened. Overall, there was a general air of resignation. Nobody lingered on politics, the conversation moved on, the high cost of housing, sub-optimal healthcare, the fact that labor cost for my buddy who is a successful restauranteur has gone up 40% in the last 2 years and he is barely hanging on. But the cynical me couldn't help thinking that as a 3rd generation Californian, this is exactly the kind of imported mind-rot that has destroyed our state. And they keep voting for it.