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Former Obama speechwriter David Litt penned an opinion piece for the New York Times recently in which he posed the insufferably smug question to his fellow progressives, “Is It Time to Stop Snubbing Your Right-Wing Family?” Even before reading the article, I wanted to shout the obvious answer: It was never time to snub your right-wing family.
Litt, 38, whose article coincidentally ties in with his recently published book It’s Only Drowning: A True Story of Learning to Surf and the Search for Common Ground, writes in a very, self-satisfied tone about his own journey from self-righteously shunning his brother-in-law – a Right-wing, COVID vaccine skeptic – to patting himself on the back for engaging in an “unlikely friendship” with him. The piece fairly reeks of Left-wing elitism:
I met Matt Kappler in 2012, and it was immediately clear we had nothing in common. He lifted weights to death metal; I jogged to Sondheim. I was one of President Barack Obama’s speechwriters and had an Ivy League degree; he was a huge Joe Rogan fan and went on to get his electrician’s license.
My God, how did Litt tolerate being in the same family as this embarrassing rube Matt? It’s a testament to his progressive inclusiveness that he didn’t hurl a glass of Chablis at the knuckle-dragging Neanderthal, who probably doesn’t even have his own personal pronouns.
“Then the pandemic hit,” Litt explains,
and our preferences began to feel like more than differences in taste. We were on opposite sides of a cultural civil war. The deepest divide was vaccination. I wasn’t shocked when Matt didn’t get the Covid shot. But I was baffled. Turning down a vaccine during a pandemic seemed like a rejection of science and self-preservation. It felt like he was tearing up the social contract that, until that point, I’d imagined we shared.
“Had Matt been a friend rather than a family member, I probably would have cut off contact completely,” Litt admits [emphasis added]. So Litt turned frosty with Matt – for strategic, not personal reasons, mind you: “Being unfriendly to people who turned down the vaccine felt like the right thing to do. How else could we motivate them to mend their ways?”
This is so typically progressive: the condescending compulsion to engineer a shift in their political opponents’ morality, not by compelling them through rational debate, but by publicly and privately shaming them.
Litt then goes on to cite, as support for his strategy, articles in USA Today and the Los Angeles Times cruelly calling for shunning the “vaccine hesitant” and even mocking their deaths.
Shunning as a form of accountability goes back millenniums [sic]. In ancient Athens, a citizen deemed a threat to state stability could be “ostracized” — cast out of society for a decade. For much of history, banishment was considered so severe that it substituted for capital punishment. The whole point of Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter was to show she had violated norms — and to discourage others from doing so.
Litt then claims falsely that the Right-wingers he helped exile from society turned to “an alternate universe full of grievance peddlers and conspiracy theorists who thrived on stories of victimized conservatives.” In fact, it was conservatives who clung to the truth about the vaccine and the pandemic lockdowns in the face of overwhelming totalitarian abuse, not only from power-mad politicians but from bullying, conformist toadies in their own families like David Litt.
Slowly, Litt began to wonder if the self-righteous banishing he participated in might have been ineffective and counterproductive – not wrong, just not working. He began to feel that the downside was that “ostracism might just hurt the ostracizer more than the ostracizee.”
What changed his mind was that he took up surfing and reluctantly began hanging out with Matt because he was the only other surfer Litt knew. Gradually Litt discovered that in tiny ways they had some common ground; Matt was even surprisingly congenial – for a Nazi who probably doesn’t even believe in climate change.
“Matt and I remain very different,” Litt writes, “yet we’ve reached what is, in today’s America, a radical conclusion: We don’t always approve of each other’s choices, but we like each other.” Sorry to burst your bubble, David, but that radical conclusion is a conservative position: that Americans don’t have to agree on everything and that politics doesn’t have to divide us. We can all just get along. It’s not the Right that demands absolute ideological conformity; it’s your party.
Litt takes credit for helping Matt become more open-minded; it doesn’t occur to him that Matt was already more open-minded than Litt, who didn’t believe that was possible in conservatives until he got to know one.
“When I share stories about surfing with my brother-in-law,” Litt continues, some of his fellow progressives confess they’re searching for a way to repair friendships “in the Trump era.”
“My advice is always the same,” Litt concludes – keep the door open:
Our differences are meaningful, but allowing them to mean everything is part of how we ended up here. When we cut off contacts, or let algorithms sort us into warring factions, we forget that not so long ago, we used to have things to talk about that didn’t involve politics. Shunning plays into the hands of demagogues, making it easier for them to divide us and even, in some cases, to incite violence.
As you can see, throughout the article Litt’s worldview remains progressive: that it was Trump and Right-wingers who forced this state of affairs; that they are the ones who are close-minded and in the wrong; that they are the grievance peddlers, conspiracy theorists, and demagogues inciting violence; that Trump is the demagogue dividing us and inciting violence.
Pure projection. In fact, as the Left demonstrates every day, the opposite is true on every count. It was progressives who politicized every facet of our lives in order to divide us into warring camps. It was progressives – who never let a crisis go to waste – that seized upon the pandemic as an opportunity to marginalize the vaccine skeptics and lock down the population (except for BLM rioters, Antifa thugs, and Gavin Newsom’s winery guests) with totalitarian measures; it is progressives who cling with a death grip to their reality-denying ideology; it is progressives who relentlessly peddle victimhood and dismiss inconvenient truths as conspiracy theories; and it was and continues to be progressive leaders who rabble-rouse and incite their followers to political violence, justifying it as “resistance.”
Your condescending gesture of reconciliation is too little, too late, New York Times. Throughout the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations you Leftists demonized us and encouraged our own family members to cut us out of their lives. To this day you don’t regret it, much less apologize for it. Reconciliation begins with sincerely seeking forgiveness, and progressives are incapable of that. You showed your true colors, and we don’t need or want you back.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior