By The Tartan Board
It was a riotous all-staff meeting this Monday, as Tartan editors and staff writers regaled one another with anecdotes about the crazy opinions that Uncle Toby and Grandma Mildred shared at the Thanksgiving table. Though your Forum editor might hail from a liberal suburb of New York and have family members who only produce good takes (where do you think he gets them from?), our editorial board hails from a diverse background that ranges from other liberal suburbs of New York to decidedly conservative small towns in red states. After takings turns one-upping each other’s stories at this wholly fictionalized all-staff meeting, we decided to ask you, the reader, what bad takes you heard from your own kin.
With an explosive take on white privilege, we have from someone’s father: “Again with this ‘born into privilege’ nonsense. You know white men were on the factory lines too.” Surely the scholars on the matter are quaking in their boots, realizing that their decades of theory and sociological study failed to account for working-class white men. They really should get on that.
Another respondent’s relative described Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce as “that liberal idiot who’s dating mr vaccine.” While we admonish those who would condemn Kelce for promoting the safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine, we ask this person if they truly think that an “idiot” could have written “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version).”
But it wasn’t all conservative relatives airing out their opinions over the gravy and stuffing. One respondent’s aunt proclaimed, in what seems to be a well-intentioned but slightly misled attempt at allyship, that “I hope one of my kids turns out to be gay.” No pressure on this person’s cousins.
And finally, in a submission that was most likely intended to hurt our feelings personally, we learned that “grandpa Farman said that the tartan was the worst newspaper.” At least have the decency to capitalize our name.
While we jest and have our “ha-ha!”s over the silly things we hear from our regressively-inclined family, it’s interesting to consider the trope of the Thanksgiving dinner political argument. While there has certainly always been ideological tension between young and old, this trope has recently begun to truly cement itself in our culture. Are our older relatives really becoming more argumentative and radical?
The conversation around political radicalization sometimes seems to focus disproportionately on the young, white, male, and teenaged; likewise, the means of radicalization we focus on are the social media platforms used by young people, like Instagram and TikTok. This is absolutely a problem, to the extent that teachers have noticed Andrew Tate’s rhetoric seeping into middle school classrooms. But just as the young and impressionable fall prey to radical rhetoric, so do the old and scared.
The vast majority of Facebook users were born before the turn of the millennium, with a paltry 21.5 percent of the site’s U.S. users being under the age of 25. It’s an old-people website. It was also instrumental in allowing people to come together and plan Jan. 6. The very mechanics of their site encourage users to engage with radical ideology, and the platform knows it. According to the Washington Post, “The company rejected its own Oversight Board’s recommendation that it study how its policies contributed to the violence” on Jan. 6.
The phenomenon of older people in our country being radicalized has caught the attention of researchers, particularly because of how distinctly old the Jan. 6 rioters seemed to be. Politically-motivated violence, property destruction, and crime is no longer the purview of the teenagers overturning a cop car at a protest. On the right wing, our aunts, uncles, and parents are breaking and destroying the instruments of government.
So you’re not crazy if you feel like your Uncle Toby is actually getting more radical. The data shows that it really might be true. So what the hell are we supposed to do about this?
The hyper-compassionate answer would, “continue to love and support your family members, because cutting them off could just make them more isolated and radical.” This is certainly true, and is certainly possible if you have infinite empathy. But sometimes, it’s not fair to expect people to do that. Sometimes, your cranky relative who watches Fox News is aggressively homophobic and transphobic, and maybe you’re queer and you’d rather not be involved in their life anymore. Maybe their ideas are so radical that you can’t talk about anything without it devolving into argument.
If you have a family member who seems to get more conservative every Thanskgiving and increasingly unpleasant to talk with, you’re not going to convince them of anything over a single dinner. You probably won’t convince them of anything ever, actually. If it’s feasible for you, the only thing you can really do is to make sure they know you will still support them if necessary. Sometimes, people fall deeper into ideological rabbit holes because they’ve lost their community and family ties — ties which they lost in the first place because of their extremism. It’s a vicious cycle that some never leave because they know that their nieces, nephews, and kids don’t want to talk with them anymore. Sometimes, the only way out is further down the rabbit hole. But if they know they still have someone who cares about them, that might just make all the difference.
Anyways, can you please pass the green beans?
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