Our Inside-Out Politics

I ’m more sanguine than a lot of columnists when it comes to the question, “How divided are we?” In the George W. Bush years, I started to play a little game, which is to pretend people are drunk when they start talking about politics. “Pay him no mind,” I tell myself these days, a hundred times a year, “He just saw a Trump tweet, so he may as well have just downed six shots of Patrón.” Even among the highly intelligent, when the political circuits of their brains get lit up, they tend to say the stupidest things, especially on Facebook. (Which is why I hardly ever look at Facebook. Some sort of logic-destroying algorithm is at work there.) At dinner parties, when people contend that, say, our democracy is imperiled because the Supreme Court ruled that the government can’t ban books and movies in election seasons, I just sit silently and wait for people to get the craziness out of their system.

Political writers who submit their ideas to the broad public for scrutiny tend to be a bit better at thinking about politics than those who merely share their thoughts with friends, but sometimes they too seem to find their cranial oxygen supply going a bit thin as they turn purple in the face, or at least in their prose. For quite a few years now, the most hysterical and extreme columnists who use the least temperate language and make the wildest predictions have gotten caught up in a perverse-incentives feedback loop. The louder they scream, the more attention they get. I tend not to take these people all that seriously either; columnists have been warning about a theocratic takeover of America since the Reagan era, and when that fear became inoperative in the notably secular Trump years, they simply swapped in warnings about Nazis where they used to fret about evangelicals.

Shrugging at such doomy talk, I part company with many on both the left and right when I say that I don’t see anything like a new Civil War, a serious secession movement, or even what President Biden amorphously dubs an “uncivil war.” (Is that better or worse than a civil war?) People get very, very excited about political developments they don’t like, but then they get used to them more quickly than they would have guessed. Remember when “rushing through” the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court before the election was going to cause a national crisis, rioting in the streets, dogs and cats living together? She was confirmed a little over 100 days ago. (And holding back her confirmation vote until the new 50–50 Senate was seated would not exactly have had a calming effect.)

The many dire warnings that the improvised cosplay rioting of January 6 would prove to be “just the beginning” of a season of well-organized right-wing attacks roaring through every state capital and Washington, D.C., also look a bit overstated at the moment. We were breathlessly warned about a “wave of violence” in January that would crest around the inauguration and continue for years. I’m still struggling to grasp the logic of paranoia that runs so deep that a famously progressive company, Starbucks, shut down its Manhattan locations on the Sunday before Biden’s inauguration in anticipation of a crippling pro-Trump uprising in a county where you would have difficulty finding enough Trump supporters to fill a bus.

My sunny view is that most people are eager to take a breather from politics for 18 months or so and that the innovations of our pharmaceutical companies will, despite the gross incompetence of governments distributing their fruits, break the back of the pandemic in the next 90 days, creating a sense of relief and goodwill that will nudge politics back towards its proper place on the periphery rather than at the center of the American consciousness.

Still, there are moments that make me wonder whether the Trump-related craziness (among both his acolytes and enemies) is more enduring than I’d hoped. Case in point: A Los Angeles Times columnist is trying to reconcile hating her Trump-loving neighbors with acknowledging the kindness of those same people, and effectively deciding that the former is far more salient than the latter. This strikes me as politics turned inside-out.

Surely the most important thing about our neighbors is how they behave as neighbors, in day-to-day situations, not the abstract question of which boxes they checked on a ballot last November. LAT columnist Virginia Heffernan frets that, despite her Trump-approving neighbors having plowed her snowed-in driveway without being asked, they lack her respect for truth: that’s inside-out. I couldn’t tell you whether my neighbors next door or across the street believe JFK was murdered by the CIA, Jeffrey Epstein was murdered by Hillary Clinton, or we’re all being hoodwinked by a simulation of reality while our actual bodies are in pods hooked up to the Matrix. Why should I care, as long as they don’t steal my mail or throw beer bottles in my yard? (Also, one of them plows my driveway.) I care about their behavior, not what’s on their minds. The existence of people who may think differently about various things than I do does not cause me undue irritation.

I acknowledge I’m a bit of a rare duck, though. Colonel Jessup once noted, “I eat breakfast 300 yards from 4,000 Cubans trained to kill me,” and when I return from my country estate, I’ll be eating breakfast on the Upper West Side, which is probably home to more committed communists than Cuba ever was. Yet I feel no desire to flee to a part of the country where everyone votes the way I do. Why should I? Political affiliation isn’t the only, or even the most important, or even an important, reason to live in one place rather than another. I live on a block with thousands of Virginia Heffernans, and I feel neither miffed with them nor besieged by them. If any of them are walking around in a dark cloud of resentment that people such as I exist, that’s their problem.

It’s odd that we have all internalized the principle of live-and-let-live (I can’t imagine anyone still bothers to be rankled by, say, the existence of a gay couple down the street) and yet we seem to have a problem with the principle of think-and-let-think. I wonder if Virginia Heffernan seethes with loathing for her neighbors behind one of those hate-has-no-place-here yard signs.

Take a deep breath, thinking Americans — even columnists who get rewarded for being unreasonable. Please remind yourself that we have more in common than we think. Dial down the political thermostat and consider that we don’t really hate each other. It’s an illusory state that we get trapped in whenever our political circuits light up. It’s not the daily reality of our lives, or it doesn’t have to be. What does it matter whom your neighbor voted for if he’s a nice guy? We all love our kids, we’re all looking forward to post-pandemic life, we all think we could stand to lose a few pounds around the midsection, and we’re all worried that Eddie Murphy isn’t going to be able to make Coming 2 America work. Politics divides us, but only notionally. It need not define us.