The False Comfort of Going ‘No Contact’

P rior to 2020, Sarah, a thoughtful young writer from Chicago, spoke daily with her close friends about everything from work and relationships to music and politics. After 2020, and the political upheaval that that year contained, that open range of conversation seemed to contract to the dimensions of a snow globe. Their formerly unguarded discussions became self-conscious and circled the same subjects: masking, anti-racism, gender, sexuality.

The change was not simply in what the group talked about, but in the militancy with which they talked about it. One friend derisively described her aging father as “ableist” because he felt sad about the physical limitations that came with growing old. Another recounted a fight with her mom because the daughter refused to come home for Thanksgiving as she considered it a settler-colonialist holiday.

Amid this contraction and escalation, Sarah, like many others, began questioning the speed and substance of the social changes unfolding around her. Her hesitation began with the rise of gender interventions for minors. But vocalizing her uncertainty made her anathema within her friend group. It turned out the shared history of friendship she assumed could accommodate disagreement no longer could. One by one, they began to ice her out.

When I spoke with Sarah about losing her friend group, she initially concluded that those friendships must not have been what she thought they were. Later, she reconsidered. The friendships had been real. What changed were the terms under which they could continue. “I think there really was a time when nothing — especially nothing so impersonal — could have come between us. And then something changed, and all of a sudden it was possible to imagine such stupid fractures.” Her friends demanded conformity to beliefs that just a handful of years earlier none of them had held and treated her hesitation as grounds for ending friendships that had lasted far longer.

Sarah’s experience is one familiar to many — and it’s part of a disturbing trend I document in my new book. It’s often called going “no contact” — discarding family and friends over political or ideological disagreements. Though in some ways those hot button topics have receded or been replaced, many people, like citizens in a war-torn city, are still navigating a lingering obstacle course of rubble long after the bombs stopped dropping. With approximately 68 million Americans estranged from a family member, such ruptures are now quite common and affect friendships and families alike. Estrangement is nothing new, and sometimes, it is entirely warranted. But something has changed in both its justification and its direction — not to mention the frequency at which it now occurs.

At the heart of that change is a profound shift in our concept of family. Traditionally, the family was understood as a natural and pre-political institution, befitting the human condition. We come into the world in existential poverty, radically dependent upon particular people. Our need calls forth their care, and those relationships make claims upon us. Family unity doesn’t depend upon agreement or perfection. The inevitable friction of living in intimacy with imperfect people helps us grow in our capacity to love.

But if family is understood instead (as many progressive academics have long held) as a social construct nested in power differentials, family friction begins to look like oppression. Family bonds become brittle and conditional under the weight of such a reduced and suspicious rendering.

Into that vacuum enters the political tribe, which tends to become inflated and inflamed as the familial tribe weakens. Once a populace has effectively transferred their identity and loyalty to the political tribe, they will inevitably judge their most intimate relationships according to its exacting demands.

In families now, that judgment tends to be at the instigation of the young toward the old. This is a reversal of the old archetype (sometimes warranted, sometimes not) that long populated our movies and moral imagination of the authoritarian father cutting off a wayward son or daughter over morally transgressive behavior. The newer direction of ideological estrangement inverts these roles, with the adult child in the authoritarian role cutting off a parent over politically transgressive beliefs.

One father I interviewed for my book summarized his experience of this shift: “Overnight it seemed the conversation with my [progressive] daughter turned into ‘I don’t want to hear any reasons why you voted that way. I don’t want to hear your side of things. I only want to hear you tell me that you were wrong.’” To him, the divide was one of disagreement. To her, she received news of his vote as a personal threat. The recourse then was not argument or persuasion, but penance and contrition. The daughter’s message to her dad was of looming excommunication: Affirm the correct things, or you lose access to me.

Sadly, estrangement rarely ends there. It has cascading effects, disrupting proximate and secondary relationships and reaching into generations to come. Many older parents who have been cut off by their adult children also endure the grief of losing relationships with their grandchildren. And those who initiate the cut-off often find themselves without an easily replicable support system amidst the precarities of life.

Why has ideologically driven “no contact” become so normalized? There are plenty of explanations. Social media habituates us into relational habits of muting and unfollowing. TikTok psychologists with short-form videos invite viewers to search their relationships for signs of toxicity. Therapy-speak can catastrophize ordinary friction, freezing a difficulty into a diagnosis: narcissist, toxic, traumatic, manipulative. And our political divisions too often now are not disagreements over the best means of achieving shared ends, but what those ends should be in the first place.

All of these are real and consequential. But beneath them lies something deeper: We have impoverished the very things that once protected us from political cannibalization. Without a deeply human — and therefore deeply spiritual — principle of unity animating family and friendship, we try to manufacture through rigid uniformity the unity that we no longer know how to sustain.

Anyone from any point on the political spectrum can become politically belligerent in ways that fracture relationships. But an ideology that continually finds new ways to pit the individual against the family — as though the flourishing of one were definitionally at odds with the flourishing of the other — supplies that belligerence with justification, direction, and a delicious sensation of righteousness.