In Defeat, Leftists Attempt to Repair Families and Friendships Broken by Politics
“Is it time to stop snubbing your right-wing family?”
Regrettably yes, answers former Obama speechwriter David Litt in a recent guest essay for The New York Times — and he wants you to know he feels damn good about it. Yet even with his attempt at graciousness, Litt shows that to the left, everything, everywhere is always political. The good news is that they’re finally starting to learn that no one else cares.
Litt begins with a story of his brother-in-law Matt, an electrician who loves Joe Rogan and with whom he never quite connected with because, you know, Litt has “an Ivy League degree.” Their already-tense connection turned explicitly sour during COVID, when Matt opted out of the jab.
“My frostiness wasn’t personal,” Litt writes. “It was strategic. 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?” He outsources justification for his bad behavior to some Los Angeles Times op-eds about vax-shaming and even references Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter. Imagine that! In 2025, liberals are finding moral inspiration from—checks notes—the Puritans.
While Matt still loves Rogan, Litt’s bromance with his righty brother-in-law has a happy ending. The duo started surfing together post-COVID, and what do you know, Litt the turbo-lib comes to realize there’s more to life than just politics. Well, sort of.
“Our differences are meaningful, but allowing them to mean everything is part of how we ended up here,” he concludes, intending “here” as a vague and ominous allusion to the second reign of Orange Hitler. “When we cut off contacts … we forget that not so long ago, we used to have things to talk about that didn’t involve politics.”
To that I say: Whose fault is that?
Litt has not arrived at any principled objection to his former activity of callously writing off friends and family who think and vote differently from him. It’s that he’s no longer seeing his social opprobrium pay dividends. “What has all this banishing accomplished?” he asks. “It’s not just ineffective. It’s counterproductive.”
Unfortunately, this revelation comes a few generations too late. For the last 60 years, the left’s reigning ethos has been “the personal is political.” It’s an intentional strategy to force change at the micro-level by challenging norms of sex, family, and even basic etiquette in one’s everyday life. A combination of emotional terrorism and blackmail, this strategy has helped the left bulldoze their apolitical friends, family, and colleagues into submission for generations. It’s how we wound up with ritualized Thanksgiving dinner political minefields instead of peaceful family gatherings. Most normal people decided to go along to get along; there are more important things in life than politics, after all.
Social interaction? Personal relationships? Common interests? Even familial bonds? For the left, these are all just the instruments of politics. Litt interacted coldly with his brother-in-law when he believed his displeasure would spark a political about-face, but once he realized it wouldn’t, he fell back to the defensive long-game. Surfing together is more than just a common interest. It’s Litt’s latest strategic ploy: If only he can keep from further alienating Matt, there’s still hope for his conversion, or at least he may instill enough doubt to neutralize Matt’s unmitigated voting. “Shunning plays into the hands of demagogues, making it easier for them to divide us and even, in some cases, to incite violence”—so what’s a rational lib to do but take the high road?
Far from proving Litt’s intellectual superiority, his article shows his persistent narrowmindedness. Leftists have a fundamental inability to understand their opponents. Litt lauds the “generosity of spirit” required to accept his brother-in-law personally despite politics, failing to realize that his brother-in-law almost certainly never viewed him as an adversary at all. With his Yale diploma and White House pedigree, Litt thinks so highly of his own perspective that he can’t fathom the possibility that someone could differ in perspective, let alone have reasonable justification to do so. Of course, most of America’s elite institutions align to affirm Litt’s belief. Still, it’s no different from a religious missionary who can’t understand why his promise of fire and fury doesn’t resonate with a local population living happily in their own epistemology.
All along, Matt probably looked at Litt as a generally nice, if uptight guy, who’s fine to be around as long as he’s a good husband to his sister and isn’t always going on about his politics. Like most Americans, Matt’s life just doesn’t revolve around politics. Also like most Americans, he’s been bullied for too long by those whose lives do.
It’s undeniably a good thing that the left is learning that their bullying has diminishing returns, and a Times op-ed does nothing if not signal to fellow travelers the proper course of belief and actions in their own lives. But liberals like Litt should not be credited with generosity; it’s the average Americans like Matt who deserve the credit.
Millions refused the vaccine, at great personal cost. Parents across America refused to lie down and let education bureaucrats indoctrinate—and mutilate—their children. After all of that, a majority of voters showed up last November to tell the left that they will no longer allow their laissez-faire attitudes about politics to be weaponized against them; if it’s a confrontation the left wants, then they’ll get one … and lose.
The social opprobrium of people like Litt only matters if we let it matter. When we remove our own scarlet letter, there’s not much else they can do.