One issue I can’t stop snubbing the left over

Before I’d established my tiny crew of fellow local moms, I aggressively befriended – or tried to befriend – any woman with a baby who looked vaguely friendly. I’d try my luck in cafes, playgrounds, baby classes, yet with only minimal success (one find, a Cambridge-educated Irish lawyer, “forgot” her wallet on our date, leaving me to pay for her expensive glass of wine).

So I clung gratefully to one of my café pickups, Marta, with whom two or three pleasant playdates (or rather: mommy walking dates) had taken place. I had rosy hopes for more as her kid was cute and reminded me of my own. But one day, strolling along the dark and wintry main drag that connected our two adjacent neighborhoods, things took a turn for the ominous. She told me she had googled me, and politically, we were very different. She had to tell me she had two red lines, across which she would not go for anyone, even me, for the sake of our babies. I waited nervously. She would not tolerate any hint of Russian apologism over the invasion of Ukraine, and she would not countenance any nationalist sentiment (I live in London so this was mainly about Brexit). I hastened to reassure her that I was very anti-Kremlin, and not overly opinionated about Brexit. I hoped I’d passed the test, but I hadn’t, as I never heard from her again.

This is a version of a dynamic playing out on a huge scale across the Anglosphere. In the US it has become commonplace to sever ties not just with the friends and acquaintances you disagree with, but family members too: one in five Americans has done this.

The left, in particular, are pioneers of contemporary censorship and ostracization. Their impulse has been to banish and punish those whose views they don’t just disagree with, but whom they believe are “toxic” (itself a leftist word). They don’t engage. They insult. They gave us cancelling, boycotting (mostly of Israel), no-platforming, triggering, bullying, micro-aggressions and firing people for wrong-think.

But since Black Lives Matter, gulfs too big to be bridged have sprung up throughout society largely because of the left’s vengeance for those who don’t sufficiently sign up to allyship in all its forms. Covid brought new splits, over the vaccine and lockdown, and exacerbated those that came with the mad fact of Donald Trump’s ascendancy. Now there’s Gaza and free speech on campus, selectively defended by the heretofore censorious left expressly for those who want to legitimize Hamas, and abortion. The right has given as good as it got, and in places become just as histrionic and insane-seeming as the left.

But the brutality of the left towards those whose views they don’t like is beyond compare, largely because of its smug sneeriness. In a recent New York Times piece by David Litt, a former Obama speech-writer, headlined “Is it time to stop snubbing your right-wing family?”, Litt writes about the “strategic frostiness” with which he treated his brother in law, who did not take the Covid vaccine. He then learns, through being forced to surf (his new obsession) with the brother in law (a much better surfer and valuable guide and protector on the waves), that he was a nice guy, and that it is possible to like people with whom you have serious differences.

It’s funny how the left assumes that such “strategic frostiness,” even to family, is one-way. It doesn’t appear to occur that the right might want to snub their left-wing family. But there are plenty of areas where Conservatives may want to do just that. Over the trans issue, for instance, or Gaza, or abortion.

It’s not that choosing not to associate with people over political issues is entirely unreasonable or a sign of times gone mad. Because sometimes politics is a broadcast of how you view life and death; who should live and who should die. During Covid I made no bones about shunning vaccine refuseniks because why should my health and that of those I care for be imperiled by someone freely chosen death-baiting anti-rationalism? Now, though, I wouldn’t care so much.

I am staunchly pro-abortion but happily associate with pro-Lifers. Ditto people who disagree with me over trans issues. But there is one issue that reliably sends me “strategically frosty.” I find it hard to be civil to a person wearing a keffiyah or any other garb from the Palestine movement, including around a family table. This is because, more than ever after October 7th, it is a direct insult to me, and to Jews everywhere, whether they recognize it or not (and many do not). It is not some peace-loving good-faith movement against oppression and never was. There’s a reason Palestinianism has had its strongest outing ever since Hamas’s attempted second Holocaust: it celebrates the destruction of Israel, with only the most fleeting exceptions. Why would I want to be friendly with someone whose politics align with those who want me dead?

Anyway, as David Litt says, it’s become almost impossible to persuade people out of their views; the right as much as the left. Does a little part of me hope, by being frosty, to make the Palestine-fanciers think twice? Of course it does. But I know it won’t happen. The only benefit to this behavior is the avoidance of a more flagrant form of disapproval: an all-out scrap.