I'm not sure when I first realized this. But my friends—I mean Marie, Schmidt, and Debbie (I don't have a lot of friends)—and my family are all 100% wrapped up in the Dominant Narrative: Joe Biden may be old but he is the Savior of Democracy, Donald Trump is a would-be authoritarian, and Robert Kennedy is a nutcase.
Me, by contrast? A couple years ago I started following Bari Weiss and Scott Adams on Twitter because I thought they sounded intelligent. But you know how it is with gateway drugs. Pretty soon I had added Tulsi Gabbard, Tucker Carlson, Abigail Shrier, and Robert Kennedy. Sure, I tried to soften the impact by also following John Cleese, Bill Maher, and James Surowiecki, but it was never enough. It was only a matter of time before I was following CatGirl Kulak, Vivek Ramaswamy, Dave Portnoy, and the University of Austin. You know—the hard stuff.
This doesn't even mean that I have been completely red-pilled. Mostly it means that I have come to know—like Socrates—how little I really know about what is going on in the world. When I read accounts from the Right about What Really Happened on January 6, 2021, or about the cartons of documents in the bathrooms at Mar-a-Lago, I realize that the political parties in this country are divided not by values but by basic facts. One side will assert that this-and-that happened, and it was bad. You would expect the other side to argue that it was good, but No! In fact, the other side agrees that IF this-and-that HAD happened, it would have been bad; but in fact what happened was something else totally different!
The first time I was ever aware of this kind of discontinuity, I didn't flag it as a partisan phenomenon. This was back in 2000, during the long, protracted recount in Florida. Father was still alive back then, and we argued about the Florida recount regularly. But it was a strange kind of argument. He would reference events that I had never heard of; I would do the same for him. How was that possible? He finally figured it out: he got his information from television news, and I got mine from a daily newspaper. And each medium chose to report some things and leave out others; so he and I were in effect watching two different events!
At the time, I just thought Huh, how odd. But in a way it primed me for the experience of finding that the news on Twitter has nothing in common with the news that my mother gets from her daily paper … or that my friends get from wherever they get the news these days.
So what do I do now?
The principled answer, naturally, is that I should try to help them see my point of view. But that sounds like way too much work. I've explained before why I think that it is almost impossible to explain a political conversion. And in the meantime, I guarantee that everything I said would be misunderstood. Plus, of course, Marie would shriek at me that I'm a sociopath.
Nope. Not gonna go there.
But of course the consequence is that all I can do to "discuss" these issues with anybody is to drink and to refresh Twitter compulsively. It's not a healthy way to live.
If Father were still alive, I could talk to him. He went through this same transition forty or fifty years ago. In 1976, he said that if Ronald Reagan were elected President maybe we should leave the country; by 1980, he voted for Ronald Reagan and rarely looked back.
Maybe I should figure out how to make new friends, but that's never been a real strength of mine.
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