Tag: Irish Catholics

Nobody ever followed the rules, of course, and it was standard for voices to get heated at my Irish-Catholic Thanksgiving meal. Approaching the Thanksgiving holiday, countless pieces across the partisan Internet will emerge about how to “win” an argument with your relative of the opposite political persuasion. You and Uncle Irv aren’t the only ones grinning and bearing it through the meal at this point either; it’s likely pretty awkward for the rest of the family as well. As we mostly communicate online, we’ve shifted the manner in which we communicate in person as a result. When that eventual argument does occur, winning is the objective. That may be fine online, when you don’t have to spend an entire evening and every subsequent family get-together with a person. But in person with Uncle Irv? So how does one handle an annoying comment or even a direct confrontation with angry Uncle Irv? The goal is to get through the meal with the relationship intact, and to make it as comfortable and enjoyable for yourself and everyone else as possible. And to do that, the goalposts need to be moved; it’s not about winning, it’s not even about conversing tersely about politics.

The Kavanaugh hearings, he wrote on Friday, constituted an “American nadir.” You often hear such phrases from people who think the biggest problem with the Kavanaugh battle is that the participants weren’t more courteous and open-minded. Implying, as Brooks, Flake, and Collins do, that America’s real problem is a lack of civility rather than a lack of justice requires assuming a moral equivalence between Brett Kavanaugh’s supporters and Christine Blasey Ford’s. If tribal implies unthinking or inherited group loyalty, then Democrats and Republicans were actually more tribal in the mid-20th century. The parties are so bitterly polarized not because they’ve become more tribal but because they’ve become more ideological. The “tribalization” of American politics, Brooks argues, “leads to an epidemic of bigotry. There is no equivalence between the “bigotry” faced by preppy lacrosse players and that faced by black males. Similarly, there is no equivalence between the “bigotry” faced by men accused of sexual assault and the “bigotry” faced by women who suffer it. In April 1963, seven white Alabama ministers and one rabbi wrote a letter to Martin Luther King Jr.. The problem that the Kavanaugh struggle laid bare is not “unvarnished tribalism.” The problem is that women who allege abuse by men still often face male-dominated institutions that do not thoroughly and honestly investigate their claims. Brooks, Collins, and Flake may decry the “tension” this exposes.