In June, a woman who goes by Shannon Hill said that her 36-year-old son would not acknowledge her birthday gift to him. “Why? Because he hasn’t spoken to my husband or I in seven months because we voted for Trump,” she explained on X. Hill’s viral tale worked like a Rorschach test. MAGA parents read it and saw their own snowflakes, who are triggered so easily. Others saw a narcissist who could not accept the consequences of her actions. We don’t know the truth, and we probably never will. Maybe Hill’s vote was the only reason her son needed to block her. Maybe it was the final crack in a longer disintegration. Whatever the reason, the result — estrangement — has become more common.
Young adults are going no-contact with parents and other relatives, often because of politics. The psychologist Joshua Coleman and Will Johnson, the Harris Poll CEO, found that half of all American adults are “estranged from a close relative,” they wrote last year. Although the reason is often personal, another one in five “cite political differences as the reason,” and they said the Trump years have worsened family strife. The usual narrative pits liberals against MAGA elders like Hill, who are shocked, absolutely shocked, that anyone would avoid them. “Politics should stop at the family front door,” one X user told Hill, and some pundits agree. David Litt, a former Obama speechwriter and the author of It’s Only Drowning: A True Story of Learning to Surf and the Search for Common Ground, made a similar argument in the New York Times this month. “No one is required to spend time with people they don’t care for,” he wrote. “But those of us who feel an obligation to shun strategically need to ask: What has all this banishing accomplished?”
Estrangement doesn’t work, Litt added, and could “hurt the ostracizer more than the ostracizee.” Coleman, the psychologist, has warned that adult children have alienated “perfectly good, loving parents and grandparents” in addition to men and women who abuse. There is some truth to both observations. When I doomscroll I get the impression that everyone wants to be a therapist and no one is very good at it. Certain diagnoses are in vogue and, with them, certain prescriptive behaviors. If you are in conflict with a parent, that parent might be a narcissist, and boy, is there a sub-Reddit for you. Set a boundary, grow a spine, block that number. The body keeps the score and all that. I get the idea. I come from a conservative family and a conservative place, and I nurture my pain like it’s a small pet. But I speak to my family and sometimes I even go home to see them. That’s the right choice for me. It might not be for somebody else.
That distinction eludes Coleman, who comments frequently on the subject of familial estrangement, and it seems to elude Litt, too. Social media can flatten relationships that are fundamentally complex, but so can the valorization of civil dialogue. “Shunning plays into the hands of demagogues, making it easier for them to divide us and even, in some cases, to incite violence,” Litt wrote, an argument so naïve it borders on malice. Too often, civility is another word for impunity.
Litt’s newest book, It’s Only Drowning, is hardly more sophisticated than his op-ed for the Times. When the pandemic struck, Litt and his wife retreated to their second home on the Jersey shore. There, Litt spiraled into a depressive state and decided, somewhat rashly, that he would learn to surf. This afforded him an opportunity to bond with his brother-in-law Matt, an electrician who rode motorcycles and listened to Joe Rogan. Matt was an experienced surfer, which impressed Litt, and they began to spend time together. “My idea of a perfect meal was a bowl of homemade knife-cut noodles, studded with bits of pork and drenched in chili oil, from a hole-in-the-wall restaurant near the university where I studied on a summer fellowship that sent Ivy League undergraduates to Beijing,” he wrote. “His was chicken tenders.”
I realize that Litt has made a joke at his own expense. Who wants to hear from a guy who went to the Dalton School, then Yale, and went straight into politics, right? In most circumstances I don’t, and if I must, I would like to get something valuable out of the experience. This does not usually happen and did not happen while reading It’s Only Drowning. Matt is not quite a person but rather a catalyst for Litt’s own awakening. First he’s an enigma, fond of SpongeBob and frozen pizza, and later he’s a noble savage who has taught Litt an important lesson about relationships and the world. As they surfed together in Hawaii, Litt asked himself if “a pair of epic waves” had “finally bridged our cultural divide.” The answer was “no,” he concluded, but he later wrote that although he and Matt “had uncovered far less common ground than I’d expected,” they’d also “found far more neutral ground” than he had anticipated. Neutral ground mattered “no matter what it led to,” he argued, because “its value was intrinsic.”
Is it? If feelings are all that matter, then maybe so. Matt “made me more courageous at an age when most people start becoming more afraid,” Litt added. Though he once believed that he had a “civic responsibility” to shun Matt, who did not get the COVID vaccine, he’d changed his mind. “Finding our piece of neutral ground was not perfect, or complete, or sufficient,” he wrote. “But in a world on fire, few things are.” I can see what Litt gained from this quest for neutrality. He evidently feels better about himself, and family gatherings must be easier now. Nothing’s changed for anyone else.
It’s Only Drowning is but a symptom of a much more pervasive idea. Neutral ground not only exists but is worth discovering for reasons its defenders can never explain. “We have entered an age of bad generalization,” David Brooks complained in 2020. “We don’t see each other well. We do not see the heart and soul of each person, only a bunch of bad labels.” Organizations like Braver Angels promote civil dialogue as a good in its own right. “Respect, not agreement, is an essential key for a healthy discussion,” reads one page on its website. Some would apply that standard to familial relationships, too. An adult child might feel better after cutting off a relative, Coleman said, but “if it ends up causing the full immiseration of your parents, if it cuts off decent, loving grandparents from grandchildren, if it divides families up, then maybe it’s not such a great thing.” Estrangement or “shunning,” as Litt put it, is a threat to more than family unity. According to Brooks, “Many of our society’s great problems flow from people not feeling seen and known.” If we peer closely enough at another person, we can save democracy, somehow.
But Litt had it easy. Matt was not his parent or a sibling, and he was not hateful, which made détente possible. In fact, Matt was so politically apathetic that Litt could not convince him to vote at all. I’m not sure why Litt thinks that surfing with Matt makes him an authority on “shunning,” although I have my theories. His defense of “neutral ground” is a profoundly liberal argument, and it is reminiscent of Barack Obama in particular. After a gunman nearly assassinated Gabrielle Giffords in 2011, President Obama blamed “discourse” for the tragedy, in part. The nation was “too polarized,” he said, and “we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do.” So much has happened since then — like the rise of MAGA and a resurgent far right that has killed and will probably kill again — and somehow we’re still talking about discourse. The 2009 beer summit lives on, at least in Litt’s world; the rest of us are moving on. I suspect that Shannon Hill’s son knows what I learned years ago, which is that neutral ground does not exist. Not in a family, or in a friendship, or anywhere else. A human being cannot step into some magical circle and cease to be who they are.
Instagram therapists won’t help you navigate your most fraught relationships — but neither can Litt or commentators like him. Sometimes the act of knowing a person leaves you with no choice but to move on without them. If my parents liked Alligator Alcatraz, I’d no longer speak to them. If they were rude to my LGBT friends, I’d block their numbers. Though shunning won’t work as a political strategy, there are still natural consequences for the way we speak and behave. It’s good, actually, to have values and draw lines accordingly, even if there’s a chance someone will overcorrect. Politics never stopped at the family front door. Why pretend otherwise?
