During the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan and liberal House Speaker Tip O’Neill (D-Massachusetts) famously had strong policy battles yet maintained a warm, cordial relationship. And on the U.S. Supreme Court, arch-conservative Justice Antonin Scalia and liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had a mutual respect despite their major differences on legal philosophy. Yet during the Donald Trump era, political fractures are so bitter that families are literally being torn apart. And according to the UK-based i Paper, this trend is only “accelerating.”
“In a recent survey,” journalist Andrew Buncombe reports in the i Paper, “psychologists at the University of California, Irvine, found a third of Americans had ‘lost relationships with friends, family, romantic partners and co-workers over political differences.’ Among the respondents, 62 per cent had had fallouts — 40 per cent of them with a family member. The researchers believe the trend is accelerating.”
Buncombe cites specific examples of families being torn apart by their differences on politics, which, the reporter notes, go beyond views on President Trump himself.
Braver Angels is a group that is dedicated to fighting the results of extreme partisanship, which, according to their communications director, Wilk Wilkinson, is a full-blown crisis in the United States.
Wilkinson told the i Paper that while Americans have had intense political disagreements in the past, the “visibility of the toxic division and polarization” is much worse than before.
According to Wilkinson, “The way it’s piped into the eyes and ears of everyday Americans on any given day is certainly higher. We have more access to more media outlets and social media feeds and 24-hour news cycles and things like that.”
Buncombe reports, “Braver Angels advises local communities and schools to ‘become beacons of civil discourse where students can express their perspectives freely and fully while actively listening to others.’ Asked if Trump has made divisions worse, he says he has been a factor but not the only one. ‘People who try to pin this on Trump or any other single singular figure within our political apparatus are doing a disservice to the bigger problem,’ he warns. ‘And that’s the “us versus them” tribalism and toxic polarization, and the fact we’ve reached a point where we no longer see political opponents as wrong, we see them as stupid or evil.”
Another group that’s confronting the United States’ bitter political divisions and its effects on families is the Kansas City-based American Square. Another is QAnon Casualties.
Explaining Square’s, spokesperson Ryan Bernsten told i Paper, “People are going to come and hear something they agree with or something they don’t. They might also hear perspectives from someone they’ve never heard from before, and a subject matter expert who knows more about something than they do.”
A paralegal interviewed by i Paper said that she is almost to the point of not speaking to her MAGA mother because of their political disagreements.
The paralegal said, “It’s kind of like grief in the sense that there are stages. I’ll cycle between radical acceptance to anger to heartbreak. It’s also a bit embarrassing … I don’t want people to judge me for the heinous stuff my mom and some other family members believe in. Groups like QAnonCasualties have helped a ton. No one really gets it unless they live it.”