How Not to Let Political Crybullies Ruin Your Thanksgiving

I hear from more people than ever before about Thanksgiving dinner and holiday get-togethers. How to mix holiday and politics?

Evidently this year, it’s worse than ever. It was a close election, and the losing side is taking it very personally. It seems that a lot of people – not all, but a lot – who voted for Hillary Clinton feel entitled to NOT be around people who voted for Donald Trump.

In my state of Delaware, there’s an enclave of loudmouthed lefties who try to intimidate opposition into silence. It’s a psychological witch hunt against people who are even suspected of having voted for Trump. It seems that tolerance and diversity have finally met their match with the strongest proponents of tolerance and diversity.

Here’s an example from my tolerant state of Delaware, posted just today on Facebook: So my son (he’s 6 years old) got smacked in the face today by a 10-12 year old girl in the bus with her backpack. This little girl has been harassing us for months about our Trump signs and 3 of our Trump signs were stolen, mysteriously, and she had already assaulted my oldest autistic son by throwing a wet newspaper in the middle of his back as hard as she could because he was wearing Trump gear. These parents teach their children SO much hate. WHAT IS WRONG with people????

My main advice about Thanksgiving in such a climate? Don’t spend time with people who feel entitled to things to which they are not entitled. This would be the case with anything else, not just with politics. There is not (at least yet) a law requiring you to spend Thanksgiving or any other holiday with anyone other than with the people you choose. Don’t do it unless it’s worth it.

Use your own actions as a guide. Most of my readers (not all, but most) voted for Donald Trump. It stands to reason that you did NOT vote for Barack Obama 4 years or 8 years ago. It also stands to reason that you weren’t happy with the outcome of the election those years. Did you take your anger out on others? Or did you keep it to yourself? Insist that those who were upset about this year’s election results handle it the same way you handled it the last two times. If they refuse, then send them on their way.

Keep in mind that the overriding emotion underlying all this “crybully” and “crybaby” mentality is anxiety. For years – decades, in fact – I have often heard people on the left-Democratic side of things say they they’re “scared” of opposing viewpoints. You don’t want national health care? “That frightens me,” they say. You don’t want to take attacks from Islamic terrorists lying down? “You scare me!” You think taxes should be cut, and government spending should be slashed, except for defense? “I’m afraid for our country with people like you in it!”

Basically, they take the emotional reaction that would be appropriate for, say, someone who wants people rounded up into concentration camps and they project that emotional reaction onto positions which – while ones they do not share – are not in any way threatening or dangerous to the well-being of a republic. Positions which, in fact, actually move the country more in the direction of liberty and freedom than the opposite.

Nevertheless, their “fear” is supposed to be your reason for submission. Sounds a lot like religious fundamentalism, doesn’t it? It’s ironic, given that leftist-liberals are the last people who would ever want to admit identifying with religious authoritarianism or fundamentalism. They think they’re too sophisticated or tolerant for that, but their attitudes and actions are – as a group, at least – displaying just the opposite.

You have to understand that the progressive political mindset is grounded in the psychological and philosophical mindset of subjectivism. Subjectivism is only about feelings. Subjectivism means there’s no rational way of proving anyone or anything right or wrong. On the surface, this sounds like tolerance. “What’s right for you and what’s right for me might not be the same. Can’t we all just get along?”

Yet the truth is that there are matters of right and wrong. How we’re to live together in a civilization is one of those matters. There’s an objective difference between allowing a government to take away your weapons of self-defense, intimidate your freedom of speech, and threaten your income via taxation and regulation versus a government being prevented from doing any of these things. But progressives are the ideology of big, activist government. On the one side, they want everyone to be tolerant and diverse, or at least so they claim. On the other side, and in contradiction, they want all of their tolerance, diversity, social insurance and equalization of income to be enforced via compulsion, threats, shaming, jailing and just general intimidation.

They’ve run into the brick wall of their own contradictions.

Life in a free country and in the objective realm of reality requires that we all accept, tolerate and sometimes even celebrate our differences. But objective lines still have to be drawn. And a government intolerant of anyone stepping on the private property or private decisions of another is one objective line that must be drawn and maintained.

My advice on Thanksgiving and Christmas get-togethers? Don’t take the attacks personally. Hear these attacks as, “I’m scared to death. I have no rational basis for holding the views I hold, and I know it. I’m frightened beyond words. I express my fear as rage. I express my rage as attacks against you.”

Should you tolerate any of it and allow yourself to be a doormat? Not for a minute. If they get physical, throw the legal book at them. But see it all for the frightened intellectual mush that leftist progressivism truly is.