LOL: NYT writer admits that shaming right-wing family members failed

One of my favorite recurring features in the mainstream media — maybe it’s a favorite of yours as well — is when some progressive liberal in The New York Times or The Atlantic or elsewhere writes a column on how to avoid your conservative family members during Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or even the Fourth of July.

The premise of these articles is always the same: The toxic rightwing views of your grandma, or your Uncle Steve, or your great aunt Betty, constitute a form of emotional labor that you, a good, moral, upstanding progressive should not have to be subjected to.

Some of these entries don’t merely suggest that liberals should avoid and shun rightwing family members and friends — they actually suggest that you should belittle or mock them. You may remember a ghastly Los Angeles Times column with this title: “Mocking anti-vaxxer’s COVID deaths is ghoulish, yes — but necessary.”

Indeed, COVID vaccine skeptics were a favorite target of liberal op-ed writers year after year. But now, one card-carrying member of the liberal establishment, former Obama speechwriter David Litt, thinks that showing conservatives and covid vaccine skeptics was, in fact, a mistake of sorts.

And he has a new piece in The New York Times that makes that case. It’s called “Is It Time to Stop Snubbing Your Right-Wing Family?”

I’d say it was never time to snub your family over politics in the first place. But better late than never, I suppose.

In his op-ed, Litt explains how for years he sort of tried to avoid making conversation with his brother-in-law, Matt, an ardent Joe Rogan fan who possesses contrarian, non-mainstream opinions that aren’t universally right-wing but are definitely non-progressive.

Matt, importantly, declined to get the COVID vaccine, a choice that David disdained. He wrote the following in his New York Times column: “We were on opposite sides of a cultural civil war. The deepest divide was vaccination. I wasn’t shocked when Matt didn’t get the COVID shot. But I was baffled. Turning down a vaccine during a pandemic seemed like a rejection of science and self-preservation. It felt like he was tearing up the social contract that, until that point, I’d imagined we shared. Had Matt been a friend rather than a family member, I probably would have cut off contact completely. As it was, on the rare and always outdoor occasions when we saw each other, I spoke in disapproving snippets.”

To David’s credit, he admits in the column that he’s decided he was wrong to snub his vaccine-hesitant relative. David says that this siloing effect, whereby we start only interacting with people with whom we totally agree, is unhealthy for the country. He writes, “When we cut off contacts, or let algorithms sort us into warring factions, we forget that not so long ago, we used to have things to talk about that didn’t involve politics. Shunning plays into the hands of demagogues, making it easier for them to divide us and even, in some cases, to incite violence.”

I agree with that, and I’m glad David no longer thinks that it’s a good idea to shun people over politics as a general principle. He’s sorry he did that and admits he was wrong.

But here’s the thing: Shouldn’t David also admit that his main beef with his relative — the thing that so riled him up about right-wing people — was a fervent belief that David ended up being wrong about, namely the importance of the COVID vaccine?

Nowhere in his column does this progressive New York Times writer — who was willing to shun someone for not getting the jab — acknowledge that as it turned out, getting that vaccine is a personal choice that doesn’t have much bearing on other people’s health.

David writes that choosing not to get the vaccine was shredding the social contract. Actually, no, forcing people to get the COVID vaccine on pain of losing their jobs — now that was shredding the social contract. And it’s exactly what former President Joe Biden tried to do, until the Supreme Court stopped him.

So while I’m happy to see New York Times liberals admit that it’s bad form to lose friends and family members over politics, I’d also like to see them admit that when it came to this issue, specifically, they were really, really wrong.

But don’t worry. To any liberal friends and family members, I’m certainly not going to shun you because of it.

Robby Soave is co-host of The Hill’s commentary show “Rising” and a senior editor for Reason Magazine. This column is an edited transcription of his on-air commentary.