Political Differences With Parents

over xmas my sisters and i explained gay marriage to him and he's now pro that, though i doubt very much he's gonna be campaigning for it around the water cooler.

The last time I can remember having a political discussion with my mother was in about 1996, during the whole "Tory Sleaze" thing - our MP was one of the ones implicated alongside Neil Hamilton and accused of taking companies' money to ask questions for them in Parliament. My mother: "Why shouldn't he take advantage of his job? It seems fair to me." I've avoided talking politics with the parents ever since.

(The MP in question had already lost his job as a junior whip after the News Of The World published a rent-boy kiss-and-tell story outing him. He's since reinvented himself as a political journalist.)

My mother is pretty much the same (or more likely doesn't want to argue about politics).

I just don't have the energy to argue with either of them - I saw my brother do it for years to no effect, so there's no reason to waste my time and effort.

My stepmom has really ridiculous views on politics, dad and I usually try not to bring it up around her. My favorite was one dinner where she was actually trying to defend Clarence Thomas to me - the kicker being that she worked as a Congressional staffer in D.C. in the 1980s, and has lots of stories of sexual-harrassin', ass-grabbin', and just-plain-arrogance from politicians of all stripes (her Dan Quayle-as-a-junior-senator-on-the-Armed-Forces-Committee is my favorite).

My mom and stepdad are both quasi-liberal, usually vote Democrat, but I think my stepdad was a "Reagan Democrat." In 1980, as a precocious 5 year-old, I announced to the ladies at our precinct's polling place that I was proud of my mom for voting for Jimmy Carter.

So anyway there's some committee hearing on something-or-other and my stepmom's doing her thing, handing out the notes when each Senator's time is up. Quayle's got the mic, and he'll be damned if he won't stop yakking. My stepmom goes over to him with the note. He stops talking, looks up at her, crumples the note up, throws it on the floor, and continues talking.

Unfortunately it's not a racier story, like "Strom grabbed my ass" or something, but I doubt my stepmom would tell such stories about herself (though I'm sure she could be able to tell some).

It's really bad, cos whenever I visit I'll end up in terrible rows. It's not as if my parents' views are even particularly coherent (mine aren't either, but theirs even less so). But even if we agree (ie, they and I are anti-war) it's for different reasons. As for 'identity politics' -- it's cringeworthy. They're like 1960s liberals or something, they've just woken up to the idea, now that my mother works with one, that gay men aren't vampire-like predators...

Just before Christmas, my uncle tells us that his adopted son Nathaniel is going out w/a new girl who has turned Nate's life around. My uncle has nothing but great things to say about her. But he lets us know: "that Molly Ivins book you gave Nathaniel for his birthday kind of upset her."

Now, one of the great pleasures of Christmas is that we all get together and talk politics. We commiserate. Free to let our hair down and just really lay into politicians, their stupidities, their lumbering ignorance of actual social movements. This Christmas will be different. Our minds race: have we bought any "political presents" for one another?

In the end it took a SERIOUS effort of will to reign in our knee-jerk impulses and it may have been good for us in the end. Talking w/people about progressive politics who not only agree w/us but take it further is great; when it's your own family it's amazing. But it can also be just unsophisticated catharsis and unfaithful to the arguments we think we're making. Actually being polite about this stuff was eye-opening.

My friend V**** is now a junior spin doctor type-thing for New Labour. On the day of her interview a picture of her mother gazing adoringly at Michael Hesletine at the Tory party conference appeared in the papers. She has never lived it down.

I don't see my parents that often, but my dad dropped by today. He was all up in arms because the NHS has apparently given £50m to pay for translators for people that can't speak English and according to him this is £50m that has been directly taken away from 'all those people who have been refused life-saving drugs'.
My view is that the NHS budget is hideously complicated- there's no way if that money wasn't being spent on translators it would go into the drug budget. And presumably £50m is cheaper than the cost of not providing translators, letting them get worse and being a much bigger burden on the NHS for example. But there's no way you can say either way unless you've got the full NHS budget figures in front of you to provide some kind of context.
Big mistake - he then spent about an hour telling me how these people who have been paying tax their whole lives are being denied drugs just because these foreigners can't be bothered to learn English - this government's to blame - letting in all these Asians (who are 'all muslims') when people are dying because it's too overcrowded (?) and then letting them live by Sharia law etc etc etc. Although I agree to some extent that immigrants should learn to speak English if they come here, I can at least acknowledge that enforcing, 'policing' and maintaining this wouldn't be free - my Dad insisted that it would just require a few extra tick boxes on existing databases (as a good part of my job is spent collecting data that should already be maintained but isn't, and having seen the huge costing figures given to these apparently minute tasks, I am more than aware that this itself could cost a good few million).
I then told him he was a sucker if he believed what he read in the paper with no evidence to back it up - he denied getting any of this from the papers and started telling me about a book written by a professor of Islamic studies he was reading. (Later on I found the copy of the Times he'd been reading which had half a page of letters about this bloody £50m translating figure).
I don't want to sound like a whiny teenager but I've always thought of my mum as pretty right-on and sensible, so I'm quite saddened not only that my dad still cannot listen to an argument and respond with an appropriate counter-argument - instead just repeating non-sequiteurs and unrelated facts about muslims) but that he's actually pretty much a Daily Mail racist type after all with little grasp on reality and no desire to find out what whether he thinks is actually true or not.
Do people ever change their views as they get older or is it even easier now to just listen to things that fit in with what you already believe and ignore the rest?

PS he had already sent me this VERY FUNNY!!!! MUST READ!!!! a few months ago, so maybe I should have been prepared:

Don't you wish that you had written this?

Subject: Passport Application

Dear Minister,
I'm in the process of renewing my passport but I am a total loss to understand or believe the hoops I am being asked to jump through.

How is it that Bert Smith of T.V. Rentals Basingstoke has my address and telephone number and knows that I bought a satellite dish from them back in 1994, and yet, the Government is still asking me where I was born and on what date?

How come that nice West African immigrant chappy who comes round every Thursday night with his DVD rentals van can tell me every film or video I have had out since he started his business up eleven years ago, yet you still want me to remind you of my last three jobs, two of which were with contractors working for the government?

How come the T.V. detector van can tell if my T.V. is on, what channel I am watching and whether I have paid my licence or not, and yet if I win the government run lottery they have no idea I have won or where I am and will keep the bloody money to themselves if I fail to claim in good time.
Do you people do this by hand?

You have my birth date on numerous files you hold on me, including the one with all the income tax forms I've filed for the past 30-odd years. It's on my health insurance card, my driver's licence, on the last four passports I've had, on all those stupid customs declaration forms I've had to fill out before being allowed off the planes and boats over the last 30 years, and all those insufferable census forms that are done every ten years and the electoral registration forms I have to complete, by law, every time our lords and masters are up for re-election.

Would somebody please take note, once and for all, I was born in Maidenhead on the 4th of March 1957, my mother's name is Mary, her maiden name was Reynolds, my father's name is Robert, and I'd be absolutely astounded if that ever changed between now and the day I die!

I apologise Minister. I'm obviously not myself this morning. But between you and me, I have simply had enough! You mail the application to my house, then you ask me for my address. What is going on? Do you have a gang of Neanderthals working there? Look at my damn picture. Do I look like Bin Laden? I don't want to activate the Fifth Reich for God's sake! I just want to go and park my weary backside on a sunny, sandy beach for a couple of week's well-earned rest away from all this crap.

Well, I have to go now, because I have to go to back to Salisbury and get another copy of my birth certificate because you lost the last one. AND to the tune of 60 quid! What a racket THAT is!! Would it be so complicated to have all the services in the same spot to assist in the issuance of a new passport the same day? But nooooo, that'd be too damn easy and maybe make sense. You'd rather have us running all over the place like chickens with our heads cut off, then find some tosser to confirm that it's really me on the goddamn picture - you know... the one where we're not allowed to smile in in case we look as if we are enjoying the process!
Hey, you know why we can't smile? 'Cause we're totally jacked off!

I served in the armed forces for more than 25 years including over ten years at the Ministry of Defence in London. I have had security clearances which allowed me to sit in the Cabinet Office, five seats away from the Prime Minister while he was being briefed on the first Gulf War and I have been doing volunteer work for the British Red Cross ever since I left the Services. However, I have to get someone 'important' to verify who I am -- you know, someone like my doctor...
who, before he got his medical degree 6 months ago WAS LIVING IN PAKISTAN...

Yours sincerely,
An Irate British Citizen.

my mom sends me frustrating emails like that sometimes too, which always weirds me out because for most things she's left-of-centre... I think she's a bit malleable and easily influenced in her political leanings, but I usually have an easy time discussing things with her and not getting into arguments.

dad is flamingly socialist, though. after the recent Canadian election I got him going on a fantastic anti-conservative rant that made me feel all warm because I like having parents who share my views. we get along fine politically, but my mom's side of the family doesn't really appreciate his umm, left-leaningness, and my dad's pretty argumentative (and redundant) so I think it's caused a bit of strife at recent family gatherings.

Haahaha thats hilarous. OK so when some other guy steals this "irate british citizen"'s identity and goes to the Passport office and they happily hand one over because hey, they should know its him by now! And Irate loses his life savings, well.

xpost

i felt all warm the other day when my dad said he felt bad for ralph nader because he campaigns so hard and no one will let him debate or anything. i'm not #1 ralph nader fan but my dad used to be super conservative and voted for reagan 2x and then for nader in 2000. but he lives in NY so it doesn't matter so much and he can vote for who he wants.

Also, that email sounds American but with a few token English words chucked in - not many Britishers say "mail" as a verb or "jacked off" - and would probably say "driving licence". This makes it even weirder!

Also 'health insurance card'. Anyway, my dad joined Facebook and put 'BNP' as his political views. I'm especially looking forward to christmas this year.

my dad says politics is "a load of bollocks" and "it doesn't matter who you vote for, the government always gets in".

i was talking with my mum about the us election and he sais "who cares? we don't live in america, why do we have to hear about it." i sort of think if he had to choose a candidate he'd go for obama, seeing as he thinks the war in iraq is "a load of bollocks" and "that george bush is crackers".

My dad was a big lefty, was an activist in the Chilean Socialist Party during the Allende years etc., but has mellowed right out and him and my mum are centre-left, more or less the same as myself, I'm possibly a bit to the right of them. Only real big issue we're divided over is Scottish independence, I'm nationalist, they're unionist, but any discussion we have is good natured.

My dad doesn't argue. Once in awhile he comes out with some incredibly weird opinion that I can't figure out how to align with any particular political party, but for the most part he just keeps silent.

― Maria (Maria), Sunday, 8 February 2004 21:16 (4 years ago)

This is still true. He blew my mind last week by saying on the phone, "By the way, are you planning on voting this year? I sure hope you're voting for Barack." "Um...I already voted absentee. And yes, I did." "Oh, you don't have to tell me who you're voting for, I just wanted to let you know I was hoping."

I don't think he's openly voted for a Democrat in my lifetime. It's possible he voted for Gore or Kerry, but was angry about all his options and never expressed a preference.

mom, mom, dad & stepmom are all voting mccain-palin. Dad & I quit discussing politics after i made a turn to the left back in high school (he knew something was wrong when I stopped asking to borrow his Rush Limbaugh books), but moms and i have agreed on a measure of liberalism until recently. They're ex-Hilary supporters who are crazy about Sarah Palin, "don't trust" Obama and have essentially bought every McCain talking point about the homie: "he hangs around with terrorists: what kind of judgment does that show?? he wants to sit down across the table from people who want to kill us WITHOUT preconditions? he's naive, he just doesn't know about the world..."

oh wow, I thought ex-Hillary supporters who are crazy about Sarah Palin were figments of some collective imagination.

any time these kinds of discussions come up with my very much Republican dad (thx, Reagan) and my much less-so, but still very much pro-life mom, i spend the whole time just pointing out the flagrant hypocrisies of the right more than arguing *for* anything. I'd like to think after the last 8 years (neither can stand W) that I've made some headway with them, and I wouldn't be surprised if my father starts looking into libertarian candidates (after this race, of course) and mom secretly votes for Obama. I think the Wright thing really bothered her tho. If I could just get them to stop watching Fox lolNews :-/

I suspect they think I'm libertarian, which makes family gatherings easier than if they knew their son was fully in the tank for Obama.

My dad just discovered the FWD: button, so every day it's five or three new "Fwd: fwd: re: fwd: PATRIOTS ONLY" or such. It's just kind of funny.

I've always avoided talking politics with my parents. Like even minor stuff. And if it comes up, I just whistle inside until they finish their thoughts & I can change the subject. My parents and I are philosophically at odds in enough ways without politics, so I don't want to add in another category of disagreeable conversations.

It is interesting to see what they do have to say about these things. My dad's just depressed. "This is the worst choice of candidates since Carter vs Ford," he said two nights ago.

Part of me is actually kind of itching for an argument with my racist conservative family at Thanksgiving, esp. assuming Obama is the president-elect and they can't do anything but fume impotently. I have a better idea who will be at the get-together than I did a couple of weeks ago, and I'm not dreading it as much. Also, I wrote a longish comment to some nutty anti-Obama people last week that helped me clarify and distill a lot of my arguments, so if we get into it, I'm prepared to knock all their arguments into the dirt.

A typical political conversation between us:

DAD: So, who are you going to vote for? Do you know?
ME: I already voted, for Obama.
DAD: Oh...
ME: Who are you voting for?
DAD: Well, we have different political views, I guess. I'm not voting for Obama.
ME: You're voting for McCain?
DAD: Yep.

And dead air between sentences.

He's sad Mitt Romney isn't the candidate.

My dad's all paranoid about election fraud. My grandma has an "Old White Woman for Obama" pin.

Part of me is actually kind of itching for an argument with my racist conservative family at Thanksgiving, esp. assuming Obama is the president-elect and they can't do anything but fume impotently.

OTM! God Christmas will be so much easier for me if Obama wins. Especially since I know my Mom is pretty much the Reverse Maverick, and will be all good with anyone if he wins, and my Dad will argue energy policy with me, but won't be hostile. And my argument once Obama wins won't be so much partisan as Thomas Friedman.

As I recounted in the prez thread, I've resolved not to speak to my parents until after the election.

I didn't grow up in a particularly political-minded household. My dad is a fairly conservative retired military man and sees things through that prism. My mom never really expressed many strong opinions one way or the other about about politics.

Damnit, you have made me want to call my mom. Which I now will do.

yeah fucky you

grew up in a very Democratic leaning household, so talking about politics is like talking about sports, it is like everyday small talk. my wife's folks are very peculiar, mom in law is pretty liberal, father in law a "love it or leave it" conservative. apparently they just do not talk politics between the two of em :/

my dad, as both a mid-sized business owner and old-school Detroit leftie, still surprises me. he'll totally go down the 'taxes ARE patriotic, damn it, and i should know cuz i pay a lot of em' path. it's pretty fun to watch. it's like the only thing we connect on.

yeah fucky you

What (if anything) is this about?

My mum is more lefty than myself and my dad is motivated by race more than anything. I'm sure he's absolutely fuming at the notion that a nigger will be the next president.

I'll have to schedule a visit with him soon, just so that I can rub it in if Obama wins.

yeah fucky you

What (if anything) is this about?

I'm drunk

well understood.

i've talked about the political views of my parents off & on since '04 on here. This time around, they know i'm an active Obama volunteer, and I know they've already voted in exurban Tennessee. That's as far as the conversation has gone.

My Dad has started warming to Trump in recent weeks and months, probably starting late last year. He was always against Trump because he was part of the ruling class but recently he has discovered that Trump isn't serving the interests of the ruling classes after all and this has put him in a new light.

He is now fixated on the fact that the ruling classes are going to bump Trump off soon, which has only increased a sense that maybe there's something to this Trump guy after all.

I'd suspected this would happen eventually, that he might get hypnotised by Trump in some way but the timing is strange. He is very anti-Israel, and (relatively) pro-Iran and those things haven't changed, so I'm not sure where this is coming from, what channel has sent him down this road.

Trump has clearly made many people who have been done well out of the system anxious. I've had people who would never comment about politics, guys who work and earn good money say Trump is fucking it up for them.* Tariffs (and the bullying of European leaders), gutting the US federal government (US economy), releasing even a chunk of the Epstein papers and now the war on Iran are a clear bad for the business class, and much of the political class.

*personally don't think it truly is but here we are.

Anyway, sorry to hear about your dad

He isn't pro-trump now, it's more like he's seen Trump in a new light since he read or watched somewhere that the business classes are going to bump him off. Something he never considered until he watched whatever it is that floated this idea

It will also partly be that Trump is annoying the right people (but then he was doing that before as well)

he read or watched somewhere that the business classes are going to bump him off

very sorry to read this about your dad. it's classic conspiracy thinking, a purely reactionary worldview with only a tenuous connection to what is real.

This isn't a change of character, he has always spoken the same way. Ever since I can remember he would repeat the same handful of phrases but could never go beyond these phrases as he didn't have anything prepared

He is currently reading Problems of Leninism. He's been reading it since before I was born. It's the same copy. Almost all the lines have been underlined at some point. Other lines have been copied into an endless array of notebooks and then underlined in those notebooks. Other things go into the notebooks, the notebooks are lost under other notebooks which contain the same phrases as the lost notebooks.

He still doesn't know what the Problems of Leninism says or what it's about. Neither do I. YouTube is replacing the books but the books soldier on. Problems of Leninism is never far away. It must be made of titanium as everything around it disappears and randomly reappears from the abyss years later. I've a grudging respect for its tenacity

A Yanis Varoufakis book appeared at some point. It's the only book with a picture on the cover. Passages are underlined, phrases are remembered and forgotten and remembered again.

Before Trump is going to be bumped off it was Burkina Faso.

It isn't conspiracy thinking. It's not that complex.

so tenuous connection to what is real about sums it up?

I thought he might have been hypnotised by Trump before but it didn’t really happen. He is anti-royalist but when the royals are on tv at christmas he is transfixed, though after snapping out of it makes sure to say “bloody royals". He is anti-establishment but anyone claiming any kind of authority he will obey immediately like a cat transfixed by a laser pointer

Once a man rang up doing a phone scam and he had a meltdown trying to find a piece of paper with some (presumably financial) information to give the man. He didn't know who the man was.

He now thinks Trump might blow up the world. He might be right! He seems undecided whether this is good or bad

We used to live opposite a police station. Random people would sometimes knock on the door at night and he would let them in. I came down one morning to go to school and there was a prostitute lying on the sofa. I got up in the middle of the night once to go to the bathroom and a man in a white suit came out of the bathroom walked past me and went down the stairs and out the front door without saying a word. I came downstairs and an Italian man had laid out a bunch of expensive suits on the floor, I went to get my mum and she told the man to leave. If she hadn’t my dad would have bought all the suits. He doesn't wear suits. He would have bought them just left them on the floor. He thinks they are bourgeois. He said I was a capitalist because I wore a tie once. Taxi's weren't allowed