10 Reasons Left-Wingers Cut Trump Voters From Their Lives

Many Hillary Clinton voters have ceased communicating with friends, and even family members, who voted for Donald Trump. It is so common that The New York Times published a front-page article on the subject headlined, "Political Divide Splits Relationships -- and Thanksgiving, Too."

"Matthew Horn, a software engineer from Boulder, Colo., canceled Christmas plans with his family in Texas. Nancy Sundin, a social worker in Spokane, Wash., has called off Thanksgiving with her mother and brother. Ruth Dorancy, a software designer in Chicago, decided to move her wedding so that her fiancé's grandmother and aunt, strong Trump supporters from Florida, could not attend."

The Times acknowledges that this phenomenon is one-sided, saying, "Democrats have dug in their heels, and in some cases are refusing to sit across the table from relatives who voted for President-elect Donald J. Trump."

A number of people who voted for Trump called my show to tell me that their daughters had informed them that they would no longer allow their parents to see their grandchildren. And one man sent me an email reporting that his brother-in-law's mother told him that she "no longer had a son."

All of this raises an obvious question: Why is this phenomenon of cutting off contact with friends and relatives so one-sided? Why don't we hear about conservatives shunning friends and relatives who supported Hillary Clinton? After all, almost every conservative considered Clinton to be ethically and morally challenged. And most believed that another four years of left-wing rule would complete what Barack Obama promised he would do in 2008 if he were elected president -- "fundamentally (transform) the United States of America."

In other words, conservatives were not one whit less fearful of Clinton and the Democrats than Democrats were of Trump and Republicans.

Yet virtually no conservatives cut off contact with friends, let alone parents, who supported Clinton.

1. Just like our universities shut out conservative ideas and speakers, more and more individuals on the left now shut out conservative friends and relatives as well as conservative ideas.

2. Many, if not most, leftists have been indoctrinated with leftism their entire lives.

There are far more conservatives who read articles, listen to and watch broadcasts of the left and have studied under left-wing teachers than there are people on the left who have read, listened to or watched anything of the right or taken classes with conservative instructors.

As a result, those on the left really believe that those on the right are all SIXHIRB: sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist and bigoted. Not to mention misogynistic and transphobic.

3. Most left-wing positions are emotion-based. That's a major reason people who hold leftist views will sever relations with people they previously cared for or even loved. Their emotions (in this case, irrational fear and hatred) simply overwhelm them.

4. Since Karl Marx, leftists have loved ideas more than people. All Trump voters who have been cut off by children, in-laws and lifelong friends now know how true that is.

5. People on the right think that most people on the left are wrong; people on the left think that most people on the right are evil. Decades of labeling conservative positions as "hateful" and labeling conservative individuals as "sexist," "intolerant," "xenophobic," "homophobic," "racist" and "bigoted" have had their desired effect.

6. The left associates human decency not so much with personal integrity as with having correct -- i.e. progressive -- political positions. Therefore, if you don't hold progressive positions, you lack decency. Ask your left-wing friends if they'd rather their high school son or daughter cheat on tests or support Trump.

7. Most individuals on the left are irreligious, so the commandment "Honor your father and your mother" means nothing to those who have cut off relations with parents because they voted for Trump.

8. Unlike conservatives, politics gives most leftists' lives meaning. Climate change is a good example. For leftists, fighting carbon emissions means saving human existence on Earth. Now, how often does anyone get a chance to literally save the world? Therefore, to most leftists, if you voted for Trump, you have both negated their reason for living and are literally destroying planet Earth. Why would they have Thanksgiving or Christmas with such a person?

9. The left tends toward the totalitarian. And every totalitarian ideology seeks to weaken the bonds between children and parents. The left seeks to dilute parental authority and replace it with school authority and government authority. So when your children sever their bond with you because you voted for Trump, they are acting like the good totalitarians the left has molded.

10. While there are kind and mean individuals on both sides of the political spectrum, as a result of all of the above, there are more mean people on the left than on the right. What other word than "mean" would anyone use to describe a daughter who banished her parents from their grandchildren's lives because of their vote?

I wish none of this were true. But there is a way to prove me wrong: Re-friend your friends and relatives who voted for Trump, and tell everyone who has ended relations with family members -- especially with parents -- to reach out to them and welcome them back into their lives.

I would like to make a comment about #4, that since Marx the left cares more about ideas than people.

I believe so-called “progressives” would insist precisely the opposite, that they care more about people than ideas or ideals.

Consider the difference between caring for Persons, or individuals, and caring about people.

I hope it should be obvious that you or I can care deeply about one yet not the other, just as someone may care about both or, sadly, neither.

A Person (to belabor the point) is an individual: when one says “I love my mom.” they are talking about a particular Person; but, when one say “I love mothers” they are talking about people, an abstraction of persons. Such a lover of mothers, caring about the ideal of motherhood, may not even like their own mother. They may even hate her.

Here, I will try to cut to the chase to say that progressivism enjoins that folks care a great deal about people in the abstract, and for evidence we can look at how progressives often go about meeting the needs of people through the intermediary of governments where professionals direct tax money (that is obviously not their own) to individuals as “cases”.

Your archetypal progressive response to people being in need is not “charity” where someone sees a specific need and from their own means and at their own discretion tries to meet it.

That doesn’t mean that progressives do not engage in charity, don’t think I’m saying that!

It means that when progressives act in society the welfare they seek to provide for “people” is something done through official proxies.

Yes, someone can actually “care” a great deal about the idea of “people” but not give a damn about some (or any) Person standing there before them ... but that’s an extreme I’m not wanting to deal with here.

Rather I want to deal with the difference between the use of publicly funded proxies to meet the needs of a class of persons (like “the poor”) and caring for others either directly or through voluntary association.

Remember that old adage about charity being insufficient, that people fall through the cracks and that is why we need force association welfare schemes?

Charity in its purest form is “me” giving to “you” but I only go so far: I have only so much to give, in resources or time, and only so much awareness to inform my giving.

Someone can care deeply about meeting the needs of actual Persons that they encounter and, being resigned that they can only do what they can do, are “okay” that there are Persons they cannot help, and which are therefore not being helped by them. They probably hope that others are meeting those needs and part of the motive behind banding together in voluntary charitable associations is rooted in this hope.

That is deemed both insufficient and inefficient (the argument being that hoping that something occurs is not the same as it actually happening).

And it is a desire for sufficiency and efficiency, that helps to establish that the “progressive” way is to care / provide for groups at the expense of other groups.

Everyone “gives at the office” by their taxes because that’s efficient and care is given by agencies with deep resources because that’s sufficient.

It does not matter that making them give at the office removes from folks some of the means with which they could be more charitable themselves because their charity is flatly defined by progressivism as insufficient.

So we have reached a very different point in our history from earlier times when people may have been leery of charities, as voluntary associations, to where many folks are leery of the efficacy any but involuntary associations.

In my less charitable moments I have said that, of this desire to meet asserted needs through official proxies funded by force, that if only Ahab had taken Naboth’s vineyard for a vegetable garden to feed Samaria’s poor he would be a hero to the left!

More commonly I express the view that any lack of sufficiency in charity is exasperated as government gobbles up people’s means to waste on bureaucracies shuffling money to the needy. That the assumption they make (that charity is insufficient) is not a fact but a prophecy for it is certainly insufficient now that they take so much of people’s means for their mad schemes of public welfare!

To them “sufficiency” is from some in the group (by force as required) to others in the group per need.

Sound familiar?

They do “care about people” and ironically “people” are an idea, an abstraction of actual persons that they meet.

I’m not going to say that “progressives” only care in the abstract; but, I will say that if someone does not care in the abstract as progressivism ideologically demands that they do there is a marked tendency among “progressives” to consider such people to be bad and that this gets worse the deeper one lives within the echo chamber.

So then, what are the ideas or ideals that progressives care less about than they do “people”?

Well, without apology, they would be anything, like our Constitution as amended and even what this country was founded to be, that may stand in the way of the official proxy do gooders that they demand run the show.

Or ...

Me: people’s circumstances are not amendments to the Constitution ... because I do care about those ideals greatly in addition to caring for Persons.

Them: we don’t give a damn about your old fashioned views ... it’s a living constitution bla bla bla bla...

... and we can know for certain that they have not valued our Law because those progressives responsible for bringing us all this progressivism have never attempted to amend the Constitution to make it all actually lawful. Arbitrary government was good enough for them, their oaths of office be damned, from FDR till the present day.

Of course that isn’t the same as saying they do not value any ideals ... for it is not without a cause that there is nothing left of the old extreme left that is still considered extreme by the left anymore! Nor is it divorced from this change that they now define McGovernites as moderates and call unrepentant Alinskyites right of center!

Those who have given us and who continue to propagate Arbitrary Government and absolute rule certainly have ideals that they value.

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