How to prevent rifts in a time of polarization

Don't let the Cobra Effect torpedo your family

Credit: David Clode and Unsplash

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I thought I had said all I was going to say about politics and estrangement in my last few posts (both here at Nuclear Meltdown and over at IFS). But then, last week JD Vance had a minor viral moment when he argued that it’s a mistake to discard friends and family over politics. That’s basically the same point I made, and while I’m not endorsing any candidate or taking a side politically, on this one point that has basically no policy implications, I do agree with Vance. It is a mistake to cast aside relationships over political disagreements.

Nevertheless, probably because Vance was the person who made this point (albeit after my IFS piece!), the comments were polarizing and received plenty of pushback. Sadly but not surprisingly, almost as soon as I mentioned this relationships-over-politics idea on Twitter, someone replied to say that in fact you should “cut those MFs off for good.” That was a pretty common response to Vance’s remarks.

So with the election upon us and the holidays nearing, today I’d like to reiterate once again that I don’t think relationships need to end over political disagreements. Estrangement is not inevitable. That was basically my argument before.

What I want to add today is my one piece of practical advice, which is this: Lean into strained relationships. In my experience it can be tempting — natural-feeling, even — to drift away from people after disagreements. But I think it’s worth trying to resist that urge.

I’m going to mention some of my own experiences here, but first let me bring up a Slate advice column, which I think gets at this idea. The column features a question from a guy who dislikes his in-laws. The way the question-writer tells it, his in-laws are arrogant, demanding, abrasive and have political views that conflict with his own.

This is all pretty typical in-law stuff, and I think probably the most useful piece of advice this particular person could use is that he should adjust his own attitude. A lot of the time, discussions about how to get along better focus on how to make other people more tolerable. So, there’s a crazy uncle or whoever and you want to get him to change his attitude, or shut up, etc. But that’s probably a fool’s errand. A likelier path to success would be changing one’s self to become more tolerant. That’s one thing I like about the WEIRD psychology idea from my previous posts; the individual bends to the group.

But of course that’s hard to do and doesn’t help a whole lot amid the messiness of real life. I routinely fail and bending the individual to the group.

Instead, what often happens is what this Slate advice-seeker has chosen to do: People gradually drift away. Faced with annoying in-laws, the advice-seeker has chosen to use work and ski trips as excuses to skip family gatherings. And not surprisingly, the rift seems to be growing as politics and other points of tension drive these people further and further apart.

The situation captures what I suspect is often going on in political estrangements, which is that people end relationships that were already on their last legs anyway.

But in any case, I think the advice-seeker’s actions — while understandable — are actually the exact opposite of what he should be doing. The seemingly obvious solution is actually making the rift worse.

This reminds me of something I recently learned about, which is China’s efforts to eradicate sparrows. Apparently, in the 1950s communist China was struggling with food production and Mao oversaw a plan to exterminate a variety of pests. Sparrows were identified as one of those pests because they were seen as a threat to grain supplies, which of course hungry humans needed.

You can see the logic there, and as a result in the late 1950s China encouraged its citizens to shoot sparrows, mess with their nests, and do anything else to drive them to extinction. They killed many millions, perhaps even a billion, of the birds.

But you can probably guess where this is going. Instead of saving grain, an absence of sparrows allowed locust populations to explode. Those locusts then devastated farmers’ crops and contributed to a massive famine that killed tens of millions of people.

I bring this up as an example of a situation in which the “solution” to a problem actually made the problem much worse. History books are filled with such episodes, and this is sometimes called the “Cobra Effect” based on a story in which the British in India put a bounty on cobras. Eventually people realized they could breed cobras and collect more bounties, and so the end result was way more cobras — the opposite of what everyone wanted.

The Slate advice-seeker is sort of experiencing the relationship version of the Cobra Effect. His problem is annoying in-laws, and so he’s trying to avoid them. But by avoiding them, he’s also probably weakening the relationship and thus creating a situation in which he feels even more annoyed when he is forced to interact. Now, they lack any positive common ground. And because they are his in-laws, he will probably have to continue interacting forever or go nuclear and cut them off — which would leave him more isolated.

The alternative is less obvious, but I’ve seen it work first hand in real life. As I’ve written before, I have a big family and some of us (me especially, I’m the weird uncle I guess) enjoy talking about polarizing topics in what we might call adversarial conversation. Most of the time this is fine. But sometimes things get a little too adversarial.

Maybe everyone in my family dislikes each other and is on the verge of cutting each other (or, just me, ha) off. On the other hand, we all continue to come over to each other’s houses. No one is estranged, despite people spanning the political spectrum (as well as disagreeing on other key issues).

I think the reason that’s the case is because family gatherings are relentless. Maybe there’s a dessert night on Thursday with a heated debate. But then on Sunday we might have a family dinner at the comparatively neutral ground of someone else’s house. And because the group is big, anyone with hurt feelings can choose to interact as much or as little as they want. Or, they can skip the gathering altogether knowing that another one is right around the corner.

In other words, more time together appears to actually be the antidote to fraying relationships — as counterintuitive as that sounds. The key, I think, is building a catalogue of positive experiences that form the foundation of the relationship, so that it’s not just all arguments and passive aggression. And to be clear, my family doesn’t just debate politics. During recent preparation for a family wedding, for example, there were flower arranging gatherings and shopping trips and event set up and more. Much of the conversation over the last six months focused on the wedding prep, not whatever issue was in the news. Gradually, these positive experiences overwhelm the inevitable and occasional negative ones.

I’m fortunate that my family appears to have just kind of stumbled upon this idea by accident. Indeed, I didn’t even realize it was happening for years. But it does seem to be a common factor in groups that work well together. As I wrote about a while back, experts have suggested that the secret ingredient for successful relationships is often just time spent together. And that’s probably worth remembering during this period of political polarization.

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