Howdy.
So this week my girlfriend, who I had been getting very close with and we were beginning to long term plan together, had a moment of deep realization about the kind of blowback possible being openly communist, in favor of direct action, and pro-palestine can be. I've not hid any of this over the last several years of dating, but there's a difference between understanding and understanding, you know? She's thinking about calling it quits because she doesn't want to risk her own career which she has worked very hard to develop in a very competitive and innately unstable industry (performance art). She's dealing with some self admitted cognitive dissonance over the matter because she agrees with me politically, but can't bring herself to committing to resistance and solidarity in the face of blowback.
In a certain sense I understand. It's the same discomfort I first felt when I realized how fucked we were with climate change and rising fascism to begin with. How was I supposed to live a normal happy life with that? Well, obviously I wasn't, not unless I wanted to be complicit--by inaction if nothing else--in the self-annihilation of the biosphere and the genocide of people in the global South that would be necessary to enforce borders in the face of climate catastrophe and migration. It seems like she's choosing to try and live out her fantasy over solidarity or just confronting the material reality that is worsening conditions for all of us, even in the imperial core, so in another sense I just want to shrug at this and call it the same moral cowardice that most labor aristocrats have chosen in the core.
My family is not taking the news well, and thinks I'm throwing away my one shot at love because I can't compromise on my extreme politics. This is an absurd framing of events to me. I've been nothing but forthright about my commitments and beliefs this entire time. My parents clam up and get resistant with even milk toast hypotheticals like, "would you personally kill Hitler if given the chance?" So it feels impossible to have a sensible political discussion with them. They're that squeamish and averse to any and all violence that they can't imagine resisting genocide or fascism. So to a certain extent it feels impossible to make headway on any kind of informative discussion. But they continuously weaponize pity as shame it feels like, and say things about how sad and lonely life is going to be if I don't compromise on politics for relationships. It almost reads as a veiled threat at cutting me off too, sadly enough.
I guess I'm just looking for feedback and an opportunity to externalize my thoughts. I am a fairly gregarious and well liked person. I have a good social life, I've dated successfully before this and I'm sure I will again, but dang. It sucks having my parents harangue me for genocide being a hard line in the sand. I'm the beneficiary of a great many privileges that make it seem all the more imperative that I take a stand on these kinds of issues. I find myself feeling closer to people than ever when I'm involved in organizing work or political work, so their doom and gloom about how lonely my life will be I'm tempted to read as ignorance only a liberal mind is capable of. But like, am I actually the asshole? Do I need to check my power level? I guess I'm just baffled at how anyone thinks they're going to live a "normal" life, much less WANT to, when the West's rapid decline into the third reich is in full swing. Do they all imagine themselves as good little Germans, showing up to work and paying taxes, while tut tutting at the news? As far as I'm concerned the only good Germans under Nazi Germany were partisans.
I don't want to get too ranty here. I'll likely delete this post after a few days. Just wanted to hear some other perspective, maybe from people who have been through similar, or maybe just some commiseration. Whether I'm right or not it still sucks, you know?
Your post is well reasoned and I think a perfectly healthy way of deliberating over it. I can't speak for your situation but you will absolutely find love/connection/etc in the future, so no reason to worry about that. I certainly wouldn't be able to maintain a relationship with somebody who, after years of political transparency, chooses to "go along to get along." I understand the calculus on her part, although doing so for the sake of a "career" in performance art is totally laughable to me. If she was a junior banker or analyst on Wall Street it would make so much more sense, even if an objectively evil choice.
As for the wider question of why people choose to ignore the reality in front of them, well... I think history demonstrates that the majority of people are passive until material conditions directly affect them. At present she can play pretend, but at some point in the future things will break for her specifically and she may just remember how right you were. Cold comfort, but no use fighting over the They Live glasses if she hasn't put them on yet at this point in your relationship.
Thanks for your kind words. It's nice to hear/see them from someone else, even if I already believed that too.
Yeah it's really frustrating and hurtful for my parents to be making zero room for sympathy for me in this. They liked her, I get it, they're sad it's ending and want to put that hurt somewhere, guess I get to have insult added to injury then. But for real, I was so transparent the entire time, and then I'm the bad guy in their mind for not being able to make it work. Do they want me to date someone who I'm fundamentally unaligned with? Do they want me to give up my strongest convictions and way of life in order to have, what, a relationship that might ultimately culminate in resentment or failure as we both realize the incompatibility too late? I guess more than anything they can't imagine believing in something so much that you'd give up a relationship for it, but that again just smacks of privilege and moral cowardice to me. Who cares if the world burns around us, at least we'd be in loooooooove, right? It just seems so juvenile. Ultimately it's them projecting their discomfort with my politics onto her and, so far as they can imagine it, all potential dating partners. My girlfriend was very clear that I had been nothing but forthright up until this point, but my parents won't even believe me when I tell them her words about the matter. They keep interjecting with their own catastrophizing and anxiety about my politics making me unlovable. Perhaps that's how they really feel. Concerning I suppose. If they were chuds I could write them off and be done with it, but they like to pretend they're good and reasonable people. Liberals sure are something. They're just so totally insulated from political consequences that they can't imagine sacrificing anything in life of any real importance for a greater good. They're still friends with maga chud republicans, they're still dreaming of a form of resistance that can avoid violence, and they are too white and protected by the system as it is to imagine there being consequences for being wrong. I thought I had been making progress with hem over the years too. Like, my mom would say she's a socialist now, but as soon as you step outside the idealized niceties of theory and into the world as it exists and history as it plays out, it all gets too uncomfortable.
It just felt like a double whammy today. Get all but broken up with (it's 97% of the way there), and then I try to talk to my parents about it and I catch an earfull about how this is what I get for being so extreme and violent. Fun day.
Incredibly relatable thread. Many of my oldest friends are Nice, Upstanding Liberals - the (not-even-always-)white moderates from Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Except I can't even insist that they read LfaBJ because they'll
at the white moderate section and will try to hit me back with the "MLK doesn't endorse violent action!" passages. Some seem to think that making anyone uncomfortable (via rudeness, disruption, or simple dismissal) is a greater crime than systemic oppression. After all, the crimes of capitalism are Just the Way the World Works, whereas anything I advocate to change that is just me being difficult.
The last time I had a real crisis over all this I read Sartre's essays on the occupation and collaboration, which helped a bit. The first several essays in this book were on point. This essay, by Jones Manoel, also helped me conceptualize some problems in the way both my interlocutors and I were arguing.
Thank you so much, I'm looking forward to reading those. I got my parents to read the Letter to make a point much like this 4-5 years ago, and I thought it really sank in at the time, but man. They've clearly been harboring resentment and quiet disapproval this whole time.
I went through the same with my own parents. They are well aware of all the systemic consequences of capitalism and the looming collapse of the biosphere, but as soon as I start sounding even remotely like
they shut down. It's ideology at work. Liberals are only superficially different from chuds and will remain so until their ass is in a bread line surrounded by people they used to ignore. I try not to let it drive me nuts anymore, it's just dialectics at work.
Definitely an unforced error on your parents' part regardless of their own beliefs and insecurities. I'm sorry comrade
Thank you so much for the love and solidarity. I'm thinking about how, if possible, to have a conversation about it all that's more productive. Maybe it just isn't. They spent my whole life harping on cOmMuNiCaTiOn, and then they can't remove their own feelings from the situation for half an hour to just let me cope with the pain and loss. They cant even hear me when I say their reasons for finding my politics distasteful weren't hers, they just immediately project that onto her and say they're not surprised, they'd do the same in her shoes. I'm not even mad so much as baffled at how selfish and egotistical that response is of them. These people were social workers all their lives, they're supposed to be emotionally attuned and empathetic lmao. Even if they do think that, who the fuck starts a conversation like that I just ~~sat down~~ got broken up with.
I think I'm going to have to separate it as much from the politics as possible for now because that's feeling like a dead end. I guess I'm just amazed at how much acid got thrown in my face when I was already down. I don't want to totally write them off as a source of emotional support but yeesh. Once bitten twice shy that's for sure.