1mo ago

Young people are struggling to deal with their MAGA parents — again

www.teenvogue.com Young People Are Struggling to Deal With Their MAGA Parents — Again

"It’s very hard to view the world fundamentally differently from the person that raised you.”

Summary

With Donald Trump’s 2024 election win, young Gen Z voters like Kate, Holly, and Rachel are grappling with deepening divides with their Trump-supporting parents.

For many, these conflicts go beyond policy disagreements, touching on core values and morality. Parents once focused on fiscal conservatism have, in some cases, embraced conspiracy theories, creating painful rifts.

Studies suggest political divisions are increasingly seen as moral judgments, fostering a “mega-identity” where political views signify personal decency.

For these young adults, maintaining family connections amidst such ideological fractures has become challenging.

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172 comments

Don’t deal with them. Walk away. You’re allowed to be mad at your parents for electing a felon dictator. You’re allowed to hate them and not talk to them again. That’s their loss, and you don’t need such toxic people in your life.
- Here is where I am at and why. I believe that the next administration is a significant risk for the country, the envionment, and will likely have global geopolitical implications on what happens to Ukraine, Taiwan, and Gaza. The immigration policy and rehetoric is unbelievably hateful, not based on reality, and will likely be an unmitigated disaster. The promises to eliminate the ACA and governmental regulatory bodies/oversight in the EPA, FDA, and NOAA make all our our lives more risky and worse. Specifically though, they my MY KIDS LIVES MORE RISKY. If you are going to actively vote against MY KIDS, YOUR GRANDKIDS lives/futures in such a fundamental way, you don't get to be a part of my life.
  
  I'm in hard agreement with you, EuroTrip Yoda (had to).
  My in-laws definitely voted Harris, my dad passed 4 years ago (Vietnam vet - not a trump fan), and my mom went down an idiotic rabbit hole. I haven't talked to my mom in weeks, and I'm sure she knows why.
  She also doesn't know that we are planning to leave the country. I can't stay in a place that will reduce my daughter to a second class citizen without bodily autonomy. Yet that's what the nitwit I called "Mom" voted for.
- Yup. I haven't spoken to my father since the election, but I know he voted Trump.
  The next time he calls, the conversation will go like this:
  Me: Before we go act further, I need to know who you voted for.
  Him: will probably say Trump
  Me: Alright, then this is the last time we will ever speak, and here is why...
  I'll start with the fact that the party that he voted for wants to make my wife not a person, then keep going for as long as I'm able.
- Me, disabled and home-bound (with the folks): that's great and all buttttttttt
- So ur encouraging people to hate and never speak to the people who literally raised them over an idea? For what having an opinion you dont like? I cant possibly see why politics is so polarised nowdays.
  
  You didn't get to choose your parents. And there's no reason to force anyone to continue associating with toxic shitheads with no capacity for critical thought.
  
  If you want to change the world, you can't escape the confrontation.
  
  No one has any responsibility to change the world.
  
  Agreed. But there's a lot of blame going around that says otherwise.
  
  What confrontation? The confrontation was deciding to cut them out of their lives. The only other confrontation to deal with there may or may not involve a baseball bat.
  
  People won't magically disappear just because one no longer interacts with them. They'll still exist, live their life and interact within the society we're all a part of. One can set them aside for the majority of the time, but eventually those connections do come back to haunt and annoy.
  
  Why would I want to continue associating with someone that voted to endanger people I care about?
  
  Because the alternative to communication is violence.
  
  Not communicating is violence now?
  
  Apparently it is. Otherwise we wouldn't have popular comments such as "if you didn't vote, you're complicit" or "silence is acquiescence of fascism". So no communication = violence, because if you run away from them, then you're giving them free reign to implement their views.
  ...
  
  ...you act like you had control over their views at any time in the past, which is hilarious. Staying is simply suffering for no benefit. Now I'm not going to kinkshame, but damn man, you should really find another way to cum; anguish is going way too far.
  
  Dear solitary person, who is separate from the world, uninfluenced by anyone or anything, a true beacon of independent thought, you seriously believe your views are pure and untainted? That nothing and no one can change them at any point? Or were you so defeated by your past that you no longer believe a mind can be changed?
  From you who is already beaten and wallows within the bitter taste of their tragedy, all i have gained is sadness. I am sorry you suffered and i am sorry you were unable to regain your loved ones, if they ever were such, but please, do not drag others into your suffering and instead allow them to drag you out of it.
  Minds can be changed, views can be altered. Hope exists whether we can see it or not. And in this vein, I hope you will find your happiness once more and spread that joy instead of this current unpalatable sorrow.
  Be well.
  
  I didn't choose to be born. I didn't choose to be adopted into a dysfunctional family. I didn't choose to be raised as a little bigot. I did choose to walk away when I grew up and started seeing how people like me and my family were hurting others. This goes far beyond mere opinion, and perhaps you ought to spend some time reasoning about why these things aren't that important to you.
  Edit to add a word.
  
  Narrator: They didn't.
  
  Eh, I get the cynicism, because it's hard not to feel it myself. But if I can change, so can they 🤟
  
  I think people's values and actions are perfectly fine things to judge them on.
  We're not talking about favorite colors here. We're talking about people actively enabling terrorists to attack minorities without fear of consequence and voting fascists who have openly expressed their intentions to destroy our democracy into power.
  If you voted for Trump, then your "idea" is that there shouldn't be any work or medical safety standards, no food safety laws, no environmental protection to keep companies from dumping waste wherever they want, no national parks, and no schools. And that's just the government departments that are planned to be axed. We can talk about Operation Wetback 3 next, if you want.
  
  Precisely. People have had 8+ years of Trump showing and telling everyone exactly who is and what he will do. Anyone who voted for him knew -- or should have known -- who and what they were voting for. You'd have to be willfully ignorant not to know who Trump and MAGA are by now.
  I know of no valid excuses this time. Ignorance is not an excuse. People knew trump is a monster when they voted for him; they don't care. But many have so little understanding of how badly a second Trump admin will hurt everyone and everything. The "now concerned" trump voters just wanted change, but they voted for fascism.
  
  Yep. These are people who looked at the fascism and bigotry on open display and said, "This isn't a bridge too far for me. I am perfectly okay with this."
  
  Believing that women and other marginalized people aren't people isn't a difference of opinion. Dismantling all regulatory protections isn't an opinion. Supporting a person who is blatantly trying to dismantle our democracy isn't an opinion.
  It's a cult ideology, and no one has to tolerate intolerance.
  No one has any onus to maintain contact with a person who only believes in hate, regardless of their relation to you.
  These people made the choice to support a monster, and they deserve consequences for their actions.
  
  And you're encouraging people to expose themselves to toxicity that is very unhealthy for them.
  
  The toxicity won't disappear on its own. It has to be cleaned up.
  
  Time has a way of dealing with that
  
  Yes, we're seeing it live. Most people here don't seem very much pleased with how time decided to deal with it though.
  
  I'm referring to people with horrible views dying.
  
  Death doesn't care about one's political views.
  
  And?
  
  And either you're expecting the people you hate to die first or for yourself to die before them. Neither of those cases actually solves the problem, so your choice is quite pointless. All you're doing is passing on the torch to the next generation and thus maintaining the cycle of ruination.
  
  Actually, removing the hate from your life does solve the issue. If everyone excommunicated these people, their ideologies will die out.
  
  I don't think you have a clue or care what I'm saying
  
  Socially ostracizing them is dealing with it. People aren't sticking their heads in the sand here. They're telling these people that their actions have consequences, and one of those consequences is exile. Cutting people out of your life is just one part of dealing with these people.
  
  Let me ask you this, if your kid ends up in a way not acceptable to you, will you "socially ostracize" them? Simply say "there's nothing i can do" and cut them out of your life?
  If so, then I am sad for you. Not pity, just sadness.
  If not, then why not feel the same for your parents? Because they're old or something like that?
  I don't know. It's just.. eh, can't even use 'weird' anymore.. maybe 'lame' works. It's lame to be so decisive in giving up, yet still flower it up as some sort of moral punishment.
  Yeh, people are dumb. Yeh, people can be evil. And yeh, some people are irremediable with too much wrongdoing to be forgiven. But it's important to know the difference between these aspects and treat them accordingly. Otherwise, it's just being lazy about it.
  
  Do you not understand the concept of compounding events or something?
  This isn't coming from nowhere and it's not the first action people are taking.
  This is coming from 10-20 years of dealing with these people. The drunk uncle going on about "the darkies" every Thanksgiving since Reagan was in office. The in-laws making comments about how they respect you as a person, they just can't support your "gay lifestyle." The mother or father asking why you can't just be a feminine gay man instead of trans. People who have had years of their cognitive dissonance pointed out to them as they repeatedly vote for politicians who want to hurt their friends and family.
  And now, as the thugs are donning their jackboots and people are saying, "Enough is enough, you're a danger to my life and right to freedom," you're wondering why the abuser doesn't deserve to be in their victims' lives?
  
  The path of least resistance.
  We often walk it without even realizing it.
  The drunk uncle. Alcohol is called liquid courage for a reason. Has anyone tried since Reagan to teach him throughout the year he's got nothing to fear or was he left to stew with only a propaganda channel as company and then only rebuked at Thanksgiving?
  In-laws. Nosy relatives are a staple of large family gatherings. They usually don't really care about your "gay lifestyle", they just want to nag, nitpick and compare. "Look at me and my kids! We're all proper and shit! Nyeh nyeh nyeh!" Even if you shut them down on one thing, they just move on to something else. The cunts. But that's just how some social contracts work.
  Parents. The biological urge to reproduce is often times a contest of wills that the urge tends to win. Parents want biological grandchildren. When the possibility of getting one drops to zero, it's a shock to the system. Does not compute. "Feminine gay man" is a fucking win in the face of that.
  You want people to make difficult decisions because they're the right thing to do, but you don't care to understand how or why these type of decisions are difficult to them. Because it harms you, it harms others. Well guess what, harm comes in different shapes and forms, often unnoticed and unchallenged.
  If you're unwilling to understand the difficulty in changing who you are, who you've been for a large part of your life without a constant impetus to push forward that change, then do you really deserve that type of understanding from others? To clarify further, you're the impetus. Without you there to push them towards acceptance, who exactly are you expecting to do that for them? Fox news?
  It's hard, very hard, so hard that many just pack up and run. And that's fine. It's completely fine. But it ain't the right thing to do, it's the left one.
  
  Now you're just justifying the actions of abusers. Your speculated scenarios are as likely to be accurate as they are to be completely off the mark. Just like your assumption that the people cutting extremists out of their lives never put any effort into changing their beliefs.
  You want people to make difficult decisions because they're the right thing to do, but you don't care to understand how or why these type of decisions are difficult to them. Because it harms you, it harms others. Well guess what, harm comes in different shapes and forms, often unnoticed and unchallenged.
  The same exact words apply to your own argument. You might as well be saying, "Abusive parents deserve to be in their grandchildrens' lives because it's harmful to them to not be allowed to see their grandkids."
  
  Your problem is that you believe their actions aren't supposed to be justified. But that's the wrong approach. "Every action has consequences" is just bullshit on its own. The web of reaction is as old as the universe and us picking which action deserve a certain reaction is nothing more than personal whim.
  We're flawed beings, all of us. I can't be right for every situation, but neither can you. And the difference between us is that I want to try and treat each individual as an individual. You may see this as excusing an abuser, I see it as fighting against abuse.
  I won't protect everyone and i can't protect everyone, but just like any other kind of death row decision, it has to be earned. Each degree of punishment has to be fair. The chance for redemption has to be given. Punishment should be for the purpose of rehabilitation. And if we can't do it at an individual level, how can we expect it to be done for a better society.
  Being just is hard work. And if you can't do it, why expect it of others?
  
  It's not that I don't believe their actions are supposed to be justified - I don't believe that they are justifiable. They can try to justify them all they want, but that doesn't make them just, right, or reasonable when they support a man who has spent 8 years telling everybody exactly who he is and what he intends to do. It means that they either support him in his bigotry and intention to destroy American democracy, or at the very least, they find it acceptable enough to ignore it. The calls for state sanctioned violence against minorities aren't a bridge too far for these people. Nor are his calls for terrorism against minorities from his supporters.
  I have a saying: There are conservatives, and there are Republicans, and these are not the same thing. I have watched Republicans since 9/11. I saw how the attacks on Jews tripled in the 24 hours after the towers fell, how the attacks on black people doubled, and how Muslim parents asked their kids if they wanted to change their names to something more American so they wouldn't get attacked at school. I have tried to reason with Republicans since I was 14 and had to hide my sexuality and pretend to fit in with cis straight white people. I saw how my former coworker voted for Trump the first time and became a staunch Democrat after seeing what he did. I watched as the racist jokes kids made on 4chan became their actual beliefs. I heard over and over again on live TV Republicans complain about how they were being censored when people reacted poorly to their publicly broadcasted hatred and bigotry.
  Refusing to talk to people isn't censorship or a "death row decision," as you put it. It's the conclusion to decades of attempting to reason with these people. It's accepting the fact that they have shown that when the chips are down, they won't have your back and may even turn you over to SS themselves. This is about survival now. Cutting the people who voted the fascists in out of your life is harm reduction. When the new administration is openly calling for the genocide of people like you, wagging your finger at the people who voted him in as you're carted off to the camps isn't going to cut it.
  There are people who can be saved, the young people especially, but Trump is a cult, and one thing about dealing with cultists is that after a certain point, 99% of them will double down rather than accept that they're wrong. Because to admit that they're wrong is to admit that everything they've done up to this point - everything that they've believed - wasn't justified.
  So you can go ahead and wax poetic about the injustice of not talking to the men with rifles all you want. It sure as hell looks like self-defense from the other end of the gun here.
  
  My mom and dad literally raised me to recognize that the people they have become are shit that would hurt their own children and grandchildren in the name of their hate. So maybe they should try to get back to being decent human beings before they whine about their kids not recognizing them as such.
  
  I can't possibly see why politics is so polarised
  Spoken like a true well-off middle-aged+ white cishet. 'I don't have any problems, so I don't see what the big deal is!'
  
  This account is just a bad take factory. Great day for a blockin'
  
  Block away. Build ur little echo chamber
  
  Can you explain how cutting abusive people out of your life is an act of hate?
  
  This is the issue u are purposely neglecting the possibility that u cqn disagree about ideas without being abusive. If they are actually abusive sure cut them out of ur life sure. Disagreeing about ideas isnt abuse its the human condition.
  
  We’re at the “round them up into camps” stage. Have you read a history book before?
  A disagreement of ideas is something like “should we fund government services through the sale of bonds or require upfront funding from property taxes?”
  Also, the way you are drunkenly taking this personally tells me that you have been recently ostracized by people you care about. Are you willing to share what relationships you have recently lost and how they went sour?
  P.S.: Congratulations! I think you may actually be the first author of a comment to receive more than 100 downvotes on Lemmy!
  
  There isn't going to be camps, stop bloody stressin.
  I havnt been ostracised by anyone recently, actually. I think u may be projecting a little i hope u can work through that to be more civil to those u disagree with.
  Ill take the downvotes as a compliment ive always liked pushing the boundary of thought crimes.
  
  He literally promised camps on day one, less than a few days ago. Is he lying?
  
  No camps still?
  https://www.axios.com/2024/11/18/trump-mass-deportations-military-national-emergency
  
  Have you been staying under a rock for the past 8 years? When one party starts adopting fascist policies and removing rights from real people/citizens of this country it stops becoming just a difference of opinion. Politics is so polarized nowadays because one group is fighting to help save people, and the other is fighting to just help ONE group of people.
  
  Please enlighten me to what rights are being removed

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