What Ties Still Bind?

On love and friendship and politics

The cast of Family Ties

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The 80s hit show Family Ties captured a very specific moment in American pop culture. With Reaganism ascendant, hippie boomer nostalgia ran strong. The story of the Keaton family was a product of that nostalgia. It was a coping tool for mystified parents like Steve and Elyse, pining for the Age of Aquarius that never came, now struggling to communicate with a rising generation of yuppie conservatives. That rising generation was embodied in Alex P. Keaton, a charming, ambitious teen who constantly hymns the praises of capitalism and feels more at ease with his grandfathers than his father. Conservatives and liberals alike fell in love with this character, because they projected onto him their own hopes for their own sons. Conservatives hoped for a revival of pre-60s America. Liberals hoped that Alex’s hard edges would soften with age and experience. For all his posturing, Alex was still a nice kid at heart, still his father’s son. At times they might clash, they might confuse each other, but they would always love each other. Love, peace, and tolerance, the show-writers gently proposed, would always win the day.

That was television. In the real world, a new leftist order was indeed preparing to supplant Reagan Republicanism. Yet its reign would be anything but peaceful or tolerant.

Conservative journalist Daniel McCarthy recently developed this observation in a thread arguing that real-life Alex P. Keatons grew up to be cultural leftists, because the culture gave them no choice. If they wanted to remain respectable, they would either cross the aisle and become Democrats or become the sort of neocon “mediocrities” despised by McCarthy’s wing of the GOP. They certainly wouldn’t put up a serious fight on messy third-rail topics like abortion or the eventual redefinition of marriage, and they would punch right when it was politically expedient to distance themselves from Christian “extremists.”

As for the Keaton parents’ gentle leftist ethos, McCarthy proposes it “died without heir.” If you’re a traditional conservative, maybe Steve and Elyse would have tolerantly agreed to disagree with you. Maybe they could even have been your friends. But in 2024, heaven help you if you fall into the hands of an angry leftist.

If I wanted to poke at McCarthy’s particular brand of American conservatism, I would point out that Donald Trump also represents a form of cultural capitulation, which sits in ironic tension with McCarthy’s contempt for the squishy neocon right. However, he’s not wrong that we live in an America where it’s harder than ever to nurture all kinds of relationships across a political divide, and he’s not wrong that this is in large part because the authoritarian left wanted it that way. Consider the reactions to a recent speech where J. D. Vance encouraged Americans not to cut off family or close friends over political differences, because some things are more important than politics. On Twitter, I scrolled through reaction after reaction violently rejecting what would seem like the most anodyne thing a vice-presidential candidate could say in the runup to a tight election. Those violent rejections consistently came from one political side. Guess which?

Last month, a writing professor penned a “career suicide note” announcing that while he’d been a lifelong Democrat, this year he would be voting for Trump. He said he was doing this “for the surveyor, the farmer, the HVAC man, the nurse, the hairstylist, the Deadhead, the veteran, and my fellow adjunct professors who have told me their stories about being bullied by the Democrats, their friends and family, and their colleagues at work.” It was also “for the young Black woman in my class last year who, on the day of Kamala Harris’s visit to campus, said, ‘You’re going to hate me, Dr. Armstrong, but I’m not going. I’m voting for Donald Trump.’” The professor was shocked. Why did this young woman assume as a matter of course that he would not just disagree with her, but hate her? What had happened to our country?

Predictably, no self-reflection can be detected when people on the left decry “polarization.” The actors who played Steve and Elyse Keaton advance their own version of McCarthy’s thesis in an interview from 2021, except they seem to think everything is Trump’s fault. Reflecting on whether Alex would have been a Trumpite, both argue no, because in the battle between Alex’s mind and heart, “what always won was his heart.” They suggest it wouldn’t even be possible to make comedy out of a family divided over Trump, because our political divisions aren’t funny anymore. Our disagreements are too bitter now, too toxic. But whence the toxicity? They don’t consider that it might pre-date Trump, and they certainly won’t consider that it might not be exclusive to the right.

On the Harris campaign trail, Barack Obama was also recently seen lamenting how “divisive” and “bitter” our discourse has become. Conservative historian Miles Smith dryly suggested that “Being the first president to sue nuns for being nuns probably didn’t help.” (This in reference to the administration’s mandate that the Little Sisters of the Poor pay for contraception.) Even before his presidency, Obama was an abortion extremist before it was cool, opposing a partial-birth abortion ban that even his fellow Democrat senators approved.

Of course, abortion was very much a live issue in the 80s as well. Indeed, it was the primary issue that galvanized the Religious Right. Hillary Clinton coined the phrase “vast right-wing conspiracy” in the 90s, referring to people like the crazy pro-life Christian activists who protested outside abortion clinics and willingly got themselves arrested. (I still vividly remember the “Proud Member of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy” bumper sticker on our family’s first car.)

Ironically, getting arrested at a protest is the sort of radically uncool, countercultural move Steve and Elyse Keaton would have identified with. In one episode, they dust off some old signs and sally forth to protest a nuclear power plant on Thanksgiving, then spend the holiday in jail because they won’t sign a statement promising never to protest again. Flanked by embarrassed relatives on either side, they refuse to compromise their principles, even when their fellow protesters take the easy out. In the end, the rest of the family moves their feasting to the jail in solidarity.

No doubt Steve and Elyse would have voted for Bill Clinton. But, hypothetically, could they still have looked at those pro-lifers getting dragged off to jail and recognized some kind of kinship, some shared sense that it was worth looking silly for what you believed in? Perhaps. Then again, perhaps even Steve and Elyse were already idealized representations of the boomer leftist. After all, they’re of a generation with celebrities like Stephen King, Mark Hamill, and Rob Reiner, all of whom are as vociferously, intolerantly anti-conservative as any young TikToker today.

This year, Reiner released a documentary called God & Country that indiscriminately paints American Christian conservatives in the most unflattering, sinister light possible, using Trump as clickbait but obviously hostile to conservatism writ large. There is not even a pretense of respect for Christians with sincerely held convictions about preserving life, marriage, or a Christian sexual ethic. There is no good-faith attempt made to distinguish between people who aggressively stormed the Capitol on January 6 and the young pro-life women who jumped for joy outside the Capitol when Roe vs. Wade was overturned. All of it is thrown in a bucket labeled Christian Nationalism, scored with ominous music, and treated as prima facie a Threat to Our Constitutional Order. A vast right-wing conspiracy, you could say. Worst of all, various self-styled “evangelical” Christian voices allowed themselves to be interviewed for the piece, enthusiastically throwing their own fellow American Christians under the bus.

Still, there’s a certain logic to Reiner’s hostility. We are talking, after all, about matters of life and death here. We’re talking about morality and autonomy, and whether the former has any bearing on the latter. In short, we’re talking about the sort of things that a cozy show like Family Ties was never going to touch (except in cute little throwaway lines like when Elyse recalls “that march in Paris that we thought was for peace but turned out to be for legalized prostitution”). It’s easy to act out a funny argument about the free market, or nuclear weapons, or some other topic that doesn’t strike at the very core of our personhood. But the business of politics is the business of governing according to someone’s vision of the common good. In the clash of political visions, a clash of moral visions is inevitable. And such clashes are, in their essence, zero-sum.

So what does that mean, then? What does it mean for families? What does it mean for friendships?

I don’t think there are easy answers to these questions, and I can’t speak for every conservative who would try to supply those answers. I myself am among the majority of Americans who deeply care about someone they deeply disagree with. I can’t hide what I think, but this is not to be confused with hostility towards anyone who thinks differently, merely because they think differently. I do freely admit that I’m not fond of people who are bullying or self-righteous, or using a public platform to promote evil things, most especially if they do so while claiming to be Christians of some stripe. But I simply can’t hate the friend, family member or ordinary neighbor walking down the street while liberal. I’m not allowed to anyway, because of the whole Christian business, but I don’t even want to. I can hate the ideas they’re voting for, I can hate the wicked people feeding them those ideas, but I can’t hate them. It’s not in my nature. This is why I got very twitchy the other month when I saw people on the right calling for a random Home Depot worker to lose her job over a dumb comment about Trump’s near-assassination on Facebook. Yes, conservatives unfairly lose their jobs all the time in a left-dominated culture. Yes, I do believe we’re in a culture war. No, I don’t think that means you can justify just anything against any fellow American on the grounds that “this is war.”

I personally would like to live in an America where people who disagree with me still want to work and play and create things with me. I would like to live in an America where we could share ideas and solve problems together. An America where neighbors can still be neighbors even if their yard signs cancel each other. An America where some ties, in some sense, can still bind.

I don’t think I’m alone in this, and I’d like to believe I’m joined by a sizable number of people to my left as well as to my right. I believe that left-leaning percentage has grown in recent years as the even farther left has ruthlessly ostracized anyone who fails their purity tests. Which doesn’t make the outcasts conservative, but it has at least made them look at conservatives more tolerantly, especially when they realize we don’t demand they join our tribe to be our friends. We never did.

This is not to say that deep disagreements can be waved away or trivialized. It’s not to say that friends and family won’t argue. It’s not to say that we can’t break each other’s hearts over things that matter, because they really do matter. They matter so much that sometimes it’s just not possible for two people who used to be close to be close anymore, to even speak anymore. Sometimes it’s not possible for two people to marry.

And still, to quote a Christmas carol, charity stands watching, and faith holds wide the door. The door must be open, the heart must be open to the hope that friendship is still possible. My door must be open even when my political opponents’ doors are shut and double-locked. Because someday, someone might come knocking. Someone might need a friend. And who am I to say no?