Conversations with Normies

I enjoy talking to my brother about politics because he is, for lack of a better way of putting it, far more normal than I am. He is not passionate about politics, but he's not ignorant about it either. He pays some measure of attention because he's a good citizen who cares about the world around him, but it's not something he's independently especially interested in. There are, of course, a lot more people like him than there are people like me, even though there are a lot more people like me talking about politics online. So chatting with my brother feels like getting a sense of the pulse of normie America (even though of course he's not necessarily representative).

In terms of ideology, my brother is probably best described as a moderate Democrat. His line for the past several years has been pretty consistent in saying that there is a universe where he could imagine voting Republican, but it is not our universe because he fully recognizes that the Republican Party in America today is fully captured by insane people. 

So there was never any question that he'll be voting blue come November. But we happened to have a chat about his current political outlook on things. I present these not as endorsement or non-endorsement, but simply because what he said may be of interest to a readership who I suspect is (like me, unlike him) very much not of the normie bent.

1. He loves Joe Biden. One of the first things he said was that he's annoyed and frustrated by the notion that Biden is "the lesser of two evils" or a sort of shit sandwich you have to swallow given the alternative. My brother thinks Biden is great! He thinks he's had a tremendously successful presidency! In particular, my brother gave Biden a bunch of credit for lowering political temperatures and trying to pursue actual solutions to problems rather than demagoguing and grandstanding. 

Admittedly, my brother started off as a Biden supporter -- he was his favorite candidate at the outset of the 2020 primary (back when David was deciding between Booker and Warren). But now he wonders if he's really alone in that assessment, because so much of the prevailing narrative is centered around how nobody actually likes Joe Biden, they at best tolerate him. My brother is a loud and proud "I like Biden" guy.

2. He's lost patience with Israel's Gaza campaign. We're both Jewish, and while neither of us is super religious, we've both stayed involved in Jewish life as adults (and unlike me, he's visited Israel). He was obviously repelled by what happened on October 7 and thinks Hamas is a despicable terrorist outfit. Nonetheless, his take on the current status of the conflict in Gaza is that at this stage it feels to him as if it is no longer (if it ever was) about Israel's security, and now is just unconstrained vengeance being taken out upon the Palestinian population. He has no trust in or love for Bibi, and thinks he needs to go.

3. He's interested in Freddie DeBoer. That was, of all the names, the person he said he'd been reading recently whose work had been resonating with him -- didn't agree with all of it, but found him thought-provoking particularly on matters of mental health and "wokeness". I confessed that I hadn't thought about Freddie DeBoer in ages, so I couldn't really react to it. I suggested reading Matt Yglesias' "Slow Boring"; he laughed because Yglesias and DeBoer apparently despise each other even as they (in his mind) didn't seem too far apart when it came to tangible policy beliefs.

4. He's skeptical about the impact of "woke" trends. He doesn't identify with the efforts to destroy trans health care or anything like that (again -- he recognizes the GOP is crazy). But he did express concern about what he described as "wokeness", even though he also said he thought that term was clearly imprecise for what he was speaking of since it also captures plenty of activity he fully approves of. 

At first, I assumed he was talking about certain cringy performative activities that I could imagine being grating to someone of his views. But he emphasized that it wasn't just a matter of performance -- in his space (the non-profit world), he felt as if impactful programs that were doing a lot of good in marginalized communities were getting short-changed as donor priorities redirected towards initiatives that could more easily packaged as messaging DEI values (even if they didn't tangibly improve as many lives in the communities they purported to be uplifting). So his grief was partially an objection to performance, but with a tangible kick. I recommended he read Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò; he said he had heard of it but hadn't had the chance to read it.