News Narratives About the Politics of Dating
NPR recently reposted a piece from May that accompanied a segment of All Things Considered. It’s a piece in what has become a genre in our news. It concerns people refusing to date outside of their personal political affinities. For a number of years now, we’ve been seeing these pieces with some regularity, though they may focus on slightly different specifics. You can read it behind this link.
There are patterns to the way these pieces work, with clear social and political forces that explain them. There are also biases at work in the assumptions about political affinity as a measure of a potential person relationships being a change in behavior, and not a change in context and conditions. Those biases are exemplary of underlying assumptions made because of existing, inherited narratives. Questioning those narratives, and their assumptions, is necessary to making better decisions, and I don't think it can be argued we, as a people, need to start making better decisions. In this case, the narratives around political affinity and dating, are indicative of obscuring the fact that we even are making decisions.
One of the biases is in treating if political decisions as if they are divorced from morals, values, and ethics. This has never been true. What has changed is a new portion of the population who are being confronted with the fact aspects of their political decisions they didn't previously associated with moral and ethical foundations, and a fundamentalist extremism being made mainstream. This fundamentalist extremism has existed as part of our politics as long as the country has existed, but it is no longer content with being part of. It now wants to be the only perspective able to wield power. That is a change in the conditions of the political landscape, and its implications are being felt throughout society and culture.
The NPR piece begins by talking to a couple that is not representative of the majority of their age group. It goes on to immediately site another individual who is also unrepresentative of the majority.
Keller, now 21, voted for Vice President Kamala Harris in the fall, largely because he supported her policies on safeguarding abortion access. Rhiannon Costanzo, standing next to him, felt differently. Driven by more conservative views on abortion and immigration, she cast her ballot for President Trump, arguing Harris was too, "extreme."
Keller and Costanzo are more than just politically opposed college students: they've been in a relationship for a year.
By doing this, it is establishing a baseline. It is treating this particular perspective, as if it is the norm and default. It goes on to site statistics showing that political viewpoints and affinities are more important among people who are younger and less important among people who are older. It then states this is a sign that political affinity matters less as one ages, treating this younger cohort as if experience will change their minds, not as if they are reacting to different conditions than existed for previous generations.
From there, it goes on to cite a polling professional who backs up those claims, rhetorically at least. What they say though is important and it gives away what has been consistently left out of these pieces and these conversations. The very first thing that they say as representative of this being a change in behavior in younger people is to say that in the past it would have been more important to ask, “Do you belong to the same church?”
"We do know from some of our past research that younger people are more inclined to seek out that information," he said. "A lot of people in previous generations, they report that they didn't even know the politics of the person they were dating for a good long time because it just wasn't as relevant as other information: 'Do you belong to the same church? What kind of work do you do?'"
This in itself, in more places in the country than not, is an extension and demonstration of values. Within the question, "Do you belong to the same church?" is a statement and question of values. Considering the number of denominations we have in the US, and that even within those denominations there are often significant differences, values are central to it. The question in itself also assumes one attends church. To people who attend church, this is a demonstration of values. Attending the same church, is going to suggest they have a similar enough value system to investigate whether the person they are asking the question of is a good fit beyond that.
Consider for a moment the divide in churchgoing people about whether or not they might date an atheist. Consider as well the reality of that question for an atheist in a country as religious as the US. Take into consideration, what it means for the atheist population who make up about 20% of the US populace. What would it mean for their ability and likelihood to be able to find partnership if they were to begin to rule out churchgoing people? Of course, a conservative leaning think tank doesn't want you to think about that, and this NPR piece doesn't bother asking you to.
All of that, is before we even get into the number of different religions, much less denominations and perspectives within Christianity. The word church has a specific connotation, doesn't it?
This is a statement of values. Values have political implications. They have always had political implications. We are seeing those implications playing playing out in a way that calls attention to the falsity of the assumption of shared values. We are seeing this because a small minority of religious fundamentalists and political extremists (often, but not always the same individuals) through corruption, and the impotence and irresponsibility of our political class, have been able to begin to enforce their values on the majority.
There have been people in the country who have always had to consider the political implications of their values in their everyday lives, and who have had to contend with the political implications of an illusory majority values in their daily lives. They are far more likely to be people of color, people with disabilities, and other marginalized groups. Ask yourself how much we know about what it was like to be queer in the 1940s or 1950s? The majority of the country only has the most vague idea. Queer history, in the collective discourse, still begins somewhere around the 1970s, with a handful of examples prior, as kind of nod to the fact that being queer wasn't anything new, that it has existed throughout history. What was it like to have what most people would think of as a severe disability, prior to say... the 1980s? There's a kind of vague sense that it wasn't good, that we have evolved to a better place now, but there's no real sense of what made it so not good. Martin Luther King Jr. observed, “I think it is one of the tragedies –– one of the shameful tragedies –– that 11 o’clock on Sunday morning is one of the most segregated hours, if not the most segregated hour, in Christian America”
We have to have these disciplines, Black History, Queer History, Disability History, because without having them, without people (almost always people who are from outside the framework of the already accepted narratives) to do the work of investigating and revealing that history, they have been erased. They are footnotes to the history of Great Men, right? There was once a Kennedy who was... something. Rosemary, right? It's necessary, but it doesn't change the fact that the greater public still has this sense of this being ancillary, as being separate histories, when they're not. These are all concurrent histories, created at the same time, and the decisions of the people who are central to those narratives about what we are as a nation, and who the people in that nation have been, shaped that history.
The Black Lives Matter movement, and the protests in 2020 were a direct reaction to the political implications of the majority's values. One of the reasons they existed, was to create confrontation within the majority about the results of those values. It is, however, a new experience for the majority of white America to experience values outside of their own as having political implications in their daily lives. Part of what they are being confronted with, is the degree to which whiteness has never been representative of shared experience or values, and is a falsely constructed political identity, created to serve power by obscuring and subsuming cultural identities through a fiction of racial identity, and by extension, racial solidarity. Power currently finds it unnecessary to wholly protect that fiction, and one of the ways it is producing confusion it to protect some aspects of it, while attacking others.
When we get to someone in the age range that represents the majority of the group being discussed, they state that this is about morals, directly:
Politics is a red line for 36-year-old Maria Nozzi of Chester County, Pennsylvania who participated in NPR's survey.
"I wouldn't be able to be in a relationship with somebody who doesn't have the same moral viewpoints that I do," said Nozzi, who leans progressive and says her boyfriend is aligned with her politically. "It's not even political discourse. It's what you think is right and what you think is wrong."
And then yet another:
31-year-old Abby Smith and her husband are Republicans living in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas. She has watched couples navigate having different political views, including her parents.
"From what I've seen, either the political views converge or they wind up getting divorced," she said, adding it was the latter for her parents. "I just think as you build a life with someone, you start raising kids, these things tend to come out more."
She argued that lines have blurred between political and cultural issues, making ideological differences potentially harder to reconcile.
"Now so many … cultural issues are part of politics as well that essentially if you had different politics, you would have a completely different world view," Smith said.
Look at that last bit again... "Now so many … cultural issues are part of politics as well that essentially if you had different politics, you would have a completely different world view."
Cultural issues have always been political, because values are derived from culture. Cultural issues are a central part of why politics exists and what democracy, as a structure of government, is meant to help navigate compromise about. The combination of the confrontation with the way the majority's values have implications, in the forms of BLM, #MeToo, the surge in labor activism and organizing, and an extremist minority enforcing its values on the majority in reaction to those is just making the fiction that cultural issues and the political aren't inherently intertwined impossible to believe for a larger portion of white people. Their whose previous experience was not being confronted with that because the conditions allowed them to avoid that the majority they believe they are part of, never actually existed.
When we go back to this article specifically, it is capped with the same couple it began with, reinforcing the idea that they are the baseline, the normal, when the article itself cites evidence they are not the baseline, not the norm, among their age group and cohort.
Was interracial marriage, even interracial dating, a cultural or political issue? It was both, wasn't it? Spike Lee's Jungle Fever was released in 1991, and its existence is a demonstration that even by then, anxieties about the cultural pressures on interracial relationships were still persistent. Loving vs. Virginia was decided in 1961, decreeing the practice of states outlawing interracial marriage unconstitutional, and twenty-four years later, those anxieties and those societal pressures were still evident. Storytelling about interracial relationships and social pressures was prevalent in the eighties and nineties, as those of us who experienced them can attest to, for this reason.
It's fairly recent for religion to not be as central to these questions about dating too. If you look back at the 1920s, there are few places in the country where a marriage between a Protestant and a Catholic wouldn't have been scandalous. In the 1980s, my mother, a lapsed Catholic, married a man who was Jewish, though he didn't attend synagogue or temple or adhere to religious doctrine, and that was not without some initial friction from the more conservative in her family. Overwhelmingly, their values, moral outlook, shaped by their experiences, complemented and ran parallel to each other. They were post war babies, from the suburbs, who were white (as least as the majority of the population perceived them) and straight. Understand when I make the distinction about how people are perceived, I'm doing so from the perspective that there is no such thing as white. That doesn't mean it's not a culturally derived perception, and depending on one's background, Jewish people may or may not be white.
My grandfather, spent my childhood telling me I needed to find a nice Italian girl to marry, with all that encompassed. Of course, he was in the minority at that point, but he wasn't in the minority of his generation either. Why? Because for him and his generation, that was a specific cultural experience. It came with and instilled a certain set of values and experiences. It was the dominant experience for that generation, inside that side of my family, but I was already two generations out from when Italian was granted full acceptance as white. His generation experienced that change. For mine, outside that very specific, limited context of that side of my family, Italian didn't matter and only had a very superficial meaning.
At what point in history, American or otherwise would it have seemed sensible to say, "I'm going to try to build a romantic relationship with someone whose morality and values are in direct contradiction to mine, and to my well being"? But, if you instead say, "I'm going to try to build a romantic relationship with someone whose politics are in direct contradiction to mine," it becomes a different consideration in this genre of news. Why? Because of the need to erase the fact that politics are significantly informed by moral and ethical frameworks derived from cultural backgrounds. There is no purely "rational" politics, as politicians, their various mouthpieces and too many in the news industry are constantly trying to convince us. What is and isn't rational, looks different, depending on the moral and ethical framework one is working from.
What we can see, from a history that brings all of this in, is that erasing or obscuring the degree to which "politics" involves morality and values functions to also erase and obscure decision points. A thing you don't think about is a thing you don't make decisions about.
I can provide and example from my own experience, in a way that would be clear in the actual definition of "practical." For a number of years, I had a job in the motorcycle industry. The place I was employed had a dress code that amounted to "Don't make the customers nervous." For the majority of the time I worked there, a motorcycle was my only means of transportation. In a very short period of time, I decided I was wearing jeans, boots and a black shirt, with the occasional mixing in a shirt from one of the brands we sold. Why? It was practical, in the sense that I didn't have to make decisions about what I was wearing everyday. Being on a motorcycle everyday meant jeans and boots were at the nexus of safety and comfort that was practical. As for shirts, black is always acceptable, and in a commercial environment, wearing something from a brand a business sells is encouraged. One of ways it was practical was removing decisions. I didn't have to decide what to wear everyday. I gave myself a de facto uniform.
When we get into the context of politics, of which culture is a crucial influence, and vice versa, removing decisions has one result. That result is that power makes the decisions for the rest of us. I know, from experience, there are people who are not outright bigots, who in no way believe that to be Black, to be queer, to be a woman is to be inferior, and yet, andthey will also say, "Why does it always have to be about race? Not everything is about race. Not everything is about identity." They're not wrong that not everything is about race or other matters of identity.
At the same time, it cannot be ignored that one of the most important functions of this idea of a "default" identity has served, one of the most important functions this sense of "default" identity has served, is to erase decision points. Whiteness is the most glaring example of this. There is no central cultural experience. There is no central spring or source of values, morality and ethics. It is a fabricated political identity, created to erase all of the other aspects of cultural identity and experiences.
Why is this fundamentalist minority going to the lengths to enforce its values on the majority, with all of the risks that involves, including that the majority might just decide the single biggest threat to it is that minority? Because the sense of "default" identity has been faltering in the last few decades. That is what the reaction to BLM, #MeToo, and labor organizing demonstrates. There's evidence in the celebration of Luigi Mangione's murder of a United Health CEO and the reaction to Charlie Kirk's murder as well. Without this false sense of "default identity," the influence of the fundamentalist minority in shaping consensus is severely diminished.
This is at the core of the struggle within the Democratic Party right now, and why is has been unable to effectively counter the authoritarian power grab. What leadership are appealing to is the sense of consensus that existed before this fundamentalist minority decided they had succeeding in engineering the conditions to make possible, and for conditions to make necessary, the obliterations of the conditions that consensus created. Why? Because the only way this fundamentalist minority continues to exert the degree of power it has in creating that consensus, is if that sense of "default identity" is intact to erase decision points. "Woke" and "identity politics" as they are being used in our current political narratives, is the attempt to marginalize and to treat as morally or intellectually bankrupt a larger portion of the majority reacting to the morality of decisions made in service of that consensus.
What Democratic Party leadership is saying is, "We can create consensus with our opponents, so long as we can operate from the foundation of this default identity." What is being painted far left is some combination of people who understand the previous consensus failed, because its based in a false sense of default identity, and people who realize that there is no going back. With or without reconstituting a willingness to compromise and come to a consensus around the consensus formed based on an illusion of default identity, the fundamentalists are waging war on concept of consensus itself. They've rejected it, which is why they've rejected democracy.
Why would it serve the Democratic Party as an organization and institution to continue trying to convince people of this? Because the ability to make decisions without constraint or opposition, especially where government and law are concerned, is power. It doesn't matter, in a very practical sense, whether those assenting to the use of power do so because they trust the entity with that power or if they don't ever consider the choices of how that power can be used. It means, the entity with that power, gets to the make the choice, having only to consider the least amount of input or possible opposition.
This is why people who experience marginalization understand what Elie Wiesel meant when he said, "Neutrality favors the oppressor" in his 1986 Nobel acceptance speech. There is no practical difference between deciding not to make a decision and not knowing there was a decision to be made.
This is the connection between the factually non-existent sense of "default identity" and that the previous model of consensus is invisible for so much of the population. They are designed, in combination, to remove and obscure decision points.
This is something, we as a people, if we engage with what we call news have to be aware of. The consensus they are calling back to, failed. One of the core conceits most responsible for that failure, is the sense of "default" identity it was based on. It failed in being accurate, and in its failure to be accurate failed to address the needs of what is now a majority of the nation. Demographically, those of us who are getting buried by the decisions of power and wealth are far more "diverse" than it could contain, in the superficial, obscuring way diversity has come to be deployed.
[Note: I am going to be posting a video, as a kind of addendum to this piece, dealing specifically relating to aspects of neurodiversity, communication, and specifically, the way many experience what are perceived as straightforward questions. It didn't seem to have a place in this piece, but may be of interest to some people.]