There is an editorial genre kept alive at liberal publications around the country that is focused on questions about what to do with conservative kin and how best to prevent family members from similarly adopting viewpoints at odds with leftist values.

The HuffPost, for instance, published a long-winded essay from a stereotypical Bluesky progressive about whether she should cut her "right-wing, Trump-loving in-laws out of [her] kids' lives."

New York magazine ran an essay last year from a mother of white boys expressing terror over their potential slide to the right and over "having a flesh-and-blood oppressor-in-training eating [her] spaghetti and meatballs."

The Delaware News Journal published an open letter in December in which the former president of the Delaware teachers' union defended the decision to ditch Trump-supporting family members, claiming that "it comes from a deep sense of betrayal, a need to preserve our mental and emotional well-being, and the refusal to stay silent in the face of harm."

Obama speechwriter David Litt recently contributed to the genre with a piece in the New York Times titled "Is It Time to Stop Snubbing Your Right-Wing Family?"

Litt ultimately answered yes, that "keeping the door open to unlikely friendship isn't a betrayal of principles — it's an affirmation of them."

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However, prior to signaling his beneficence, Litt provided Times readers with a reminder both of the elitism that has helped the Democratic Party alienate much of the electorate and of Democrats' chronic abuse of those who failed to fall in line during the pandemic.

At the outset, Obama's former speechwriter noted that he "felt a civic duty to be rude" to his wife's younger brother.

"He lifted weights to death metal; I jogged to Sondheim. I was one of President Barack Obama's speechwriters and had an Ivy League degree; he was a huge Joe Rogan fan and went on to get his electrician's license," wrote Litt.

Although the speechwriter did not dwell on these differences, they appear to fit thematically with voters' understanding reflected in a poll recently conducted by the Democratic super PAC Unite the Country — namely that the Democratic Party is "out of touch," "woke," and "weak."

According to Litt, the imagined chasm between him and his conservative brother-in-law grew during the pandemic, particularly when the in-law refused to take the COVID-19 vaccine — a decision that various studies and recent warnings from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration have vindicated, especially when it comes to healthy men.

'It felt like he was tearing up the social contract that, until that point, I'd imagined we shared.'

The Ivy League Democrat admitted that had the man "been a friend rather than a family member, I probably would have cut off contact completely."

Although Litt did not end up cutting off his brother-in-law, he indicated that he was for a period of time strategically unfriendly, claiming that such treatment of the unvaccinated "felt like the right thing to do" — a tactic then advocated in the pages of USA Today.

Democrats at the time were apparently willing to go far beyond unfriendliness in their efforts to bring the unvaccinated to heel.

In a Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey of 1,016 likely voters conducted in January 2022, pollsters asked, "Would you strongly favor, somewhat favor, somewhat oppose, or strongly oppose a proposal to limit the spread of the coronavirus by having federal or state governments require that citizens temporarily live in designated facilities or locations if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine?"

Whereas 71% of all voters — and 84% of Republicans — signaled opposition to throwing the unvaccinated in quarantine camps, 45% of Democrats said they strongly or somewhat favored the proposal.

According to the same poll, 48% of Democrats supported federal or state governments fining or imprisoning Americans who questioned the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines on social media, TV, radio, or in digital publications.

The same month that nearly half of polled Democrats expressed a desire to see their fellow citizens locked up for wrongthink or tossed into camps for avoiding an experimental vaccine, the Los Angeles Times ran a piece suggesting it was "not necessarily the wrong reaction" to "celebrate or exult in the deaths of vaccine opponents."

"Turning down a vaccine during a pandemic seemed like a rejection of science and self-preservation," wrote Litt. "It felt like he was tearing up the social contract that, until that point, I'd imagined we shared."

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While certain that conservatives will continue to be shunned over the MAGA agenda — in particular over President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown and over Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s reform of the medical establishment — Litt questioned the efficacy of Democrat cancel culture, suggesting that "it's counterproductive."

In what might be the most telling sentence in the piece, Obama's Democratic speechwriter characterized as "radical" the notion that individuals can like each other despite disapproving of each other's political choices.

More in Common, a research outfit that studies social division, noted in a 2019 study concerning the root causes of political polarization that "Americans have a deeply distorted understanding of each other. We call this America's 'Perception Gap.'"

According to More in Common, Democrats have a much wider perception gap, "likely because they have fewer Republican friends." The likelihood of Democrats reporting most of their friends sharing the same political beliefs increases depending on their level of educational attainment, whereas the likelihood remains flat for Republicans.

Although he claimed shunning family with opposing views wasn't worthwhile, Litt made sure to indicate that ostracizing strangers was still okay, claiming he'd avoid White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller on account of his supposed "odiousness."

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