This Election Season, Don’t Let Politics Destroy Your Family

As the November election nears, all eyes are fixed on the two major party candidates. But occasionally, we get glimpses of the candidates’ extended families—and the picture is quite grim. In recent weeks, for example, the New York Times has covered estrangements between Kamala Harris and her father, and Tim Walz and his brother. The waning days of the summer saw a group of Kennedy family members condemningthen-candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and of course Trump has long found himself at odds with multiple extended members of his clan. In most of these cases (Harris is an apparent exception), family estrangements are a direct result of political disagreements. Walz’s brother, is a Republican. RFK Jr.’s family was outraged that he endorsed Trump. And so on.

These types of family fissures may seem inevitable in a modern, polarized political landscape. And the fact that they’re taking place among the political class isn’t surprising. Cornell sociologist Karl Pillemer has found that more than a quarter of Americans are estranged from family members, and that differences over values are among the chief causes of those estrangements. Psychologist and author Joshua Coleman found something similar, arguing that family conflicts historically arose over resources, but today they are “often psychological rather than material—and therefore even harder to resolve.”

Anecdotally, that sounds about right. Nearly every day I see social media posts urging people to cut off their loved ones for having incorrect political views. Years ago, the leader of a news organization I once worked for famously (and I think incorrectly) declared that “there are not two sides” on many political issues, and today many have run with that sentiment, exorcizing from their lives people they believe fall on the wrong side of history.

But political estrangements are tragedies. They break apart family support networks, so that moms and dads lose childrearing support from grandparents, or the elderly languish in isolation. Loneliness, already an epidemic, increases. On a deeper level, these types of rifts imply that family is simply less important than ideas.

The good news, however, is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Politics has not always been the great divider it is today, and even now in many parts of the world people continue to prioritize relationships over ideals. We could learn a thing or two from such cultures, and, along with a better understanding of psychological history, we might be able to find ways to prioritize family relationships even during these times of heightened political tension. It is possible to put family first.

What I’m alluding to here is a concept known as WEIRD psychology, which was pioneered by Harvard anthropologistand evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich. In this case, WEIRD is an acronym for western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. Henrich has used the concept to explain how western culture evolved in unique ways during the Middle Ages, such that it managed to economically pull ahead of other regions. A key part of this process was a gradual deemphasizing of extended family tribes, which gave the West its peculiar sense of individualism. Henrich’s thesis boils down, in part, to the idea that the West is unique because it ended up conceiving of family in different, more limited ways compared to other parts of the world. And for that reason, WEIRD psychology occasionally comes up in discussions about family because it helps explain why people with western European heritage tend to have less formal family networks than those from other places.

However, buried in Henrich’s 2020 book on WEIRD psychology is a useful discussion on how we westerners tend to have a unique outlook on the transgressions of our loved ones. Henrich divides relationships into two categories, “universalistic” and “particularistic,” and illustrates them with a hypothetical: Imagine you’re riding in a friend’s car when the friend, while speeding, hits a pedestrian. When the case goes to court, do you testify—or, in this case, lie—that your friend was actually driving the speed limit? Or do you decline to lie on behalf of the friend, even if it means that friend could face dire legal penalties?

If you refuse to help your friend in this scenario, you’re probably a WEIRD westerner who has “universalistic” relationships with the people around you. Principles—truth, justice, obedience to the law, etc.—override commitments to even close relationships.

On the other hand, Henrich points out that in much of the world, people have “particularistic” relationships in which loyalty to their loved ones is more important than other principles. It may sound weird to western ears, but according to Henrich, loyalty is considered the “right” and “morally correct” behavior in such cultures, even if loyalty conflicts with another principle such as obeying the law. As examples of such cultures, Henrich points to Venezuela, Nepal, and South Korea—countries that demonstrate how particularistic cultures exist everywhere in both developing and developed regions.

Emulating cultures that make family loyalty a priority seems entirely doable. It’s a choice. And that act of putting family first would be a deeply symbolic gesture, suggesting that family transcends whatever issue du jour happens to be dominating headlines.

Thankfully, few of us will ever have to decide if we’re going to commit perjury on behalf of a friend or family member. The “passenger’s dilemma” is merely a thought experiment meant to capture the way different cultures prioritize loyalty. And in a testament to my own engrained WEIRDism, I would never suggest breaking the law on behalf of a friend.

But ever since I was first introduced to this idea it has struck me as a useful way to navigate more minor intra-family conflicts—particularly political ones. After all, family members with problematic-to-me political views aren’t breaking the law, but they are breaking my fundamental sense of right and wrong. From where I stand, they’re committing a transgression. And as a WEIRD westerner, a transgression feels like it ought to outweigh loyalty. Indeed, that seems to be exactly what’s happening in many of the values-related estrangements that Pillemer and Coleman have documented.

That also seems to be what’s happening in Gov. Walz’s family. Unlike former president Trump and RFK Jr., whose politics merely accentuated rifts that also stem from years of what we might generously call colorful living, Walz and his brother seem to be largely at odds because they have different political views. It’s the perfect distillation of WEIRD psychology; their connection as brothers is weaker than their opinions on key issues.

Imagine, though, if the Walz brothers—and multitudes of people like them—could nudge their relationships in a more particularistic direction so that political transgressions were less important than the connection between family. If they could be just a tad less WEIRD, they might see brotherly loyalty as the greatest good. 

No one can entirely escape their cultural background, of course, and those of us from highly individualistic WEIRD cultures will no doubt always live inside that paradigm. But emulating, even if only in a small way, cultures that make family loyalty a priority seems entirely doable. It’s a choice. And that act of putting family first would be a deeply symbolic gesture, suggesting that family transcends whatever issue du jour happens to be dominating headlines.

All of this is really just a long way of saying something simple: During this season of polarization, rifts within our families over politics are not inevitable. We can put family relationships above everything else. That doesn’t mean everyone has to agree all of the time. Indeed, the point is that we won’t always agree. But it does mean that people with divergent views on controversial issues—say, abortion or the war in Gaza—can still break bread together because the most important thing is their relationship with each other.

In the end, few of us can change the course of geopolitical conflicts or decide how to spend billions in taxpayer dollars. None of us will single handedly decide the outcome of the election in November. But we can be a very real force in the lives of the people we love by looking to places where—to borrow from Henrich—the “right” thing to do is to show loyalty. And who knows, perhaps if we put our relationships first, we might even find ourselves meeting in the middle more often as well.

Jim Dalrymple II is a journalist and author of the Nuclear Meltdown newsletter about families. He also covers housing for Inman and has previously worked at BuzzFeed News and the Salt Lake Tribune.