Where Do Our Politics Come From?

In Times as Fraught as These, It's Vital to Know Why We Believe What We Believe

In moments as fraught as these, in a country as divided as ours, when many among us wield their views like knives, it is hard not to wonder where our politics come from.

I don’t mean our national politics. It is important to understand that too, of course. But assessing the factors shaping the trends and beliefs of more than 330 million people is bound to be an exercise in guesswork, generalizations and viewing the world through the distortionary lens of too few data points.

No, I mean our own personal politics. How do we become the political animals we are? Where do our beliefs come from? Why are they worth fighting over? Why do we let them shape our lives in the way they do.

I was thinking of this today because it was too hot to go outside. The temperature of the flagstones on our patio was so scorching that my dog retreated to our fireplace, curled up and essentially wrote the day off. So, I settled in to watch something.

I had seen a clip of “Albert Brooks: Defending My Life,” the documentary Rob Reiner made about his lifelong friend on HBO and had for a while been meaning to watch the whole thing. So, that’s what I did. I believe and have believed for essentially all of my life that Albert Brooks is one of the most gifted and important comic voices that modern America has produced.

Brooks and his movies and short films and his comedy have been hugely influential to me. Among other things they were among the reasons I ended up doing foreign policy and political analysis. Because, originally I would have loved to have a career like his and in fact, for the first decade or so of my career when I was a writer and theater and TV director, he was a kind of a north star for me. But ultimately, I realized that he had a kind of genius that I didn’t have, that I would always fall short in that work. (Visionary theater directors like Julie Taymor had the same effect on me. I watched her work in awe and recognized I could never do that.)

The Zip Code of My Zeitgeist

While I have followed Brooks’ work closely throughout my life and come in particular to see his work as a director offering perspectives that really hit home for me, I do not think of him as a political thinker—although I do enjoy his occasional political commentary on Twitter. But his zeitgeist is in the same zipcode as my zeitgeist. And watching the movie made me think of the way my generation’s thoughts have evolved. There is in his work a persistent note of saying the things people are thinking but seldom express…and of our obligation to say those things…that I associate with having grown up in the 70s and 80s.  

And certainly, our political views are shaped by the times in which we live and to a degree by those voices, authors, artists that speak to us, that get under our skins and into our psyches. But it was none of that that made me sit down to write this.

Rather, during the film there was a scene from Brooks’ movie “Mother” in which he plays opposite his on-screen mother, Debbie Reynolds. Interspersed with the scene there is a conversation between Brooks and Reiner about the origins of the scene. Brooks realized that his mother, once a singer who gave up her career to raise him and his three brothers, on some level resented his success, that she was in a very human way jealous.

This resonated deeply with me this afternoon as it did when I first saw the scene. It made me think of my own relationship with both of my parents. Both were formidable people who enjoyed considerable success. My father was a scientist and academic. My mother wrote and edited books while also raising my brother, sister and I. Both valued—no venerated—writers and the world of ideas above all things. (One of the big fights I had with my father when I was in high school and a particularly fraught period of being mesmerized by show business was when I said in passing that I thought Lenny Bruce was a genius and he got furious and spent what seemed like the better part of an evening explaining that people misused the world genius all the time and that I just did not understand the term. He tried to help me with that.)

The Power of the Dining Room Table

So, it is no surprise that I ultimately gave up my theatre and TV ambitions and started writing about the kinds of “serious” things that we talked about around our dining room table. Yes, politics and foreign policy, presidential elections and Mideast peace talks, and all of it laced with passion and a requirement for intellectual rigor. You think I overstate but I can’t tell you how many meals were interrupted by one parent or another debating the historical context or roots of some issue and them leaping up from the table to get the appropriate reference volume from our library to resolve the question once and for all. It was twisted and wonderful and today I have to tell you, I learned a lot more at dinner about the Byzantine Empire and the Treaty of Westphalia than most kids.

When I wrote about these things in major publications or spoke of them on television or, amazingly, at a certain point in my life started writing books about them, I think I expected them to beam with pride. But if that was how they felt, they had a funny way of expressing it. They would be very interested in the mechanics of my writing while I was writing. My father in particular would goad me, always asking when I would be finished with whatever book it was that I was working on.

But then oddly, when it came time for the book parties or the books came out, crickets. Oh, polite words were exchanged. But my mother always had a keen eye for typos. And my Dad always wanted to make sure there was a next book in the pipeline. And after a while, I had this realization that was exactly the one that Albert Brooks had. My parents on some level, despite all their success and considerable…and yes, I’ll use the word here properly…genius, were a little intimidated by my books and TV appearances and the like. Not that I was ever a particularly big cheese. But they could not look at what I was doing without having that very normal reaction that we all have of seeing it in the context of their own lives and ambitions.

We were very close. I miss them terribly. But I did go through what we all ultimately grow through and started to see my parents not as the demi-gods we imagine they are when we’re kids but as real people, warts and all. And to be honest, there is comfort in that and it makes the lessons of their lives resonate all the more.

Both parents, as you might have guessed from the heated conversations around the dining room table, were politically engaged. My mother was on the board of the local Democratic Party in the very Republican New Jersey suburb in which I grew up. I remember her encouraging us to “trick or treat for UNICEF” and then getting in a big fight with a neighbor who yelled at us for doing so, saying UNICEF was a commie plot. I also remember going door-to-door with delivering flyers in support of the presidential candidacy of Eugene McCarthy for president in 1968.

My Mom was a liberal and proud of it. My Dad was more idiosyncratic. His upbringing as a boy in Austria included stints in camps and at events organized by Zionist groups and in particular those following the thinking of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, head of the revisionist Zionist movement. His mother, when they escaped the Nazis and came to the U.S. worked as a seamstress and was a proud member of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.

In my home growing up, the big heroes were men like Martin Luther King. I remember watching television in our kitchen when the news of his death was announced and rushing in to the dinner party my parents were having to tell them. The place fell silent. There was weeping and there was anger. The guests soon filed out and we listened to news reports on WCBS News Radio 88 well into the night.

Come to think of it, when I got various jobs in the government—no doubt to impress them with my focus on the big issues—whether it was serving as an aide to Congressman Stephen J. Solarz or later as first as Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade in the Clinton Administration and later as Acting Under Secretary, they were also pretty underwhelmed. My Dad responded to my phone call telling him I was joining the Clinton Administration with a pause and then the question, “How much does it pay?”

Why We Must Be Political

But the one thing that always elicited their vocal support was when I would write something or go on TV and say something that pushed back on the advance on the right wing in America and championed the kind of values of inclusion, opportunity and justice that they felt were so essential. Given my father’s experience with the Nazis, the losses in my mother’s own family in the concentration camps—and the centrality of WWII to the development of both—they saw fascism is a real threat and idealized men like Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, and Adlai Stevenson who they thought stood for progress.

When we had swastikas drawn on our driveway on Mischief Night, they said, remember this, this can happen here, it is happening here. When we were told we couldn’t use the local bomb shelter because we were Jewish, it was the same message. When they signed us up for the NAACP when we were just tiny kids, it was because freedom was in their mind for everyone and the racists in America were a part of the threat we faced, after all racism was at the root of the rise of the Nazis too.

The message to us as kids was “marry any one you like, boy or girl, black or white, just so long as it is not a Republican” may sound like indoctrination. And of course, to some degree it was. But it came from their experiences, from their hearts. It was linked to the issue that hovered over them ever since Hitler’s rise. It was tied to the fact that they knew societies could turn against their own people, that freedoms were fragile and not gifts but must be earned and protected daily. In their lives after Hitler it was McCarthy that posed that threat and George Wallace and later it was Nixon playing fast and loose with the Constitution at the time of Watergate and then it was the soft focus racism and economic exploitation of the Reagan Administration.

They despised what the Bush Administration did in Iraq. They saw Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as manifestations of the dark forces they had been resisting their entire lives. My Dad died in 2012, so he missed what came later. But I remember my mother saying to me through her tears on election day in 2016 that her mother had voted in the first election in which women could vote and that now she had the privilege of voting for our first woman president. For all the above reasons and as a New Yorker, she despised Trump and when he won, it became the bane of her existence. She watched cable news all day long, always MSNBC. And she shouted at the television set her contempt and disgust with Trump. As I have written elsewhere, when her last spoken words, in the hospital the evening before she died came when a nurse roused her and to test her mental acuity, she asked “Who is president.” And my mother said, “I hate him.”

It is possible to read such recollections and say they are responsible for the divisions in our society—divisions that have today, even as I have been writing this, led to a shooting incident at a Trump rally.  But I would argue that the message of my parents was aways toward bringing society together, ending divisions and discrimination based on race and gender, eliminating both violence and the means of violence (which are promoted by the right). Others may see it differently.

But thinking about all this has been illuminating to me. It is a good idea in times like these to reflect on our own political journeys, to ask whether we embrace and celebrate our political origin stories or they demand some reflection and reconsideration, to recognize that we are the products of history and the vehicles for its consequences and lessons whether we realize it or not.

My folks would be glad to see the amount of time I spend each day trying to push back against the fascists, the MAGA movement, authoritarians elsewhere and, what is more, if they were here, I have a sneaking suspicion—or is it just a son’s hope—that they would actually tell me they were proud of what I was doing.

So, that’s progress, right?