The Silence at the Table

Whenever I hear Trump or top MAGA people talk, it is a very familiar tone and language. I’ve heard it for years from family members (especially my father) and members of the church I used to be a part of. It’s as if narrowness had a sound. A mix of being informed on the news headlines but in a mean and ugly way. There is a cruelty to the tone and words. Lots of talk about vengeance and grievance but no real substance. Everything opposed to the world view is on the table to be scorned: race, gender, sexuality, political ideology.

Interestingly and sadly, they didn’t talk like this before Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. They talked more like Reagan or Goldwater. Out of Limbaugh and Fox News, a multi-billion dollar right wing media industry emerged, and with that emergence was a long, slow public execution of true conservative thought. This didn’t just add “conservative voices”, as they claimed, they led an all-out assault on critical thinking. What was once a political identity rooted in ideas and debate became a performance of tribal loyalty and outrage. They didn’t challenge the status quo, they anesthetized it, replacing complex questions with slogans and conspiracies.

I was raised on a ranch in Eastern Oregon. My grandparents’ dining room table wasn’t just for food, it was for ideas. That’s where the adults solved the world’s problems, argued politics, relived old stories, and tested each other’s theories. Most kids were expected to stay quiet or go play. But I wasn’t most kids. I earned my seat in the conversation by knowing what I was talking about. I read the local paper cover to cover. I read my grandparents’ subscriptions to Newsweek. When I was around 11 years old, I found a copy of Barry Goldwater’s book “The Conscience of a Conservative”. With some of my ranch hand earnings, I got my own subscription to US News & World Report. It was at the dining room table where I took what I read and sharpened my opinions like a pocketknife. 

That table was where I learned what the old timers called “the Code of the West”: you ride for the brand, you don’t cheat your neighbor, and you don’t spit on the truth. There was room for different views, but not for cowardice. If you lied or postured or dodged responsibility, you didn’t get invited back. Character was currency. That was the ethic I grew up with. Speak your truth. Back it up. Don’t trade your soul for an easier ride.

Which is why what’s happened these past ten years has felt like a spiritual betrayal. The tone I hear in MAGA rhetoric feels like a desecration of everything that table stood for. The cruelty, the contempt, the childish glee in other people’s pain. It’s not just ugly. It’s unrecognizable.

That’s because the damage isn’t just in language or tone, its neurological.  The nervous system of the American right as has been rewired, severed it from its conscience, and replaced civic responsibility with performative rage. The party that once lionized self-reliance and moral restraint now grovels at the feet of a conman. Goldwater’s conservatism was flawed but principled. Reagan's was contradictory but coherent. What we have now is neither. It’s an empty vessel filled with venom, and it’s been sold as tradition to people too heartbroken, angry, or afraid to tell the difference.

From a psychological perspective, this is what Erich Fromm called the “authoritarian character”; the person who, unable to tolerate uncertainty or change, seeks safety through submission to a strongman and domination of the ‘other.’ In this mindset, obedience becomes virtue, cruelty becomes strength, and hatred becomes identity. The MAGA worldview offers a totalizing belief system that explains everything, absolves personal responsibility, and grants a sacred permission to dehumanize. It appeals to people who feel displaced, economically, spiritually, or culturally, and who resolve that anxiety by attaching themselves to a myth of stolen greatness. It is not ignorance that drives them, but a hunger for belonging, simplified meaning, and righteous power. As Fromm warned, when freedom is too frightening, people will trade it for chains that look like purpose.

And I get it. I really do. Rural people have been mocked, dismissed, and economically gutted for decades. There’s a deep and justified resentment under the surface. But instead of that pain being metabolized into wisdom, it’s been hijacked by talking heads who have never set foot on a ranch, never done hard physical work, and turned into a business model. What started as legitimate anger curdled into permanent grievance. What could have become a movement became a cult. And somewhere along the way, two of the pillars of the west, decency and empathy, got recast as weakness.

“Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. Their mistaken course stems from false notions of equality, ladies and gentlemen. Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism. Fellow Republicans, it is the cause of Republicanism to resist concentrations of power, private or public, which enforce such conformity and inflict such despotism. It is the cause of Republicanism to ensure that power remains in the hands of the people. ”
― Barry Goldwater

What was once a living, breathing arena of conversation became a shrine to silence. The table didn’t just go quiet, it turned cold. The firewood of good argument and respectful challenge was removed, and what replaced it was thin politeness covering deep avoidance. The expectation shifted from showing up with ideas to showing up in agreement. And when I didn’t, when I brought the same voice they once praised, I wasn’t just disagreed with. I was demonized, told I had “Trump Derangement Syndrome”.

The sadness I feel runs deep, because I didn’t just lose political common ground. I lost the people I loved to a poison that masquerades as conviction. I remember when conversations were about ideas, not enemies. When church was about mystery and meaning, not fear and moral panic. I’ve watched people I once admired harden into caricatures, mocking others with a gleam in their eye, as if cruelty were a form of clarity. There’s a grief in that. Grief for what was, grief for what they became, and grief for the part of me that still wants to reach them.

At some point, I became the enemy. I didn’t walk away. I was cast out. Not openly, but with a slow turning of backs, an airless silence, a kind of passive aggressive cancellation. I went from the family’s favorite provocateur, the one who made them laugh, who could argue circles around them at dinner, to the one they warned each other about. Why? Because I wouldn’t bend the knee. I wouldn’t play along. I wouldn’t call hate a difference of opinion. I wouldn’t pretend that Trump was some sort of evolution of conservatism and was anything but a deeply damaged con man. I refused to make peace with all the lies that loyalty required. And most of all, I refused to be quiet. I called out the racism, the homophobia, the hypocrisy, the warped view of history. 

​​The table was a training ground for integrity. You learned to speak plainly, listen fully, and stand your ground without losing your decency. That’s what’s gone missing. Not just in my family, but in the country. We didn’t just lose our appetite for disagreement. We lost our appetite for truth. There used to be curiosity. That’s what gave me a shot at the table in the first place. I could bring a question or a new idea. Now that space is gone. Curiosity doesn’t live there anymore, only a dark and twisted certitude about the way things are.

I miss them more than I want to admit. But I can’t unknow what I know. I can’t swallow what they need me to swallow. And I won’t give up my voice just to get my seat back at the table, especially because it would require me to do what they did: trade character and conviction for the cheap win and a false sense of acceptance.