I do not assume most people are like my mother; actually, I try to assume most people are like me. The wisdom of this is debatable, but I mean it as a compliment.
My mother is intensely anti-communist and, obviously, Republican. She will stand witness to KGB interference and dictatorship of the proletariat in every personal annoyance and political scuffle, not sparing innocent human errors and garden-variety capitalist excess in her perpetual testimony. She lives in a world of sociopolitical monochrome. Fortunately the view outside her window does not go quite so far as Ayn Rand's did, not quite seeing altruism itself as a con. (Though she complains about ads for starving children guilt-tripping her, she does donate to veterans.) The monochrome glasses seem to come from growing up in a communist country, Czechoslovakia, where there was a vertiginous movement to ditch communism just as she was coming of age. The Prague Spring of 1968 took place when she was a senior in high school; a brimming breeze of freedom was snuffed by Russian tanks rolling in. You can see a depiction of Prague as she and her friends would have experienced it, she says exactly as she remembers, their hometown terraformed by tanks in a day, in the movie "The Unbearable Lightness of Being."
One recent motion to get her to see things a little differently was bizarrely successful. I said: "I think the country in the world that is the most like what the original communists, you know, the idealistic ones, minus all the nonsense about no ownership, the country the most like what the original communists imagined is actually Denmark." Then I briefly explained why. She said - she said absolutely nothing. Maybe she said "oh" or "hm." What did I do? It was remarkable not to be arguing for the next hour. In the imagination that suddenly had a moment to roam, I thought she even seemed to like the idea. In truth, she experiences some cognitive dissonance over the fact Republicans are against universal healthcare: she does not accept that fact as true.
She also had very little to say when I sent her an Oxford study abstract and a popular science write-up about some research that found countries with big governments, on average, happier and healthier.
Now - I don't actually know. This is how I try not to be like my mother. I don't know. But I'm looking at scientific evidence (and methods, though the latter not as much as I should). Obviously "communism" as it officially stands in various countries is not the best way to go. And I don't idealize the original communists, either. It seems to me Mr. Marx must have gotten some subtle (and major - he later admitted to one, the need for violent overthrow; I wish that were more widely quoted) things wrong with his analysis.
Whenever my mother launches into an angry tirade about "dictatorship of the proletariat" and "those who can and those who can't" and "putting incompetents in power because 'it is not fair that they are incompetent'" and all the other claims I have been analyzing most of my life, I try to remind her that she was forced to take years of Marxist theory in school and perhaps the terminology and analysis itself is not right. After all, why would she speak to me using the language of a philosopher and creed she hates?
This has not had much of a lasting effect, but she always sees my point.
As for my political views, I try to make them as unpolitical as possible. I do not care about "optics" unless they mean "clarity" or "beauty." Public perception irritates the goddamn blazing tarnations out of me. But you know what makes the masses smarter? Education! A spirit of inquiry! Less materialism! That stuff!
