It might be easier for me to find an angle to dislodge my conservative relatives from their support of Trump if I believed that the Democrats were offering any genuine answers or even trying to.

I can't convince them to positively support the Democrats because I don't positively support them! I view them as a lesser evil. So to get my Republican relatives to vote for them, I have to convince them that what they think they like is terrible and I can offer them... nothing.

This is the same as trying to convince evangelicals to leave the fold. Huh, what do I have to offer them in place of literally their entire social life? Nothing. I have nothing. "Umm... build a network of online friends over your entire adult life and become an academic?"

From the perspective of people still inside the conservative Christian milieu, my life and choices have no attraction. Nor do I think I myself am a viable model for others, since I have only wound up in another livable community through sheer happenstance.

I will say that the only thing that guaranteed I would not be sucked back into the gravitational field of evangelicalism was joining an actual concrete progressive community at Chicago Theological Seminary. It's not enough just to leave -- you need to go somewhere else.

But who knows what would have happened in the long run if I hadn't lucked into an academic job against all odds? If I hadn't been able to make an actual life for myself in a concrete, positive way? I shudder to think.

The kind of spaces that could be a real, lived alternative to conservative Christianity are always some combination of fragile and embattled and very difficult to get into -- by design, as a matter of social policy, supported in large part by... suprise! Conservative Christians.

Think of how many towns you drive through and there is just *nothing* going on other than churches. How do you tell those people "don't go to church, it's secretly bad" or "you should constantly fight with people at your church to make it different"?

Basically, I don't know how to ask people to change their lives if you're not going to be a part of their lives in an ongoing way and if you don't have a community to offer them as a context for that. But yeah, debate at the Thanksgiving table or whatever.

This analysis points to the idea that rebuilding unions is absolutely crucial to a livable future, to provide that alternate community. Which is probably why destroying unions is neoliberal goal #1.