Marriage in Trouble?

[My last few posts have been rather long so I’m going to try to keep this short.]

This is off topic but last week I was shocked that George Conway appeared on MSNBC as a legal analyst. Of course, I had to see that to see if anyone would be “indelicate” and ask him about his wife. Earlier in the year I had written about their puzzling marriage dynamic and had some speculations as to whether there was any strategy behind what they are doing, whether George Conway’s twittering was part of a larger plan.

I’m glad the MSNBC hosts did not ask George about his wife. I got a sense that he was extremely uncomfortable being on television. Maybe even scared? Like, does he know something about the character of the man currently going through an impeachment investigation? I don’t know but I was very uncomfortable and was extremely glad that the others had the compassion to not grill him.

I also saw a snippet where Wolf Blitzer interviewed Kellyanne Conway and that snippet was uncomfortable for me.

I think people should leave them alone and not ask them about their marriage. I can’t imagine how their marriage is faring but it has to be difficult because I often read about families and friends being torn apart by the state of affairs today.

Then yesterday I read that their marriage is in trouble.

That’s sad but not surprising although I was hoping that they could make it work out. They may still be able to and we can all learn from them.

We got to figure out how to work and live together.

Here’s an article that covers the US political history and how we’ve always had some level of polarization but somehow managed to come through. According to the writer, we need a strong center-right but more importantly, we have to signal to the other side, whether right or left, that winning side will respect the losing side and listen to them and consider their views and not annihilate them. According to the article, the right currently feels like the left will utterly destroy them.

A key sentence pops out at me:

“They must make even losing under democracy more attractive than a future under non-democratic outcomes.”

The Atlantic, “How America Ends”, Yoni Appelbaum, December 2019.

We’ve got to alleviate the conservative’s fear. We have to acknowledge we need both conservatives and liberals – both philosophies serve a purpose. Both parties are the ying and the yang; get rid of one, everything falls.

“The key variable was not the strength or character of the political left, or of the forces pushing for greater democratization, so much as the viability of the center-right. A strong center-right party could wall off more extreme right-wing movements, shutting out the radicals who attacked the political system itself.”

“The left is by no means immune to authoritarian impulses; some of the worst excesses of the 20th century were carried out by totalitarian left-wing regimes.”

The Atlantic, “How America Ends”, Yoni Appelbaum, December 2019.

Go read that article. It’s got a lot of warnings that we should heed.

To end this post, here’s a YouTube video from Bill Maher, exhorting us to “let it go”. He tells us we have to learn to accept the other side and live with them. It’s funny but has a lot of truths to it.

So, I’m hoping their marriage survives during and after this era and they can come back and tell us how they did it. It’s something we all need to learn.