KellyAnne Conway's family - and ours

If you're reasonably informed, you probably know about the Conway family. Kellyanne is a top advisor to President Trump. Her husband, George, is a Washington lawyer who has emerged as one of the president's vociferous critics. There has been a lot of speculation about their marriage, and I've tried to refrain from spending much energy or many words on the whole topic because, frankly, marriages are weird and the accommodations we make inside a marriage might be incomprehensible outside it. Plus, the soap opera aspect of it 

Their daughter, a teenager, has now joined Twitter -- and joined the fray, as another very harsh critic of Trump. She's gathered a lot of fans along the way, and said (or implied) terrible things to or about both her parents. I'm not going to link to it. If you have to find it, you have to find it.

A lot of people are rooting the whole ugly mess on. I think we should be mourning what's happening to the family. But a lot of people don't.

Maybe it's just Twitter. It's probably just Twitter. The site, as any number of observers have suggested, is filled with "vice signaling." Maybe real people are better than this. I haven't actually seen many real people lately, so it's hard to know.

We need to figure out what are politics are for. Is it just about getting ours and (bleep) everybody else? Or is it to work together, however imperfectly, to try and make the places we live better than they would be if we all just went our own ways?

I prefer the second option. 

The history of humanity is full of stories about how a righteous pursuit can shade into self-righteousness and eventually into bloody zealotry. We're not at the last stage, at least not yet. But a whole lot of us have decided we don't need to be humane to people we think are wrong -- or even to people who are demonstrably wrong. Cruel schadenfreude has become, to a remarkable degree, our national default.

This isn't to say that we can't or won't or shouldn't disagree, or that there aren't some people who deserve upbraiding for self-interested or bigoted beliefs and acts. But I don't think a lack of righteous outrage is our problem right now. We need to bring more humanity to our debates, more treating other people like they are humans with moral worth and real, complex, sometimes noble and sometimes misguided motivations -- because they are. 

Even Kellyanne Conway. Even George Conway, if you think he's the asshole in all of this.