Americans Should Condemn the Practice of Publicly Betraying Family Members

Consider a tragic case of family betrayal during Mao Zedong's cultural revolution in China when a teenager named Zhang Hongbing turned his mother into the authorities to be executed because one night at home she privately criticized Mao:

This tragedy should be a lesson to us all. Yet family disloyalty is one of the underlying currents in the big picture of family breakdown that has plagued American society for many decades.

We know that a lot of social dysfunction and misery follows in the wake of family breakdown. We've come to accept that state of affairs. But it's disconcerting to see people shrug off cases of gratuitous and public family betrayal.

I wrote about this theme at the Federalist after I became aghast watching Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg – daughter of the President John F. Kennedy -- publicly drag her cousin Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. through the mud in order to derail his confirmation as Secretary of Health and Human Services.  No, this was not at the level of Mao's Red Guard, but it was not a good sign.

Her act was merely one incident in a whole host of similar cases in recent years. But I believe we should warn ourselves not to find such things acceptable. I think one reason Americans in general used to express outrage about publicly trashing family members is that we instinctively knew that it can lead to really bad things.

The incident got me to thinking about patterns of family betrayal. It's a feature of totalitarianism to sow hostilities among people, especially in families. Modern history is filled with examples, from Stalin's reign of terror in the Soviet Union to the horrors in Mao's China and Rwanda. The goal is to isolate people by weakening bonds of loyalty and trust.  If we know what's good for us, we should condemn such acts.

I hope America can return to a time when we valued basic family loyalty as a virtue. You can read my whole article at the link here:  https://thefederalist.com/2025/02/12/family-betrayal-is-a-democrat-specialty-and-a-totalitarian-tradition/