Nearly a quarter of college students wouldn't be friends with someone who voted for the other presidential candidate — with Democrats far more likely to dismiss people than Republicans — according to new Generation Lab/Axios polling. ... 5% of Republicans said they wouldn't be friends with someone from the opposite party, compared to 37% of Democrats.At New York, the writer Sarah Jones offers her approval:
...bipartisan relationships are more fraught, if indeed they were ever advisable at all. Such unions hark back to an earlier age in Washington when the roots of Trumpism flourished within the GOP and Democrats preferred not to notice. Some feel nostalgia for that age; that’s evident in every lament for the bygone civility of Capitol Hill. That age is now beyond recovery. There is only a post-Trump present, and young liberals are coping with it. With few exceptions, loving a Republican means loving someone who voted for Trump, twice, despite the racism and the COVID denial and the credible sexual-assault allegations. Even befriending a Republican involves a certain amount of tolerance, and tolerance is not always a virtue, as conservatives themselves have argued for decades.
I get this feeling, but also don't really want to surrender to it. I've lost conservative friends during the Trump Era, and I guess it's safe to say I haven't made any new conservative friends during that time. So beware, reader, I'm not very good at practicing what I'm about to preach.
Which is this: Everybody has to set their own red lines about what relationships they can sustain and which ones they can't. But I think it would be a mistake to automatically reject the notion of befriending people on the "other side." Even if I think those votes are awful. I'm old enough to remember when somebody could legitimately say that "loving a Democrat means loving someone who voted for Bill Clinton, twice, despite the racism and the executions and the credible sexual assault allegations." People are complicated. Sometimes we make political choices that make sense to us in the moment and look shitty in hindsight. Sometimes we just make mistakes. Sometimes we believe bad stuff, and can't see beyond ourselves to know that it's bad, or why. That's true of all humanity, not just conservatives. Which suggests to me a little bit of grace might be called for.
Beyond that, I think back to people whose lives have changed because somebody else was willing to be gentle and open with them despite having massive disagreements with their beliefs. I think about Derek Black, a scion of white supremacy who changed his mind and his life after being befriended by an Orthodox Jew at college. I think about Megan Phelps-Roper, of the notorious Westboro Baptist Church, who was raised to sling homophobic and anti-Semitic slurs and then found her way out with the help of people who treated her as a human instead of as a cartoon villain -- which was probably what she deserved. I don't think that people should make friends with other people who have repulsive ideas simply to convert them; I do think those moments don't happen if a few brave, gentle souls among us embrace the notion that tolerance should be rejected.
Again, everybody has to make these decisions for themselves. Not everybody can embrace a racist or a misogynist or a homophobe and be true to themselves, much less preserve their own sanity. And I'm not convinced that everybody who calls themselves a conservative fits those descriptions, though some folks surely are. But I don't believe, as Jones says, that "tolerance is possible only when a certain political equilibrium exists." What that means is that "tolerance is only possible when I've already won the war." That's not really tolerance.
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