Can I be friends with a conservative?

 Axios:

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. 

Why I don't watch much sports

Photo by football wife from Pexels

Jane Coaston has one of the more interesting and lively minds around. So she even makes the experience of college football interesting for me. In her latest newsletter, she writes about her joy at Michigan's recent victory over Ohio State, its most-fierce rival:

Obviously, as I am not a member of the Michigan football team, I did not play a single snap of that game. And I watched it from my warm and cozy apartment, rather than in the snowy stands of Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor. But I was so invested in the action that my heart-rate tracker thought I was working out. When the game ended, and Michigan had won, I felt as if I had won, too, from hundreds of miles away.

I am, of course, not the only one who felt this way. A fellow Michigan graduate and current N.F.L. Network host Rich Eisen told me that during the game he felt so personally involved that he turned to his wife and asked, “Why does this mean so much to me?” He said that during previous games, when Michigan was losing to Ohio State, he would have to force himself to take stock of what was good in his life. “I would often sit there and think to myself, ‘I’ve got a beautiful family, and I’ve got three healthy children.’”

After Saturday’s win, Eisen was at a loss to describe this particular brand of joy, just as I have been. “Obviously, childbirth and marriages are your best days of your life,” he told me, not all that convincingly. “But this win over Ohio State, I can’t even really put it into words, and it’s my job to do that sort of stuff.”

This is why I don't watch sports all that often.

I can tell you when and why I made the decision. In 1998, I was living in Emporia, Kansas. Gamedays for the Kansas City football team were a big deal to me then -- I planned my Sunday afternoons around them. Some friends who worked at the local university regularly hosted a group for the games, and put on quite a spread. It was joyful. That year, the Chiefs went 13-3, looked like they might go to the Super Bowl, then ... flamed out in their first playoff game.

A few months later, KU's basketball team headed into the NCAA tournament looking like a national championship contender. Paul Pierce, an eventual Hall of Famer, led the team with Raef LaFrentz. And that team ... flamed out in the second round of the tournament.

All of this made me feel awful. Obsessively awful.

So I pretty much stopped watching. Oh, I still keep an eye on how the teams I used to love are doing, but in a general way. When KU won the national championship in 2008, I did in fact go down to Massachusetts Street to join the celebration. I'm not immune to the way that victory can make my community seem joyful. But on a day-to-day, game-to-game basis, I've pretty much extracted myself from fandom. Letting my emotional well-being ride on the athletic exploits of young men just didn't seem wise to me, or a way to be happy. I didn't -- don't -- have the emotional bandwidth for sports. 

Amanda Ripley's 'High Conflict'

High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out by Amanda Ripley


Amanda Ripley's book focuses on people who get trapped into endless conflict with each other, the difficulty of getting out and how it's sometimes possible. It's aimed at a readership exhausted by America's political polarization, it's clear, but mostly only nods at that Very High Conflict while focusing on smaller-scale stories.

I was reminded of a few things. About my Mennonite congregation's process to become a church that welcomed LGBT members, nearly 20 years ago. About the NYT's much-mocked reports about Trump supporters in Ohio diners. About how much conflict can embed itself into whatever culture or subculture we call home, so that the act of trying to honestly understand people with other viewpoints is very much a countercultural act. (And, frankly, even a spiritual act -- even for somebody somewhere between Mennonite-and-agnostic like myself.) About how I might unwittingly be a "conflict entrepreneur." About how I need to do better, both in my personal and professional lives.
 
Still digesting.

A republic, not a democracy!

Chris Lehmann reviewing a new book about Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society:

Nor was this Welch’s only anticipation of the present-day reactionary temper on the right; he and his anti-statist allies saw social democracy as the harbinger of eventual Communist takeover, and so loudly insisted that the U.S. was never meant to be a democracy and that the embrace of democracy spelled certain ruin. Recommending The People’s Pottage, an anti–New Deal tract by his friend Garrett Garrett as “required reading” for all Birchers, Welch hailed its clear-eyed account of “the Communist-inspired conversion of America, from a constitutional republic of self-reliant people into an unbridled democracy of hand-out seeking whiners.” A common refrain of the Bircher faithful was that America is “a Republic … not a democracy. Let’s keep it that way!”

The NYT Notable Books of 2021

 Lists like this make me panic about how much I'm not reading.

Common book: Mercy

 “ We’re imperfect people in relationships with imperfect people. Mercy should be mandatory.” -David French

Bag O' Books: 'Wildland: The Making of America's Fury' by Evan Osnos

Wildland: The Making of America's Fury by Evan Osnos
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The past decade or so has brought readers a fresh round of what's probably an old genre -- the literature of American decline. Books like George Packer's "The Unwinding" and Alec MacGillis' "Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America" have documented the forces tearing our society apart -- a financial system that delivers disproportionate wealth to a select few who hide themselves in walled-off supermansions; governments that neuter themselves and their ability to serve their citizens' well-being in order to make the rich richer; the left-behind places in rural America and in the Black parts of our big cities; the hollowed-out newspapers whose meager pages leave the electorate ill-informed and vulnerable to the conspiracy swamps of social media. "Wildland" is another one of these books, and it's a very good book, but it is also -- on top of those earlier examples -- exhausting. Our country is falling apart, and that's tremendously shitty, but it makes for some great literature.