Politics is how you decide whether the new elementary school is constructed in this zip code or that zip code. Politics is how you determine the tax rate that most appropriately generates revenue to fund the collective good while not stifling individual incentives. Politics is how you improve voter access by choosing between better distribution of polling places or expanding vote-by-mail options. Politics is how you determine the dividing line between citizens who enjoy the right to bear arms and violent offenders who should lose that right. Politics is how you decide how far the state can go in monitoring public activities for potential threats without interfering with individual freedoms.
A willingness to support Trump goes well outside the boundaries of politics. A Trump-centered worldview reflects not political variance but a difference in morals.
It is not politics to excuse leaders who commit sexual assault; it’s about morals. It is not politics to support leaders who want to jail their opposition; it’s about morals. It is not politics to sabotage democracy and curtail ballot access for your enemies in order to maintain your own status as a minority in power; it’s about morals. It is not politics to argue that some citizens should be regarded as less human and enjoy fewer protections than other citizens based on the color of their skin or the orientation of their relationships; it’s about morals.
Politics is about negotiating the path toward maximizing public good. If you are looking to justify doing someone harm, you’ve left politics behind.
I can certainly tolerate political differences. I do not turn my back on people due to political beliefs.
But morals — morals are a different story. If I find someone’s moral framework to be alien and indefensible, I will not hesitate to distance myself from that person, or cut them out of my life entirely, and I will lose not a moment of sleep over it.
One of my wife’s nieces is a Trumper, which came as a real shock to my wife. The niece’s family background is solid union people and professionals. She’s well-educated and has a high-paying job. But she was married to a nutjob who influenced her thinking. All that said, my wife remains close to her, and they just don’t talk politics, as things would deteriorate very quickly. She made the choice to overlook the politics and is happy with the arrangement.
Of course it’s not only her happiness that matters. Trumpism is akin to being in al Qaeda, they are both violent political movements that have carried out attacks on America.
In terms of any communication with him, I’d simply disappear completely. I have no interest in interacting with those people on any level and in any way. My belief is that, if all of his lies and sedition and criminality hasn’t changed their minds, nothing I could ever say could. Adios!
I cannot imagine this unless there was some physical danger. However, being in a community with migrants, I am careful not to say something that could lead them to call ICE or similar.
As a volunteer English as a Second Language teacher, I worked with a successful small businessman who is also a successful asylum seeker. He has lived in the U.S. for decades and, despite being fluent in English, has literacy challenges. And he told me he likes Trump. By all indications he is a good husband and father.
My niece-in-law (20) is a trumper, Thankfully she’s not a US citizen so whilst she lives in the US, she can’t vote. I treat her views with open mocking and disdain, and tell her to her face not to be so bloody stupid. Hey, it might not change her mind but it makes me feel better.
I could not have said it better (or as well). There is only one thing that inclines me to consider corresponding with him again. He mentioned in passing that he is in possession of a paper purporting to prove the Riemann Hypothesis that he has been unable to find an error. To a non-mathematician this is meaningless, but it is the greatest unsolved question in all of mathematics, about 175 years old and much more significant than the Fermat problem. My erstwhile friend is in the process of choosing a couple of expert referees. Ah well, if it is true it will become general news bye and bye.
I was part of a retired-ladies-who-lunch group and The Queen Bee (who had suffered bad head injuries in the past and wasn’t quite ‘all there’) who organized these lunches once a month…she was a real tRumper. This was a few years ago and I got into a mild argument with her. Thereafter, I was banned from the lunch group. I don’t regret that for a minute. I would rather sit next to a stray dog on the street sharing a sandwich.
Did he also say he’s going to do so for a third time?
If not, I think that might be an indication that he’s wavering. I wouldn’t come down like a hammer; but I’d reply that you’re voting for Harris and give a few reasons why (some of the more glaring anti-Trump, and a couple positive for Harris, ideally ones that you think might also be positive for him.)
And then I’d drop it, if he’ll let you. Let it stew in the back of his head for the next not-quite-two-months.
I get it, but I made a different choice. My sister is a Trumpist and I dropped her from my life. I told her why and I said that there has to be a cost for her fascism and that cost is she lost a brother.
I think that fascism has thrived in America because a lot of white people stayed silent when people in their lives said ugly hateful things. We didn’t want to ruin Thanksgiving, or alienate loved ones. We were complicit in the rise of fascism because we were silent.
I am old and most of my friends and family are gone. I don’t discuss politics with the ones I have left although we each know what side of the fence we live on.
I cannot distance myself from the only people I have left in my life.
If trump wins in November I’ll have to deal with it.
My life will go on and my friends and family will still be with me.
I respect those who need to cut ties and try to convince/argue if the opportunity arises but I am not in that space.
For me it’s all about surviving with what I have left.
I had a similar response (I think it was here) when I once mentioned I had voted for Hillary Clinton three times. Somebody jumped in and basically said this was proof of how widespread Democratic voter fraud was; not only had I voted illegally but I was openly admitted it. I pointed out I lived in New York and two of the times I had voted for her had been in the 2000 and 2006 Senate elections.
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
― Carl Sagan
I see that as being painfully true in the MAGAs in my circle. Those with whom I’m close … I won’t sever ties over it, but neither will I talk politics with them. Not. At. All.
A few decades ago, I engaged constantly with conservatives about politics, but those were the halcyon days when we basically agreed about the facts, but had differing values that led us each to different opinions about the best way forward.
Because of RW media … I can almost never find that kind of conservative anymore. And it’s a given that they’ve been excommunicated from the Republican party in any case.
Do you think this guy really developed a proof of the Reimann Hypothesis, or is this just more of the kind of bullshititude that goes along with right wing conspiranoia and narcissism? I have a former coworker who is MAGA-adjacent (not an avowed Trumper but absolutely won’t vote for any Democrat and uncritically repeats everything he hears on Fox News and OANN) who has gone down weird rabbit holes purporting to tie together transgenderism and ‘groomers’, scientific creationism, ‘states rights’, homeopathy, quantum field theory, et cetera into some kind of comprehensive theory of everything that are quite obviously total gibberish. Smart guy, really good engineer, fell right through the ice of reality and into the lake of bizarre nonsense. I get frustrated sometimes how how some progressives frequently express very idealized views of how the would ‘should’ work (but never does), but even in their most errant notions they aren’t as completely divorced from reality as hardcore Trump supporters and far-right enthusiasts are in denying basic, incontrovertible facts.
Yeah, I get that. My wife thinks of her nieces as the daughters she never had. I know what it’s like to be on the other side of the family fence, politically. My family has been Republican from way back when they actually made sense. My brother was pretty extreme right, my sister much less so, although her husband would have gladly joined that bunch of assholes on J-6. She used to ask me “How did you grow up in this family and become a Democrat?” I always answered the same way: I left this place and all of you and actually saw how people have to live in this world.