Goebbels once complained about this during World War II. He said something to the effect of, “Every German says that Jews should go, except for this Jew or that Jew that they happen to know personally - those ones are splendid Jews.”
I think this is the likeliest explanation.
Yeah, “they don’t mean ”the good ones.” ”
Because being polite is different than being friends. My friendship is conditional on your being a decent person and someone I can respect.
It’s not surprise. It’s just an opportunity to trot out the tired canard of “wow I can’t believe you’re so into groupthink.”
This is the standard ego-saving mechanism that allows one to resolve the cognitive dissonance around holding socially repugnant beliefs. “My beliefs aren’t repugnant. They’re just different. If you don’t like me, you obviously have a boring mind that just can’t handle different ideas.”
None of them believes it, of course. It’s just how they deal with being hated, because it does get to them, but admitting that kind of weakness isn’t allowed in their worldview. Everything’s fine, we are happy being hated, it means we’re pissing off the right people. We’re actually heroes if you think about it, just us against the brainless NPC woke zombies.
I think some of them don’t understand how repugnant other people can find their views, especially people who aren’t in the targeted groups. They really do think we are pretending to find bigotry repugnant.
I think it’s more that they don’t understand people who are governed by moral principles.
Take your typical anti-abortion religious person. They will tell you with a straight face that 30 million “babies” are murdered per year, and that “post-birth abortions” are real. If you believe those numbers, that’s 5x worse than the literal Holocaust, and a moral person would have to be prepared to sacrifice lives, both their own lives and other people’s lives.
But of course conservatives don’t do that, because they don’t actually believe that. It’s just hyperbole and theatre to justify why they think they should have power. That’s what they mean when they say “it’s just politics”. They believe that everyone else’s politics are equally shallow, just a preference to shout about when it’s under discussion, to be forgotten when you clock out of political arguments at the end of the day. Because they can forget about it. The dominant group has that luxury, they cannot imagine not having that luxury.
I don’t want people who wish me harm to pretend to be my friends. Anyone currently voting Republican, much less for Trump himself, wishes me harm. It’s that simple. It doesn’t matter what they claim, what reasons for voting that way they tell people or even tell themselves. They wish me harm. No, more than that - they have taken active material action to harm me in no less real a way than if they themselves had personally attacked me.
They also both wish and have taken active material action to harm millions of others. Women, LGBT folks, immigrants, non-religious people, and the list goes on. All those people have been actually, actively harmed by the former Trump administration and Republicans in general. This isn’t theoretical harm - it’s something that has in fact already happened. And those who voted for Trump twice - much less those who are still intending to vote for Republicans in the upcoming election - have decided they not only want that, but want more of it.
It is inexcusable. It is indefensible. These are not the actions of anyone I would wish to call friend. If circumstances in life force me to associate with such people I will to the degree that it is necessary. I will maintain the level of civility that is necessary. But I will not do so by choice. The only thing that can convince me to associate with these people is when they have power over me. They will not ever have me as a friend; they can force me to associate with them, they can pretend to themselves that because I am not currently punching them or insulting them or otherwise being uncivil to them that I am their friend, but I am not and never will be. To accept this, to interact with them willingly, would be to excuse an abusive relationship because what they’ve done is ‘not that bad’ because I haven’t yet been sent to the hospital from my injuries.
The reason I haven’t asked about this year is that I am afraid to. Afraid of the answer I will get. On the other hand, he definitely did not say anything about this year. Most likely, I will not write him again and if he writes me I will not answer. Unless he volunteers that he voted for Harris.
What could happen, if you ask him and he says he’s definitely voting for Trump a third time, that’s more drastic than you cutting off all communication? He already knows that you favor Harris, so if he’s going to show up at your door in a fury, or even email you a pile of invective, he’d have done it already.
It’s also, as usual, a one-sided accusation, despite the continuing reality.
How can anyone see/read/hear that stuff from Megyn Kelly and say people who vote (R) are not simply evil, is utterly beyond me.
Your “friends” are voting for persecution of minorities. If your “friends” don’t see the parallels to ‘30s Germany there that just means you need better friends. Or you can just admit where you sympathies lie and don the red cap and brown shirt.
There really is no sane middle ground.
We had friends that were pro-Trump in 2016, which was upsetting but I managed to stay away from political discourse - since I lived halfway around the world from them, there wasn’t more than occasional discourse on anything.
In 2020, I screwed up my courage and asked if they were voting for Trump, though I didn’t really want to hear the answer. But as many people in this thread will agree, it just didn’t feel like a matter I could ignore.
To my enormous surprise and relief, they said “no.” Turns out they didn’t vote at all, which I don’t like but can live with.
So I agree with thorny_locust - things won’t be any worse if the friend says they are voting for Trump a third time, and its just possible that asking will lead to a better outcome.
I never thought of it that way before but you are 100% right.
One key factor is that although Trump himself is crazed, his stances often come across as “common sense.” Many of his followers think, “He may be a clown, but it’s common sense that illegal immigration should be squashed, men shouldn’t use women’s bathrooms, black people are to blame for their own bad grades or incarceration, etc.”
So they feel no shame about supporting Trump, and don’t think they should be vilified any more for their views than they vilify Democrats for their views.
We don’t talk politics at work. VERY unprofessional IMHO. We talk work at work.
Generally speaking we don’t. There was however a lot of joking about the stupid immigrants are eating pets thing this week and two of our residents MAGA folks got triggered.
One of them actually went in some kind of leave of absence after the 2020 election (after the inauguration actually) because she just wouldn’t shut up about election fraud. Would bring it up in meetings. Would post on our department Teams chat about it. Would harass coworkers whose social media she could see.
They are constantly complaining that our DEI & CSR measures ARE political and they should be free to criticize them. Publicly, on LinkedIn, in response to our Corporate posts, and reposts of those by our senior executives. We turned off commenting on our Black History Month message. But employees then reposted it with negative comments. Imagine taunting your own employer with “Go woke, go broke” on a supposedly professional networking site.
Things had quietened down by mid 2021, but now we again see more people who just can’t stop. People who think the lunch table with 10 colleagues isn’t “work”. People who think the coffee station isn’t “work”. Every single one of these people is a right winger.
Guess this isn’t fair. You can tell if someone is a MAGA. Got none in my group.
So no one talks about it.
MAGAS can’t help themselves from spilling nonsense.
Here’s a huge hasty generalization:
In my relatively limited socializations since about 2016, I’ve found that the Trump supporters are far more likely just to shift the conversation radically to politics – no matter what the prior subject was – than moderates or liberals.
Loudly, proudly, and entirely unabashedly – as if nobody in the world could possibly hold another viewpoint.
Roughly analogous to how religious people knock at my door to proselytize to me far more frequently than atheists do.
[A quick glance at the implied Venn diagram checks out amazingly well]
Yup and then you can complain to HR when they do. Win win.