For me, it’s about whether or not it is a cost effective use of my emotions. If we were talking about my brother or my SiL, there would be absolutely no end to the effort I would make to stay with them and help them through anything. If we’re talking about anyone else, it’s not worth the effort to me because I don’t consider myself a crusader or a philosophical missionary.
I dumped several Facebook friends since 2016 because of the right wing Trump era, and I haven’t missed a single one of them for even a moment. There are people IRL from whom I have disassociated myself, and I have had absolutely no regrets.
Yeah, something like this. She kept bringing the conversation back to a personal level, where I meant my comment on a broader level: she’d say, “You’re asking me to choose between you and my own father” and I kept saying “No, not at all. I’m saying that you agree with me and you disagree with your own father, and if he weren’t your father, you’d reject him in a second. Is there nothing your father could say or do that would offend you? Don’t you have any principles at all where family is concerned? Do they get a blank check for a lifetime because you share DNA?” The odd thing was that this friend knew me to be unusually sensitive to this concern, as I’ve suffered the loss of family members rejecting me in the past, and that I’d never advise anyone lightly to break off a family tie.
Naah. Love isn’t an obligation, You don’t have to love someone just because they’re related to you. I would drop my own parent or sibling from my life if they were a really bad person (fortunately never come up). I’ve certainly dropped uncles, cousins and the like.
“Giving up” or cutting contact with someone who hurts or does not give respect is normal. Giving up on everyone is misanthropic and can only lead to self destruction.
I’m just going to throw this out there, but if you’re willing to ‘give up’ on vast swaths of people because of their adherence to a (yes, virulent) ideology, aren’t you also giving up on the idea of living in a pluralistic democracy? This is not the first time America has had to come to terms with the worst facets of our nature, and I’m not too sure if actively avoiding people specifically because of their ideology is any more healthy for this country’s soul than “we” think “they” are.
Yes, to the Churchill quote above, I need to get the individual fanatics out of my life. But in the process, I need to make sure I’m not becoming a fanatic myself.
Me decided to stop talking to my crazy MAGA former-coworker does not threaten democracy. I’m not having him sent to the gulag, I’m just not talking to him or arguing with him on facebook. That is part of a normal functioning society.
And eventually it sends the message “MAGA-creeps are not welcome in polite society. Go hang around with your own kind, and bark at the moon for all I care.”
Well, she’s my mother, and since my father passed away, I’m about all she has.
She will regale me with the latest and greatest of the Demonrats attempts to destroy America every time I see her, but I don’t have the heart to cut her off and leave her completely alone.
Which is still normal democratic society functioning as it should. We aren’t talking about people who are simply on the other end of the political spectrum from us. Saying “I think taxes should be lower” or “We should have tougher immigration policy” does not make someone a MAGA nutjob. That former coworker (who’s a real person) posted the most insane unhinged things that do not belong as part of mainstream political discourse in a healthy democracy. As members of democratic society its up to us to make that clear.
The problem is your crazy MAGA co-worker didn’t disappear when you stopped associating with him. He’s still out there talking to people. When you left the room to avoid the crazy guy, you also left all those other people. But now instead of hearing what you’re saying and what the crazy guy is saying and being able to compare the two, those people are only hearing what he has to say.
When you stop being willing to step forward and confront nonsense, it grows stronger. And then one day you wake up and find yourself living in a country where Donald Trump is President.
I’ve lived on this earth long enough to know that while I’ve changed (myself many times over) my core values have not changed. So my job is sniffing out if someone hates my core values.
Although it pretty much amounts to the same thing that the OP is proposing, I would word it in a slightly different way that I would find more palatable.
I don’t give up on people I give up on certain activities, and one of those activities might include trying to convince a certain person of something, or even interacting with them at all. This way I don’t classify a person as unreachable, it may be that someone besides me could reach them, and it may even be that I could reach them if I really put in the effort, but doing so is not worth the effort. As an analogy, a brick wall may not be impenetrable, but I’m not going to bother banging my head against it.
I’d argue that if someone is willing to believe that kind of utterly unhinged nonsense then no amount of logical argument on their Facebook wall is going to make the slightest bit of difference.
If you want to prevent the return to Donald Trump’s America then there are any number of things, like getting involved in political campaigns, get out the vote efforts, or lobbying against the organisations that cynically caused this insanity (for their own enrichment) that would be way way more effective than arguing with a deranged person on Facebook.
Not that any of those things are that effective, but they are still more effective than arguing on Facebook
From the limited sample of MAGA-ers I’ve interacted with, which by no means may be representative of the whole, it all comes down to pride and an unwillingness to admit being wrong.
These people will literally die before they’ll admit they were wrong. The Covid pandemic showed that.
Sure, some liberals can be unwilling to ever admit being incorrect as well. But this behavior is much commoner among conservatives.