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At My Wits’ End in the Culture War
I’ve never had great difficulty in getting along with my liberal friends. It is a skill I likely learned growing up with conservative instincts in the state of New Jersey. Most of life can be enjoyed with others without our political differences getting in the way. At the margins however, there are always issues. Some ideas permeate the culture so thoroughly, that a friend will often state what they believe to be an innocuous statement of truth in passing, working under the assumption that all good-hearted people will agree with it. Since I do not share many of their beliefs, the obvious implication is that I am not a good person.
It has always been a character flaw of mine that I cannot allow these remarks to pass without challenging them. Close friends know me well enough to either engage me in a friendly debate on the point, or concede that they probably shouldn’t have thrown the statement out like that. Casual friends and acquaintances are generally caught off guard by my challenges. Issues of taxation can be laughed off, along with any number of others in regards to the size and scope of government. It is only in the culture wars that friendships are lost.
Culture would seem an easy issue for one with strong libertarian leanings, such as myself, to deal with. I don’t care how you live your life, or who you share it with, provided you not encroach upon the rights of others. My world view is inherently easy to get along with. I am supportive of same-sex marriage and disapprove of institutionalized discrimination. These facts buy me nothing though when I challenge media lies about Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Some friends know me well enough that when I defend the law by pointing out that RFRA laws have existed for greater than 20 years without a single instance of them being used to allow discrimination, that I probably know what I’m talking about. Others become convinced I am a gay-bashing bigot who they would no longer like to know.
While a friend and I were discussing the nerdiest of all nerd activities (conventions), I mentioned that I was likely going to GenCon this year. She asked where it was held (Indianapolis), then proceeded to drop her innocuous statement of truth. “Well, I won’t be going to Indiana anytime soon.”
Such a simple phrase to let slide. She was signaling to me that she supports same-sex marriage and gay rights. She is no legal scholar. Did it really matter if she had the wrong impression of the RFRA? Maybe not to others, but it did to me. She had unwittingly cast the people of Indiana as villains, and based entirely on a false media narrative. Those that disagree with her are not evil, and they are not bigots. Maybe if she were to know that I support the RFRA, knowing what she does about my character, she might see her opponents in a different light.
Or maybe, as may have happened, I’d lose a friend. Her disposition toward me rapidly changed. She had sent me a signal to prove I was a good person. That test was my position on the RFRA. I failed. That the test was faulty did not matter. I am now a bad person in her mind, or at least, not a virtuous one. She may never see me the same way again.
Having friendships that span across the political spectrum is a great boon to a free society. It keeps us from casting our opposition as caricatures, but rather real, honest people who have honest disagreements without animus. Increasingly, it is difficult to maintain such relationships.
The most likely outcome is that my more liberal friends will self-select themselves into friendships with only those who share their world view, or who at least will never challenge them on these points of contention. I will be forced to into a similar position. Without these bonds of friendship bridging the gaps between us, our positions will grow increasingly intolerant of each other, until one day, we find ourselves enemies.
It’s a damn waste.
Published in Culture
See comment 24.
Frank, I think some of our group don’t get that she’s not an idiot for not knowing the background of the Indiana issue and making the ensuing uninformed comment, but that she is for quitting an acquaintance for having her pride hurt.
I think this is less an issue of intelligence, and more an issue of…pride.
I have a couple liberal friends we can have intelligent, calm, conversations with. However, that requires them to not assume I am a monster.
Not giving a friend the benefit of the doubt, is, in my book, not an expression of friendship in the first place. She was not a true friend, because she was so fast to put you into box.
And, sorry for your loss.
Yet you are willing to give her the benefit of the doubt on her views. This is why the culture war is being lost.
Because I don’t throw around charges of idiocy? Because I don’t think name calling is a particularly useful tool for accomplishing anything of worth?
I have a lot of lefty friends. Sometimes I forebear and say nothing and sometimes I engage in arguments. If they indicate they don’t want to discuss something, I drop it. And then I’m very nice and will tell them–I never let politics ruin friendships. If they let politics ruin friendships, there’s nothing I can do, but I am never rude or mean about it. I never bring politics up on social media, but I will respond when others do, though usually I don’t. It’s a horrible problem right now, I will say that. The left does not know the meaning of tolerance.
No. Because you don’t take your friend’s “beliefs” seriously enough to challenge them intellectually, and you thereby imply that they have equal value to your own. Telling people their beliefs are wrong is often necessary. Unless you want to cede the field to them and their beliefs.
I don’t like being at odds with anybody. I would like to bridge the differences between myself and my liberal neighbors.
When conservatives outnumber liberals, that’s possible because we have the freedom to explore and challenge those differences.
When liberals outnumber conservatives (or overpower the conservative majority by an unmatched will to abandon legal and moral restraints), it’s impossible because there is no safe venue for debate. Mere suggestion of conservative positions is gradually being forced out of the public square.
How about telling your friend that you support SSM, but that you also think the RFRA is a good thing and this is why.
It was said. Will it matter? Not sure.
In this day and age of information at our fingertips it amazes me how many friends of mine who should know better, don’t. If we get into an argument where I differ from my liberal friends I will try to reference a source for them to research it for themselves. that usually does the trick I say, you don’t have to take my word for it READ THE LAW, not what The New York Times says about the law, read the actual law. If you tell them to go back to the original sources and show them their own biases they usually will back down ……… A bit or they may have a little more respect for your perspective or they should at least
Give me a couple more years when I have my walking away money and I will really make my liberal coworkers’ heads explode. We lost this war when we made the right of private entities to discriminate conditional on what group they were discriminating against. I’ll say it again, the free association right of non-government entities is granted us by the First Amendment, and the equal protection clause in the 14th amendment only extends to State governments. You have the constitutional right to be a bigot. Let the free market work, bigoted bakers might have a hard time staying in business.
I naively jumped in to a political discussion at the day job, once, offering a dissenting (conservative) point of view and was taken aback when one of my co-workers went full throttle “Pod People” on me. I mean, I’m sure there must of been actual words coming out of her mouth, but I was so shocked at the time by the sheer vitriol, that I just have a vague memory of her pointing, and some weird, “tortured animal” sounds coming out of her.
In college, my lib friends and I would fight over all kinds of issues, late into the night and things got heated sometimes but overall, we had a great time, even learned some stuff, and I never so much as lost a dining companion in the cafeteria the next day over it, let alone a friendship. And even when I first moved to New York, and in acting school, no less, where I was a major oddity, the “abuse” I took was really no worse than any ribbing I got back in college.
But yes, something’s changed. It did not used to be like this – – with everything from the most casual of social conversations to my occasionally bile-filled Facebook feed sounding and looking like snippets from The Crucible.
Is it a triumph of the media? Of the generations behind me, coming out of group-think colleges? After-effect of “Bush Derangement Syndrome?” All of the above? How can so many otherwise intelligent people decide that the (crime-ridden) case file on me is closed the second they hear of my party affiliation? Two decades I’ve been a POW here in Blue Country and I still don’t believe the reverse is true.
I have this problem with members of my family. A bunch of my cousins were Obama fans, at least at the beginning. My uncle too. I take at least partial credit for pulling him back from the Abyss. (It was O’s thick witted response to the Honduran constitutional crisis, of all things.). He went to work on the girls.
Patience, humor, facts, more humor – softly softly catchee monkey.
thank you for posting this.
My oldest dearest friend (i have no memory that predates our acquaintance) is a diehard liberal, but he will tell you there’s no left or right about it.
I am confounded by a rift that rose a couple years ago. After a couple initial arguments we won’t really fight, but we aren’t as “perfectly-eye-to-eye” as we used to be; but we were.
I fear that we can’t un-reveal our innermost views of humanity. And, that’s the end of the sad story.
I’ve experienced what you’ve described almost exactly. Many a time I’ve wondered and second-guessed whether to engage on a true believer’s offhand political comment or just let it slide. Was it worth the potential fallout? With a coworker? With a landlord? Friend or family? Senior VP? I’ve regretted saying something that caused a rift in an otherwise amicable (if arguably superficial?) relationship. I’ve regretted giving into my natural tendency to avoid rocking the boat by saying nothing (thus allowing the illusion of no disagreement, and abandoning the defense of ideas that matter to me). I’ve even experienced a surprising third result: having my response awkwardly ignored as if I’d said nothing (because evidently the speaker wasn’t remotely prepared for disagreement with what they take as an article of faith). I’ve let friendships go unbeknownst to others, after getting a very clear read on their feelings of contempt toward my kind. I’m torn between the possibility (if remote) that I might have changed a mind had I (as someone they knew, rather than an imagined caricature) spoken up, and on the other hand feeling obliged to accept their candid expression as it was given. (Trust people when they tell you who they are.) Your point about the need to maintain friendships that bridge the gap has merit, but at the same time the divisions among us seem to have grown too great to span. Those on the Left may misunderstand me in significant ways, but I understand their intentions all too well. I have lived among them long enough (including 30+ years in California), and seen and heard too many candid expressions of their true feelings, to hold out much hope for reconciliation. Our desires seem fundamentally at odds and incompatible. And I have often wondered about the wisdom of investing time and energy in relationships with people who on some level fundamentally cannot respect me. I don’t know how to put their passionate contempt for my convictions aside to bridge that gap (or whether I even should). Furthermore, I wonder whether it makes any sense at all for me to extend trust to people who work at the voting booth to make me subservient to goals that I want no part of.
Amusingly, northern California is where I experienced the worst of this, and northern New Jersey is where I’ve made my escape. Relatively speaking, it’s felt like a vast improvement.
It is interesting how so many of us conservatives have experienced holding our tongues or biting back a retort of our true feelings, for fear of the retribution that may come of it, or just that it is easier not to upset the apple cart. Almost as if we were being put in the closet, to think what we will but do not express it for that would be repugnant .
Basil is right Frank. You are trying to be fair. Look where it it got Mike Pence. The NJ you grew up in is way different than mine. There wasn’t all that much difference between the parties. It was more the blue team against the greys. Sure there was the far left and right, but they didn’t dominate. It was more country club republican and ethnic dems who wanted to join. In the middle we weren’t ready to go to the baracades for this or that cause. Looking back I feel some degree of satisfaction that I’m an old, broken down Jersey Boy.
Politics, and I was in it, was more about patronage back in the day. My circle of friends was evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats. It’s when the left gained traction during and after Vietnam that things started to change. The most contemptible people started to learn the black art, and learned fast. They didn’t take over the Democratic Party right away, but over time highjacked it out from underneath our lazy butts. The traditionals thought they could buy off the crusaders with government jobs (the pad). They did for some years, but over time the idealists got elected to public office and then the party was theirs.
The woman you cross swords with isn’t a liberal. There are no liberals in your NJ. She’s a lefty. A mindless lefty who resembles the gum chewing bimbos of my era. Look to tradition. Soto, N.J.? Sounds Italian. So do what any right thinking Italian boy would do in this situation. Agree with every stupid thing she says, get the b..ch to bed and dump her. RFRA, Shmifa, just don’t tell her why. Don’t give her the satisfaction of a culture war debate. One night stand sans explanations. Show no mercy!
I’d say the same if it were a guy socialist – minus the bed part of course! Get over on these bastards any way you can. They are enemies. Their views of our country are antithetical to yours (or mine), and don’t deserve respect or understanding. You’re a patriot; they aren’t.
I’m exhausted. Good night.
Is it reasonable to respond to such a thing with, “I find that offensive”.
Or, “I’m offended by your macroagression”?
Frank, here’s the deal, and I know because I have dealt with this exact same thing before. She has known you outside of political/ideological topics for quite some time and never had a disparaging thought about you until now. She had her worldview and her feelings about Indiana and when you challenged that worldview she immediately placed you in the bigot category without a moments thought about the time prior to that moment when you were “cool.” I am sorry but that is an example of being an idiot, or more precisely, a bigot. She is the bigot, not you. If all of the time spent together before that moment did not convince her that you were speaking in good faith about a political issue, then really, what are you losing?
One benefit is that it makes the possibility of a split possible. I dream of the day when I can live in a country that is not populated, or at least populated to the extent that you would notice, with these fascist scumbags.
Well here’s the question: who is making it more difficult? Are you going out of your way to bring up political discussions and get in people’s face? It doesn’t sound like that is the case. I feel like I am living in your shoes right now. My wife and I (definitely mostly my wife) have friends in Baltimore and I am polite, never look to bring up politics (because I know where it will go), and tend to just try to have a good time. But they seem to go out of their way to make comments in what seems like an attempt to bait me–it rarely works unless it is just too unbearable to pass up. So again, who is it that is making this more difficult in your experience? That should be all the answer you need to understand that cutting line with people is not necessarily a bad thing.
Another misnomer here. Friends are people with whom you can talk to about anything while having a Scotch and cigar on the back patio. If you are having to consciously think about what you say and filter it, then you are not amongst friends. You might be with people who you enjoy for a brief moment, but I would hardly call people that put you in such a mental state friends. Friends stick by you no matter what because they know your true nature.
I agree with you Robert it’s the cheap shots that liberal aquaitences and some family members throw out there that drives me crazy, usually tossed out there to either bait you or so ensure your “cool”. It’s like we never left high school. You had to be a certain way to be accepted by the cool kids it’s the same thing but on a larger scale
(I deliberetly left out the word friends because people who do that to you are not friends and that is clear with my friends with whom I disagree)
Exactly!
No it’s not going to matter because for the Left it is all or nothing. You are dealing with people who hold a genocidal worldview about those who disagree with them and you are either goose stepping along side them or you are being goose stepped over. There is no middle ground.
The only reason why I don’t unleash on our Baltimore friends is because of my wife. I am not going to do anything to upset her or make it feel like we can’t see her friends because they are baby killing Nazis.
The things we do for love.