Fantastic questions from the noble Chris Freiman (author of Why It’s OK to Ignore Politics), reprinted with this permission.
A recent survey indicates that about 80% of Americans have no or “just a few” friends across the political aisle. So, should Democrats stop being friends with Republicans, and vice versa?
Let’s ask an analogous question: should consequentialists stop being friends with deontologists, and vice versa? I assume most people would say “no.” So is political disagreement different?
Maybe the stakes of your friend having mistaken political beliefs are higher. But this probably isn’t true. After all, their vote is extremely unlikely to make any difference to the outcome of the election. Furthermore, consequentialists and deontologists often disagree about questions that *are* impactful on an individual level, such as those concerning eating meat or donating to charity.
Maybe having the wrong political beliefs is evidence of someone’s terrible moral character. But why wouldn’t having the wrong moral beliefs also be evidence of someone’s terrible moral character? Furthermore, both Democrats and Republicans tend to arrive at their conclusions via politically motivated reasoning, so it’s hard for one side to claim an advantage here. Lastly, both moral and political questions are complicated and so people can have good faith disagreements about both. (Note that this isn’t to claim that *all* political positions are tolerable but rather that mere disagreement doesn’t imply a corrupt character.)
Also, we know that most people aren’t particularly committed to their policy preferences in the first place. So we probably shouldn’t draw conclusions about their moral character from their views about an issue that may well be different the next time an election rolls around.
Lastly, refusing to interact with outparty members is part of the reason we are seeing so much affective polarization and partisan hostility right now. Evidence suggests that positive, nonpolitical contact across the aisle can lessen this hostility. So rather than freeze out the neighbor who votes differently than you do, maybe see if they want to watch the game on Sunday.
READER COMMENTS
Fazal Majid
Nov 12 2020 at 10:30am
You’re assuming you have a neighbor with the opposing political viewpoint to bond with in the first place, or more precisely one who is not afraid to state his opinions. With geographic polarization and cancel culture, there is a strong pressure to conform. After all, even in San Francisco there are 12.71% Trump voters (lowest in the nation, I believe), but you’d be hard-pressed to identify them as they (wisely) opt not to advertise that fact about them, and I’m sure the converse is true in Idaho.
Not all political opinions deserve respect, of course. I don’t think neo-nazis or stalinists do, but nowadays Republicans or Democrats are being likened to those.
robc
Nov 12 2020 at 10:52am
DC was 5.3%, so lower than SF.
Dave Smith
Nov 13 2020 at 1:56pm
You’d be surprised about Idaho. I live in a county in Texas that went 79% Trump. Biden supporters are welcome at most BBQs.
Hazel Meade
Nov 13 2020 at 2:52pm
True, but conservatives have their own groups of people who are unwelcome. I mean, what does it matter if an openly gay person is superficially welcomed at a conservative barbeque, if everyone there is quietly voting against their right to get married?
K M
Nov 13 2020 at 6:49pm
It matters a LOT. I’m not sure if this is a serious answer, but (1) welcoming someone need not be superficial merely because the welcomer votes against a policy the guest prefers (or even cares deeply about) and (2) there is a fundamental difference between societal voting preferences and interpersonal interactions. Much of the point here seems to be about the value of civility between those who disagree.
I suppose one might respond that there is something fundamentally different about the right to gay marriage, but everyone has deeply personal issues. More importantly, I think we’re much more likely to move toward productive societal resolutions on these issues if we don’t use them as excuses to abandon civility.
(I’m not taking a stand either way on whether liberals or conservatives are more welcoming to opposite-minded people. I’ve personally witnessed much more intolerance coming from the left, but I might have very different impressions if I were living in Trump country.)
TSB
Nov 13 2020 at 9:32pm
It matters for the reasons discussed in the post.
Dzhaughn
Nov 13 2020 at 2:32pm
Your comment risks mistaking symptom for cause. SF is not a comfortable place for conservatives, and it was not conservatives that made it thus.
Nicholas Weininger
Nov 12 2020 at 11:05am
There are limits in moral philosophy, too, though. If you knew that someone’s sincere and deeply held moral belief was that might makes right and it is the will of God that the strong shall dominate and tyrannize the weak, wouldn’t that make you less likely to want to be friends with them?
The question is then whether support for a political party or candidate rises to that level of egregiousness. We should have a strong prior of “probably not” but that prior presumption should be rebuttable.
Tyler Wells
Nov 12 2020 at 12:11pm
Aren’t politcal parties in a fight for dominance over the general population? Will of God or not, both parties intend on using tax money that they coerce from the general population through the threat of violence to reward their backers.
Mark Z
Nov 12 2020 at 2:35pm
I think the extent to which beliefs are ‘mainstream’ itself to some extent exculpates people for believing them. You describe a view that would be very outlandish in modern America, one that a person would have to be exceptionally errant to believe. Because what people believe is so heavily influenced by what they’re exposed (or not exposed) to, their views should really be judged relative to the milieu in which they were formed. For that reason, I think even if one believed mainstream conservatism or progressivism were genuinely as terrible Naziism or Stalinism, it still wouldn’t justify treating adherents of the former two like adherents of the latter two. I think an obvious intuitive example: we probably wouldn’t judge someone who supported slavery 300 years ago as being fundamentally evil the same way we would someone who supports it today. It’s the same opinion, but we intuitively understand that it’s far more a blemish on one’s character to believe something wrong in a setting where no one believes it than in one where everyone believes it.
Nicholas Weininger
Nov 13 2020 at 2:52pm
That is indeed a common intuition; I’m not sure it’s correct. Abolitionists in 1850 were probably right morally (though possibly wrong prudentially) to refuse social connection with supporters of slavery where they could, and Germans in the 1920s likewise would have been morally right to refuse connection with Nazis.
Mark Z
Nov 13 2020 at 4:21pm
I guess it depends on what moral system we’re assuming here. I would say it’s inarguable that someone who was born and raised in a setting where they were constantly exposed a horrible opinion and information or propaganda that supported that opinion is less morally responsible for said opinion than someone who reaches that opinion in a different setting. We don’t reach specific moral conclusions via pure reason, they depend on what information is available to us; inasmuch as that’s beyond one’s control, I don’t think it makes much sense to treat people as morally responsible for what information is or isn’t available to them.
From a utilitarian standpoint, the worthwhileness of refusing social connection with a people of a given belief may be largely unrelated to how bad the people are who believe it. Moderately dangerous mainstream views are probably far more threatening than extremely dangerous fringe views, since the latter are pretty harmless by virtue of their rarity, so the case for socially proscribing support for slavery in 1850, when it was mainstream, is likely stronger than doing so today, when it’s a position that’s so irrelevant that it makes no difference. But if anything I would say this is because back then the view was sufficiently mainstream that even morally average people were susceptible to believing it.
Mactoul
Nov 13 2020 at 12:01am
Kipling’s poem The Stranger is informative on the basic political questions of this type.
The stranger is distrusted for his mind is strange to us. It is not the question of moral superiority or inferiority. He is not morally suspect but he is unpredictable. His reasoning is based upon alien premises. Kipling says explicitly that people of my own kind may be good or bad but still their mind works on familiar grounds.
Hazel Meade
Nov 13 2020 at 2:45pm
I have been thinking a lot about this lately, and I have two general observations to make:
I’m increasingly convinced that the two-party system is at the root of the extreme polarization in American politics, and that the electoral college and winner-take-all delegate allocation has a large role to pay in reinforcing that system. I could get into a very long discussion about why I believe that, but I think that the polarization cannot be overcome without collapsing the two-party system. There are two possible paths to do that. One is ranked-choice voting, which has gained some adherence on the left, and the other is a constitutional amendment to mandate that the electoral college delegates be assigned on a per voting district basis, banning winner-take-all allocations by the state. The problem with winner-take-all is that it enhances the “spoiler effect” of voting for a third party, and that there is a psychological repercussion of that – it makes people feel compelled to demonize the other party in order to get people to vote for their party. I.e. If you only have two choices, you must vote for the lesser evil. Voting for a third choice will result in the victory of the greater evil. That constantly pushes people back into a two-party equilibrium and simultaneously forces them to demonize their opponents to maintain that equilibrium.
Most people really WANT to reach out across the political aisle, to understand their opponents, but mainly to change their minds. However, the increasingly diverging narratives on both sides make this more and more difficult. Republicans and Democrats get their news from different sources, and are presented with vastly different narratives about what is actually going on in the world. The media has been completely captured by the parties so that virtually everything presented in the news is *designed* to make people compelled to support one of the major parties, in order to stop the other one. On Republican TV, Black Lives Matter is a bunch of Marxists who are fomenting insurrection. If you really think that, you see the left as a bunch of craziest bent on undermining civilization, you might be willing to vote for Trump to stop them. And vice versa. if you think Trump is literally a fascist who is bent on reestablishing white supremacy in the US, then you may be willing to vote for ANYONE to stop him. I’ve literally heard people say that – that they would vote for a pet poodle at this point, to get Trump out of office. This is *exactly* the mindset that the parties want to establish in their voters, that the two party system continually reinforce.
You cannot simultaneously believe that one party is so evil that you must vote for whoever the other party nominates for president, AND maintain a mindset in which you are capable of maintaining relationship across party lines.
alvincente
Nov 13 2020 at 3:04pm
Hazel, the two party system has ruled the United States for two centuries, and the electoral college has been in place even longer. Ergo, neither can be responsible for the current wave of polarization. Partisan news sources have been the rule rather than the exception in U.S. history; nothing recent has been anywhere near as vicious as the 1796 and 1800 presidential election campaigns, and the whole concept of nonpartisan news reporting is only around a century old if that.
My view is more or less the opposite: I think the two party system has preserved the United States from the kind of polarization and demonization that has plagued European countries with parliamentary systems that conduce to multiple parties. Notwithstanding the current heated language, in fact our system is remarkably stable, and way out here in Alaska I don’t see much personal hostility between Democrats and Republicans.
Hazel Meade
Nov 13 2020 at 3:35pm
The internet has a significant role to play in this as well: you can selectively choose all of your news sources in a way that confirms your priors now, whereas before you might be compelled to pay attention to partisan news sources from different points of view because that was what was available. We’re not getting rid of the internet though. Also it can take a long time for systems to evolve. it took 75 years for communism to collapse in the USSR.
There was turnover of which two parties dominated politics in the early 1800s, but since the Civil War it’s been locked into Democrats and Republicans. I don’t think that any system in which there are only two options should last this long. Having a permanently entrenched structure in which there are only two parties and they are more or less quasi-instritionalized elements of the political system is not healthy for a democracy. At least we should get some turnover of what two parties are the dominant ones!
robc
Nov 13 2020 at 4:17pm
As alvincente said, partisan news sources is the norm. Back when most cities were multi-paper cities, they usually had a partison split. You would buy the paper you wanted, it was no different that today.
Hazel Meade
Nov 13 2020 at 4:50pm
It goes beyond that though. People live in more politically segregated communities today, and they spend their time in online platforms of like-minded people, so they can even avoid interacting with people from the other party. We don’t have any forced socialization that mixes people up across party lines, which you might have gotten from the neighborhood or a church or something 100 years ago.
alvincente
Nov 13 2020 at 6:00pm
Hazel, again I respectfully disagree. I’m dubious that people live in more politically segregated communities now, or that there is any less “forced socialization” with people whose views differ. There was plenty of political segregation 100 years ago (think of the solid south or reliably Republican New England), plenty of forced socialization now (on the job, in church, etc.) and plenty of socialization in the past only with those who agreed with you (in union halls, chambers of commerce, and country clubs).
Jameson Graber
Nov 13 2020 at 3:05pm
I find this argument pretty unconvincing. Most people wouldn’t care about their children being friends with consequentialists because they don’t know what the word means. But if they discovered that it might be directly connected to an issue of major practical and ethical importance, such as abortion, I think they would quickly become every bit as concerned as they are about political views.
This point is well-taken: “Lastly, both moral and political questions are complicated and so people can have good faith disagreements about both. (Note that this isn’t to claim that *all* political positions are tolerable but rather that mere disagreement doesn’t imply a corrupt character.)”
But this point is not: “After all, their vote is extremely unlikely to make any difference to the outcome of the election.” We could apply similar logic in the following way: let’s never punish any criminals, because one individual crime can’t possibly make any difference to the whole of society. That’s obviously wrong, but this “one vote does not sway an election” kind of reasoning is no different. We don’t punish behavior in proportion to an individual’s effect on the whole society, but rather in proportion to what effect that behavior would have on society if it never got punished. In the same way, we react to people’s political beliefs in proportion to what effect they would have if they were actually implemented, and this is not an unreasonable reaction.
I think the complicated nature of political questions is the far more salient point. Political views are undoubtedly very important. The reason you should be humble about your views is not that they won’t make a difference, but rather because it’s so difficult to have the right ones.
Mark Z
Nov 13 2020 at 4:45pm
“We don’t punish behavior in proportion to an individual’s effect on the whole society, but rather in proportion to what effect that behavior would have on society if it never got punished.”
I don’t think this is true. If we punished shoplifting that way, every shoplifter would get a life sentence because if we didn’t punish shoplifting, the cost would be in the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. I think it is actually closer to the truth that we punish people according to the effect of their crime on society. The deterrent effect of punishing any particular murderer may be minute, but multiply that minute number (as a fraction of total possible deterrence) by the total number of murders that would happen absent any punishment, and the output is still probably a high enough number to justify severe punishment.
Apply this reasoning to voting, and we would still find that the cost of voting for the wrong person is usually negligible. In most states the expected value of a vote is likely on the order of a few cents. There may be a few states where it might amount thousands or tens of thousands of dollars of course.
Rugger
Nov 14 2020 at 9:45am
The problem for me is that one party wants to strip rights from me and my friends.
If it were just, “Republicans value small government and Democrats big government,” then I wouldn’t care. Vote for whomever you want.
It isn’t.
Republicans are anti-gay, and condemn same-sex marriage (it’s in their official platform). Republicans are anti-trans, and have stripped rights from my friends.
Republicans locked children up who came into the country seeking legal asylum, and separated them from their families.
Those and only those are the reasons I will never be friends with anyone who currently supports the Republican party. Get rid of those three issues, and I won’t care at all what party someone supports.
But with those three issues, no, never.
Tom West
Nov 14 2020 at 10:09pm
This seems similar to a cry to keep shopping at mom-and-pop stores.
It’s pretty clear the best way to win elections is to get your supporters to believe that the opposition is sub-human, either by their held beliefs or, if necessary, by their physical characteristics.
The professionalization of American politics has provided a large pool of capable and talented people who are adept and willing to implement that strategy, both in the US, and increasingly across the world.
Of course, people as a whole don’t enjoy envisioning much of their countrymen as monsters, but technology has improved the expertise at pushing people to do so immensely, routing around the institutions and social norms that seek restrain that push, and expertly exploiting the psychological characteristics that enable that goal. Political professionals have moved from being court astrologers to finally bringing real expertise and technology to what they’ve been paid immense amounts to do – winning elections.
I expect that the same forces that preferred tradition in the commercial realm only to be swept away by American commercial efficiency will see the same thing happen in the political sphere.
Timothy Jaeger
Dec 2 2020 at 4:03pm
Depends on what ‘belief’ means in this context, depends on what ‘friend’ means in this context, and arguably it even depends on what ‘Democrat’ and ‘Republican’ mean in this context.
Like most things in life one has to weigh the pros and cons as well as opportunity costs of maintaining such friendships.
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