A while back, a poll found that Kamala Harris voters were much more likely to cut ties with friends and family over politics than Donald Trump voters. These results were met by some with a cry of, “So much for the tolerant left!”
But there is something much more important than just the numbers at work here. It’s not that the left is more intolerant; it’s that the right’s positions are simply more intolerable. If you’re, say, the parent of a nonbinary child and your brother refuses to use your child’s preferred pronouns and insists that there are only two genders, it’s going to be hard to justify making your kid spend time with this person who doesn’t accept and love them for who they are.
Or take interracial relationships. If your entirely white family is not welcoming, whether overtly or covertly, to your aunt’s Black husband, eventually they’re going to stop coming around.
When it comes to racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and other political ideologies that fuel fascism, there really isn’t room to live and let live. There’s no middle ground between someone who thinks that transgender people are subhuman and a person who is actually transgender. You can’t ask that person to settle on an acceptable amount of dehumanization for the sake of the relationship.
According to Fox News, liberals are lonelier and more anxious because they cut off relatives with differing political viewpoints, not because those relatives' political viewpoints target them personally and cause them harm.
Look, we’re not talking about Mets fans versus Cubs fans. Politics is personal. Especially with Republicans' obsession with the so-called “culture wars.”
To “win” the culture wars, Republicans need to make abortion illegal nationwide, ban transgender people from public life, overturn marriage equality at the Supreme Court and then ban it, deny and suppress Black history to reinforce systemic racism, demonize and imprison immigrants, ban books about anything they don’t agree with, pack the courts with conservative judges, dismantle democracy to preserve their power, privatize public education, preferably turning it into a Christian charter-school system, and so much more.
In other words, they would need to extensively curtail personal freedom and civil rights. And, yeah, a lot of liberals take that pretty personally.
“As social creatures, humans rely on relationships to regulate stress. When those bonds are cut over politics…liberals may be isolating themselves in ways that make them more vulnerable to loneliness, anxiety and diminished emotional regulation,” a clinical psychologist writes for Fox News. “Social support is a powerful protective factor — it helps regulate emotions, buffer stress and reinforce a person’s sense of meaning and connection.”
Nobody is arguing that social support isn’t a good thing and that having close relationships isn’t a boon to mental health. But that’s only if the people in question are actually supportive and caring in the first place. As they say, breaking up is hard to do. No matter what the reason. It hurts to cut ties with someone, but that doesn’t mean people should allow themselves to be denigrated for the sake of maintaining a relationship that is actually unhealthy.
A better framing of this issue is to ask why conservatives are alienating their liberal relatives by taking political positions that harm the very people they profess to care about. What is that doing to their mental health? To their sense of loneliness?
Conservatives who support Trump and his policies are straight-up embracing fascism. They are choosing extreme political ideology over their loved ones. And yet liberals are being blamed for fracturing families?
When we define “keeping the peace” as making sure that the oppressors are comfortable, the job of keeping the peace will always fall to the oppressed. That doesn’t “reinforce a person’s sense of meaning and connection.” It does the exact opposite.
Life is too short to cling to relationships that hurt you. No one should have to appease someone with hateful views or beg that person to recognize their humanity because “it’s the holidays.”
Bottom line: If you hate someone, if you support policies that hurt and demonize them or people they care about, if you endorse fascism, don’t expect them to pass the stuffing. Expect them to tell you to stuff it.