I had a group of friends that I spent most my sophomore year with at a very liberal east-coast college. Most of the friends in the group studied international relations and we frequently discussed politics. As I got to know them, I realized that we differed on a lot of things. Two of them told me that they wanted to join the CIA as analysts. Now I’m not a poli-sci major, but I know enough about history to know that the CIA has done and continues to do some evil shit. Now I do have a bunch of moderate leaning friends, but it felt different talking with this group of friends they had good understand of history and political philosophy. One of these guys, let’s call him Matt, was a huge Aaron Sorkin fan and Blairite (weirdly obsessed with British politics for some reason). Matt also wanted to work in political finance. I thought we were bonding over are mutual interest in the space related stuff until he showed me a Aaron Sorkin mini-series on the Apollo Space Program. And then proceed to tell me that he like the Apollo Missions because of all the political wonkery involved. The tipping point in our friendship was when he told me, at a BLM protest, that he was happy to finally get his “liberal street cred”. Liberal wonks are some of the worst people to be friends with if you genuine care about making life better for people.
My girlfriend at the time was a huge Joe Biden supporter, her mom worked at the World Bank. She would often jokingly say that I was a communist and would side with the group of friends on domestic and foreign policy issues. She started fighting with me when I explained to her that the public health think-tank that she was applying to was just a health care lobbying group. This hurt me because I was really in love with her at the time, but I could see that she wasn’t open to critically challenge the world around her. She also got upset that I owned a gun, as many people from the south do. And when I decided to switch my studies from finance to computers science, she wasn’t supportive. Anyway, I broke up with her later and stopped talking with group of friends.
Anyway, I really wish I could meet some cool people with socialist outlook that are down to crack a cold one and do some grilling.
Don’t make politics into your whole personality and you won’t have this problem. Where I live and where I work is in the deep south and I have to deal with conservatives a lot. I just don’t talk politics with them or I ignore it when they try. I haven’t really had problems with relationships from it. My fiancé is more or less, left leaning after coming from an apolitical background.
Honestly, no. I think it’s perfectly fine to be friends with people you disagree with politically. We don’t talk about politics very much but we have lots of fun and we care about each other. That’s more important than having the same political ideals in my book.
yeah, i combat liberalism
but real talk? i borderline cannot deal with my white male friends. every single one is obsessed with denouncing china.
white male here who’s pro-china views have cost him most of his friends. do you have any openings ?
honestly, i would just avoid it. work as much as possible to center any political discussions on the bourgeoisie of your own country. that still ultimately fails because it gives the other people the opening of “well, i’m smart, and i can care about TWO things”. but at least you don’t have to entrench yourself in the position of being a china stan.
I’ve found it helps not to talk about China directly. If folks don’t have a basic understanding of how much the US has fucked with every other country on Earth over the last century, it’s hard for someone to make the leap that all the propaganda the US puts out about China is wrong. I often start with the Contras, because the US’ involvement with them is just so abhorrent and shocking you really can’t come to any conclusion other than Reagan was a very bad person, which is shocking to most Americans. And 99% of Americans have no clue why we got involved in Vietnam. They might spout the “to fight communism” line but you can just show folks how it was never really about that. I’ve worked on people that way. Once people understand America’s foreign policy not in term of us trying to make the world a better place for freedom and democracy, but rather the exertion of power in order to preserve hegemony, THEN a proper view on China starts to make sense.
Never kiss a tory boy.
I argue a lot with some friends about stuff like China, Russiagate and the USSR. With China, it’s the usual yogurt genocide stuff, HK freeze peach stuff. Russiagate I have a unique take on, in that I absolutely believe it happened, and that the US 100% deserved it as payback for destroying the USSR and the Yeltsin coup(s) in the 90s. We still get on for the most part. I like to think that as long as I hold steady and explain my stance respectfully they can at least challenge their own assumptions.
Yes the US singlehandedly destroyed the USSR. Couldn’t have possibly been internal contradictions, or dare i say it, material conditions.
