“You shouldn’t let politics get in the way of your relationships.”
As we approach one of the most consequential elections in our nation’s 250-year lifespan, I see this sentiment pop up on social media a good bit in think pieces and news stories: the idea that family members and friends are too important to lose over a political position, a party affiliation, or a ballot choice.
This may have been a reasonable and healthy idea back when we had parties and candidates who genuinely desired the common good; when we were debating methodology or financial approach to solving problems that we all agreed were problems. It made sense to preserve relationships when we imagined that our fathers, cousins, neighbors, and lifelong friends cared about diversity and justice and personal freedoms and helping people as much as we did.
We are way past that.
For a decade now, Donald Trump and his surrogates have offered an openly nihilistic, misogynistic, hate-poisoned vision of an intentionally divided nation without empathy for the poor or the sick. Their movement has been a naked declaration of white supremacy and intolerant nationalism; a movement completely devoid of policy and oriented solely around those it would exclude and punish and banish.
And that is what so many of the people we once shared this life with have chosen, many for the third time now. That doesn’t just point to political fissure or ideological misalignment, but a complete moral incompatibility.
Year after year, we have witnessed those we love repeatedly confirm their deviations regarding affordable healthcare, human rights, environmental protections, body autonomy, foreign genocide, sexual violence, and the legal and moral standards leaders should be held to.
This is no longer about policy differences, not simple disagreements on the humane and responsible way to deal with collective national challenges. It isn’t a matter of agreeing to disagree on less-than-critical subjects where a stalemate is acceptable.
The coming election (much like our political sides in this iteration of America) is about whether we will embrace or reject unapologetic racism, rabid nationalism, mindless homophobia, the dehumanization of immigrants, narcissistic greed, and the coddling of sexual predators.
And these things are worth cutting people off, severing ties, and muting on social media. They have to be if our values matter to us.
The lives of millions of flesh-and-blood human beings hang in the balance as we enter the voting booth: their freedom to make healthcare decisions for themselves, their access to fundamental liberties promised in the Constitution, their agency to govern their own destinies, their basic sense of safety from harassment and harm and violence.
If there was ever something that justified a deleted contact number, an empty chair at the Thanksgiving table, an exodus from a church, or the termination of a friendship, it is this.
If we aspire to being decent human beings, at some point, we need to choose whether we will lean into our deepest convictions or preserve relationships with people whose presence increasingly causes us to compromise, conceal, or deny those convictions.
We need to decide whether we will keep a tenuous peace with those we share blood and tradition with, but little else, or whether we will step out into the raking light of full authenticity and fight for the things that break our hearts and boil our blood, for the human beings we know are and will be under great duress because of the choices our loved ones and friends have made.
The choices we make in November are far more consequential than merely altering the balance of power in Congress, flipping key seats, or ousting incumbents committing malpractice.
The tangible impact of our votes on people of color, on LGBTQ human beings, on the sick and the poor and the elderly, on our immigrant communities (let alone the rest of the world) is beyond what we can comprehend right now.
The outcome in November will determine the opportunities people have to earn a living wage, to feed their children, to choose their homeland, to define their gender, to live free from violence at the hands of their government. This isn’t politics, it’s elemental humanity.
I’m not saying we should disconnect from everyone we know who doesn’t perfectly align with us politically, as learning to bear with reasonable disagreement, hearing another’s perspective, and finding compromise are often necessary and helpful. But when the misalignments are philosophical, ethical, or moral, we all need to ask if that’s cause for distance or disconnection.
If we haven’t gotten there yet, many of us may decide that we cannot forgive or abide those close to us who have repeatedly chosen leaders and policies that have caused so much unnecessary sorrow to so many human beings. We might decide that we no longer desire relational or physical proximity to people who have allowed our nation to be handed over to such a cancerous malevolence, and who did so with perverse joy and unrepentant cruelty.
If that isn’t reason to end a relationship, nothing is.
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