The Hill: Almost 20% Polled Say "Politics" Has Hurt/Ended Friendships & Family Relationships (10/18/22 19:43 PST) (1 Viewer)

[GordonGekko]

Direct Headline: Almost 1 in 5 say politics has hurt friendships, family relationships: poll

by Zach Schonfeld - 10/18/22 10:43 AM ET

Nineteen percent of registered voters said recent disagreements with family or friends over political issues have hurt their relationship, according to a new Siena College-The New York Times poll. Independents and Democrats were more likely to say so — at 21 percent and 20 percent, respectively — compared to just 14 percent of Republicans.....The poll found political disagreements more often hurt relationships for women and white registered voters with a college degree....Nearly half of registered voters surveyed — 48 percent — indicated people’s political views reflect whether they are a good person.....Fourteen percent said a person’s political views suggest a lot about whether someone is a good person, and 34 percent said political views suggest a little about whether they are a good person....

....Independents, people living in suburban areas and respondents between the ages of 30 and 44 were more likely to say political views do not reflect at all on whether someone is a good person.
....Just 3 in 10 respondents ages 18 to 29 said political views don’t tell you anything about whether someone is a good person, compared to 53 percent of those ages 30 to 44.....

https://thehill.com/homenews/campai...s-hurt-friendships-family-relationships-poll/




Direct Headline: Families Have Been Torn Apart by Politics. What Happens to Them Now?

By Sabrina Tavernise Nov. 26, 2020

....In interviews during and after the election, Americans talked about the differences that had emerged in their families over politics and how they had changed over the past four years. Some had learned to live with them, and were trying hard to focus on the things they had in common. Others had not spoken since 2016....

....The political divisions within families, while widespread, are far from universal. Dr. Joshua Coleman, a psychologist who specializes in estrangement, said that while he now has such cases in his practice, they are still a small share of the business, and, so far, mostly consist of millennials or other younger Americans pulling back from or cutting off their more conservative baby boomer parents.....“It’s like frying chicken,” said Ms. Moore, 64, sitting in a lawn chair outside her small brick house. “Once you put it into that hot grease, it becomes something different....”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/26/us/2020-election-family-conflict.html




Direct Headline: 'Dude, I'm Done': When Politics Tears Families And Friendships Apart

Tovia Smith October 27, 2020

.....A recent survey shows just how much the nation's bitter political divide is causing social splintering and taking a toll on friendships. Even decades-long relationships have been caving under the pressure, giving new meaning to "social distancing."......"I did straight up say, 'Dude, I'm done. Lose my number,' " said Shama Davis from Los Angeles, recalling when he "unfriended" a guy he'd been friends with since high school 25 years ago......"I just hung up on my end and proceeded to just block him in every possible way," said Joni Jensen from New York, still fuming over the guy she felt compelled to dump.....And betraying just a tinge of regret about cutting off his cousins, Ricardo Deforest of Tampa, Fla., conceded, "I hate to say it because family is everything," before unabashedly proclaiming, "I disowned them. In my mind they're not family anymore....."

...."All they can do is say, 'Trump is a racist. Orange man bad! Orange man racist! They're blowing spittle, and [their] veins popping out of their heads," he said. "Yo soy Latino. But [they assume] I'm some sort of horrible racist because I like Trump. It's ridiculous!"....Jocelyn Kiley, associate director of research at the Pew Research Center, said political polarization is more intense now than at any point in modern history. Nearly 80% of Americans now have "just a few" or no friends at all across the aisle, according to Pew. And the animosity goes both ways...."Democrats are a little bit more likely to say they'd end a friendship" Kiley said. "But Republicans may be less likely to say they have friends on the other side. So it may not be all that differential."....Another recent poll by the Public Religion Research Institute shows that 8 in 10 Republicans believe the Democratic Party has been taken over by socialists, while 8 in 10 Democrats believe the Republican Party has been taken over by racists. The report is aptly named titled "Dueling Realities.".....Another thing conservatives and liberals have in common, she said, is that they all suffer from big blind spots when it comes to the morality of their own side. They tend to view themselves as eminently fair and right, and the other side as irrational....

....It's exactly what Jon Langford, 28, a Georgia truck driver, said he experienced when his brother, who is gay, wrongly assumed the worst about him...."He went off on me saying essentially I'm a racist and a homophobe just because I'm a Trump supporter. No ifs, ands or buts. And he completely cut me out of his life," Langford said. They haven't spoken in years....Now, Langford said, he's determined not to do the same thing to his friends across the aisle, including his best friend, who supports former Vice President Joe Biden. As Langford sees it, no one has a monopoly on morality....."I could assume that anybody that supports Biden is a firm believer that it's OK to murder a baby," he said. "But I don't."

....At the other end of the political spectrum, Jeff Marinstein, a business and technology consultant from Connecticut, has also been trying to get past the ever-intensifying invective and insults from "friends."...One, in particular, kept attacking him as a "libtard," among other things. Marinstein no longer talks to that guy. But with another, he's trying a new strategy to save the friendship, suggesting they keep talking, just not about politics. So far, it's proving harder to enforce than he thought....."I'm still getting this nightly stream of ....articles and memes [mocking] Democrats, and I simply respond with a funny line that says, 'This post violates our agreement not to talk about politics,' trying to creatively send the message that I just don't want to engage....It just feels like the healthiest thing for me to do at the moment [is] to lower the temperature and to not continue these toxic conversations....But I suppose the risk is that I'm just retreating into my own information bubble with people who think just like me....."

https://www.npr.org/2020/10/27/9282...politics-tears-families-and-friendships-apart

 

[GordonGekko]

Direct Headline: Trump’s Presidency Is Over. So Are Many Relationships.

By Joe Pinsker March 30, 2021

....In a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted a couple of months after Trump’s 2016 victory, 16 percent of respondents said they had stopped communicating with a friend or family member because of the election. Four years later, many such relationships are still in disrepair. Corin Goodwin, a 53-year-old communications consultant in Seattle, hasn’t seen her dad since October 2016, when they had a falling-out over the presidential race, in which he supported Trump and she supported Hillary Clinton. Since then, they’ve had only occasional email contact. “When he passes, I don’t know if I will even be informed, which really freaks me out,” Goodwin told me. (Goodwin and others mentioned in this article were not comfortable putting me in touch with the friends and family members with whom they disagreed, so I was unable to hear the other sides of these stories.)....

....Because of the ways family members weave themselves into one another’s lives, political ruptures between them can be more world-altering than those between friends. A woman named Donna who is in her 60s and lives in Utah told me that after acrimonious family arguments on Facebook in 2016, her daughter informed her that because Donna supported Trump, she’d no longer be able to see her granddaughter. And in the past four years, she hasn’t, save for a 10-minute interaction at the funeral of a family member. The only other glimpses she gets of her granddaughter are when other family members send her pictures. “I’m really hurt,” Donna, who asked to be identified by only her first name so that she could speak openly about a family dispute, told me. “If I had known what was coming, I would have kept my mouth shut” about politics.....

.....As political scientists have documented, over the past few decades, Americans’ party affiliations have become more strongly correlated with other aspects of who they are, such as their race, their religion, and where they live. As a result, certain political beliefs have become more predictably linked to broader worldviews. “Politics isn’t just politics anymore,” Emily Van Duyn, a communication professor at the University of Illinois, told me. “Political identity now encompasses so many other things—our social identity, our morals, our values.” This means that when two people disagree about a political figure, much more than a preference in candidates and their policies is often at stake.....

....Jeanne Safer, a psychotherapist in New York City, is mindful of that caveat, but maintains that people who cut off others over political differences frequently do so to their own detriment. “We can make politics seem like a thing that’s more fundamental to character than it really is, and I think we err seriously,” Safer, the author of I Love You, But I Hate Your Politics, told me. “If you have a long history with people who have treated you well and loved you, is it really all ruined by who they voted for?”....One of Safer’s tenets of political communication is that you should never go into a conversation with the intention of changing someone’s mind. The tone should be inquisitive (“I want to hear more about why you think that”) rather than judgmental (“How could you think that?”). Ironically, as strategies like these become more valuable, they may also be needed less often: Many politically mixed friendships have ended, and so far, fewer seem likely to be formed in the future. This is concerning for what it says about the country’s ability to heal rifts that formed in the past ....

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/03/trump-friend-family-relationships/618457/


*******



"I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend." - Thomas Jefferson



"A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out." - Walter Winchell



"Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light." - Helen Keller



I considered this an interesting topic because there is a great deal of complexity when you are talking about dealing with family and friends. And this elevates into another level of possible pain if you mix in career, passions and hobbies amidst those same family and friends. You don't get to pick your family, but you do get to pick your friends and romantic relationships. You don't get to choose what kind of child you have, though you can try to shape that situation into the best possible outcome. And there is no denying that politics in many cases operates as a final tipping point for an already fractured situation where much of the blood shed and pain happened before the political disagreements. As economic times become harsher, families are going to have to become more compressed in practical living situations, along with the anxiety and stress of earning a living, out of control crime, threat of possible nuclear or World War, a global pandemic and chaos around the entire world - None of this is going to add up to more harmony if you have deep political divide that cannot be bridged.

Some things I found interesting - Younger people, mostly college educated, are more likely to assess morality with political viewpoints. And none of the above discussion/articles encompasses those that are "politically homeless" What about Pro Life Democrats? LGBT's who are Conservative? It's not that easy to put people into specific boxes to hard line where all the disputes are coming from. And the issue of "low information voters" is ignored. Many things are opinions, but some things are facts. There is a disturbing current trend of attacking facts in modern day political discussion.

I don't generally talk politics in my day to day personal life. Maybe one or two close people in private, that's it. I never talked politics at my companies. My employees have always understood I wanted a "politics free zone" in the workplace. For the most part, I've been more fortunate than other companies out there in current times in that regard. I talk current events with my godson, but in the context of the companies and business. Because of our vast age difference, I care less about his personal politics and more about preparing him for the day, likely soon, that I pass on from this world. It's more Don Vito and Michael in the garden and less Greg Gutfield and Tyrus on a film set. Because of my long tenured media optics career, I had several opportunities to work on political campaigns across time, and I turned them all down. I still have some standing offers now to do that, and I want no part of it. I've probably talked more practical politics openly in the last two years than I have the rest of my entire life combined.

Something I said about the Rooney Rule in the Shark Pool over a decade ago is that there are LOTS of reasons to hate someone, despise someone, not want to talk to someone and not want to hire someone LONG BEFORE anyone even gets to the issue of race. I feel the same about politics. There's a lot of reason to want someone out of your life WAY WAY WAY BEFORE you find out their political positions. But I will say relationships in general are easier if you have similar viewpoints on "value systems" I do not however believe in the "virtue signaling" that comes with "Why can't people just get along and stop the division!" If you want real change, set an example. It's what I taught my godson and it's what I expect of my employees.

Do I care what political viewpoints my godson carries? I care that he's a fundamentally good person, that he lives a life without regret and that he's safe. Those are my priorities as a parent.

I'm guessing some people here have had acrimony, conflicts, arguments and maybe even full on separation over politics. Particularly in the last decade or so. Here is an opportunity for some here to share that if they want. I believe this is a good baseline topic that impacts everyone to some degree.

I'll leave this here for others to discuss.

 

[tymarsas]

Do I care what political viewpoints my godson carries? I care that he's a fundamentally good person, that he lives a life without regret and that he's safe.

I agree with this. It's a good way to look at life.

I wish we could disagree without demonizing the other side. Too much name calling from both sides.

When I was young, I used to get into lots of arguments at the bar. Some about politics, some about sports and others about random dumb things. That was before smart phones of course. I generally avoid talking politics in real life now. It's just not worth it. I have plenty of close family and friends that hold very different political views than my own. It makes no difference to me.