I live by the maxim that you choose your quality by the company you keep, but I’ve struggled to add new friends over the years.

I had a friend who went from being a Marxist to being a Trump voter who rants about Jews. He used to talk about doing a Luigi, before there was one, and I could hang with that. He rotted somehow, seems like too much 4chan. I had to cut things off. Best friend for about twenty years. Worst part is, as a kid I didn’t like that I had friends who made fun of him behind his back and I stopped talking to them entirely. I cut him off a few years ago after one day he said that my baby was a suicide risk because they were mixed race.

Now I’ve only got two or three friends, and only one in the same country. It’s no good having integrity, sometimes.

We can disagree about pizza toppings, not that certain people don’t deserve rights. Get the fuck out of my life if you’re that type of asshole.

Plenty!

Depending on whether you want to count family in there, and I do have family that are friends too (as well as friends that are family), a lot

See, I’m fairly radical left. Not so far as to suck Lenin’s dick, but I could likely give a reach around to the one that is sucking it, if I stretch far enough.

So, here in the south, in the mountains, I have to drive to find leftists to shoot with.

That means most of my friends are what you would call liberals here in the US for sure, some that are more progressives. But people forget that there used to be “centrist” or “moderate” Republicans. Some of those are pretty damn open regarding civil rights, including even trans rights. My grandfather was like that; firmly in the free market, trickle down camp of economics (well, up until the last five years of his life, when he started leaning more moderate in that regard too), but hard core behind everyone having equal protection under the law, period.

That kind of Republican is called a RINO now. That’s the way my dad is, but even he voted libertarian for president last year, democrat for everything else. Southerners can be weird like that.

It’s the bible belt, So I have plenty of monotheist friends too, regardless of their political leanings. I have neopagan and wiccan folks that are close enough to friends that it counts for this.

My whole thing is about specifics. Bigotry is right out, I don’t put up with it. But actual political stuff, as in how the government should be operated, how funds should be allocated, that kind of thing? It’s more about why the hand the belief than what they believe. I can disagree with that kind of stuff and not dislike the person. I mean, I believe that when it comes to nothing minimizing corruption and maximizing human and civil rights, a democratically elected socialist government is going to be the best bet, but I’m not so arrogant as to assume I can’t be wrong. So how can I reject otherwise good people just because they don’t agree with that?

If someone is conservative, but limits that to their own lives, I got no beef. It’s when they start trying to enforce it on others that I can’t fuck with them. Unfortunately, when religious conservatives exist, and they’re also monotheistic, that’s the way they usually go. That sort of thinking precludes open mindedness to other ways of thinking, so it’s rare to find folks to be friends with like that.

Most people have different beliefs than me. So yeah. I don’t personally find any point to cutting people off just because I disagree with them although I think most people I bond with strongly tend to have similar views. I definitely have Christian friends though, despite being an atheist. No Trumpers, at least that will confess to it. But I wouldn’t exile them for it personally. I have a lot of questions for people whose views differ from mine because they puzzle me.

Yes I do and I’m glad. Occasionally we want to throttle each other, then we laugh.

I think it’s probably better that way. If you isolate yourself from people who are different it becomes easier to view them as “other” and be more willing to support harms to them.

I think so, but I’m not totally sure because certain topics are just too dangerous to discuss. Trying might seriously damage some relationships, even with relatives. I don’t know exactly what they believe and they don’t know exactly what I believe. If we knew, maybe we would agree to disagree but maybe we would never want to have anything to do with each other again.

The funny thing is that I’m talking about people who vote the same way I do. (I’m not counting a couple of conspiracy-theorist relatives whose ideas are too strange to be really offensive. They generally don’t bother to vote because they think the system is rigged anyway.) Would I ever be friends with people who didn’t vote the way I do? No, definitely not, although I would be polite to them unless they really pushed me.

I feel like the “Republicans and Democrats can’t be friends” thing has been true for my entire adult life. (I first voted in 2004.) However, “Democrats and other, different Democrats can’t be friends” is relatively new. I don’t even know how people these days do something like go on a date without reading each other’s manifestos first. I’m not even joking - I wouldn’t date someone whose views about, for example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were substantially different from mine no matter how compatible the two of us were otherwise. Do I put that on my dating profile?

Yes, I’m a pretty right leaning guy. I have a long time friend who is a socialist, another friend who is apolitical, another who’s a gay liberal, and a wife who’s pretty centrist. Politics don’t stop people from having other interests in common.