The first presidential election I remember to any degree was in 1996 between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole (I also knew Ross Perot was running but that he had little chance of winning). I don't remember caring who won, though I think I probably preferred Clinton because I knew that he was the incumbent and, I don't know, the previous four years had gone okay for me (I started school, I hadn't contracted polio, and I got Christmas presents every year; kids in the 1930s couldn't necessarily say that).
But like most small children, I mostly echoed the sentiments I heard from my parents, and my mom spoke favorably of all three (well, two and a half) major candidates. She thought the first term of Bill Clinton (whom I later learned, after not receiving her vote in 1992, received her vote in 1996) went well and was certainly not horrified at the prospect of his presidency continuing. She admired Bob Dole's longevity and political experience and his track record as a bona fide war hero. She, despite liking the Democratic and Republican candidates, liked Ross Perot's iconoclasm (yes, I know his agenda was essentially just handing powerful business interests a blank check, but I was seven) and his apathy towards the power structure of the major parties.
When I was eleven, around the time my family first got the internet, I took one of those polls where you choose somewhere between "Strongly Agree" and "Strongly Disagree" on a host of political issues. I was not, at that point, a partisan, but I did know enough to have semi-nuanced, if still coming from the mouth of a grade schooler, opinions on things. After completing the questionnaire, I got a ranked list of the presidential candidates--Al Gore ranked near the top, George W. Bush ranked near the bottom, and I decided that I was a Democrat.
I've since re-evaluated my stances on issues, changing some but ultimately reaching the same basic ideological conclusion. But I've always had many friends who disagreed with me on politics. I don't wear that as a badge of honor about my open-mindedness or any other form of self-serving flattery; it is simple a product of my environment. Here's an extremely basic run-down of where I'm from, for the uninitiated: I grew up in a state that voted for Donald Trump in 2016 by over eighteen percentage points, but in a county that voted for Hillary Clinton by over sixteen percentage points, but in a township that voted for Donald Trump by over twenty-four percentage points (my current township of residence voted for Trump, but by less than two percent).
I then went to college in Adair County, which voted for Donald Trump by near 25 percent, which sounds like a blowout until you examine the results of the surrounding counties. It was only that close thanks to college students who registered to vote in the county--like most universities, Truman State leans left (although it is far less of a monolith than the Sean Hannitys of the world would lead you to believe). But I was also in the School of Business. I would occasionally observe that the fraternity for business majors I was in probably had a higher proportion of conservative voters than College Republicans. People thought I was joking.
Most of my college friends are further right than I am politically, but in 2016, things turned on their heads a bit. People who had voted for John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 hated Donald Trump. McCain and Romney may not have excited them, but neither repulsed them (even at my peaks of resisting their presidential campaigns, I fully acknowledged that I thought the Republican Party made the correct decisions during the primary season, both for their chances of winning a general election by wooing moderates and by picking a relatively palatable candidate).
Donald Trump represented a boorish stereotype of Republicanism that they, college educated and respectable people, resisted. Liberals tried in the early 2000s to frame George W. Bush, a Yale undergraduate with a M.B.A. from Harvard, as a complete moron, because they viewed Bush's ideas as bad. His ideas were mostly bad, and there were plenty of Democrats with as much or more education than Bush who could make cogent, nuanced cases against those ideas, but that is a lot more difficult to do than just scream about how George W. Bush is a stupid redneck.
Trump complicates matters because while I disagreed vehemently with George W. Bush's politics, not that much less than I disagree with Trump's, his heart consistently seemed to be in the right place. He, if nothing else, cared about his country and he cared about doing what was best for Americans, even if he was wrong. Donald Trump, however, seems to be focused much more on matters of his own personal vanity.
The 2000 presidential election was divisive, as most presidential elections tend to be, but I do not once recall the victor spiking the football in front of those who voted against him. There was certainly an Us vs. Them element, but it largely went away once Al Gore conceded defeat. Donald Trump lacks grace to such an appalling degree that just last night, he was citing Vladimir Putin, the war criminal whom the CIA has claimed actively conspired in Trump's favor during the election, about Hillary Clinton being a sore loser. You know what George W. Bush never did? Criticized Al Gore after the election (I could probably cut the sentence off here, because, well, Bush won, why would he bother?) with help from the goddamned president of Russia (in the good ol' days, Republicans accused Democrats of being in cahoots with Russia).
This probably seems like a rant to this point, but what creates a new challenge for reconciling friendships across party lines in 2016 is that bipartisanship is based on believing in the fundamental decency of others. People I liked and respected voted for people other than the people I voted for in years past, but I trusted that, at their core, they truly believed they were doing the right thing. And that's what actually matters. I've told some of my #NeverTrump Republican friends that I look forward to disagreeing with them on politics again, because a healthy democracy needs fundamentally decent opposition as much as it needs fundamentally decent leadership, even if you're on the side that has all of the power. Insert the old "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely" line here.
A new tactic I've seen more and more recently among members of "Left" Twitter is criticizing "liberals" (when you don't make an honest attempt to win elections, you can't be criticized for losing elections, and hence these two are differentiated heavily, particularly by the former group) for speaking favorably (on certain topics) of the likes of Evan McMullin or Matthew Dowd or David Frum, conservatives who are adamantly opposed to Donald Trump. McMullin, for instance, if you look at his political stances, is not that far removed from the pre-Trump Republican mainstream.
But this is completely missing the point, which is that liberals and conservatives can not only co-exist, but can occasionally unite when the stakes are huge (yuge). But they can also scatter once the macro problems (such as the continued existence of our democracy) are solved. I have no intention of ever voting for Evan McMullin for president, because I disagree with him on a lot of issues, but I would cherish the opportunity to disagree with him because he is, by all accounts, a sharp guy who is, and I cannot say this about Donald Trump, willing to learn. He is not somebody who is so caught up in his own sense of superiority that he is not willing to at least consider the possibility that he does not know it all (even if he usually comes to the conclusion that he is right--this is, after all, human nature).
It's weird for me to think that over 60 million people voted for Donald Trump for president. I still can't quite believe it. But while 60 million people decided they wanted him to be president, or at least decided they didn't want Hillary Clinton to be president, this does not represent a lifelong covenant. Nobody is contractually obligated to support what Trump does. Those who voted for Trump in 2016 are not obligated to vote for him in 2020.
And this is where it becomes deceptively easy to maintain friendships with those who voted differently than you. This doesn't mean you should be friends with everybody who voted differently than you: you are not required to reach out to the white nationalist Trump voters whose agenda in 2016 was keep brown people away from them.
But there is a such thing as a Trump voter who isn't just a miserable bigot--you might disagree with the adamantly pro-life voter who views pro-choice politicians as enablers of murder, but if you work from the basic assumption that abortion is murder (again, you don't have to agree with the premise; you just have to acknowledge that the belief exists), it's easy to see the logic of voting for a scumbag if he at least has that going for him. And if this voter, voting for Trump on the basis of this single issue, then begins to defend positions which seemingly contradict a pro-life ethos (death penalty, excessive police force, semi-habitual bombings of civilians in the Middle East, there's a lot of them here), then you have the right to note the hypocrisy. To them. This is how political dialogue works.
I am pessimistic about just about everything with the Donald Trump presidency, but at the end of the day, there's no reason why the awfulness I anticipate about the next eight years (yes, eight) should extend to my own personal life. And there's no reason it should extend into yours, either. Because if you cannot see the difference in the concerned, compassionate voter who disagrees with you on basically all issues and the alt-right Pepe-ists who incite legitimate fear in the hearts of those whom they consider enemies, then that falls on you.
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