United States | News & Politics

This reminds me of https://www.issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/missing-missing-reasons.html

At least the reason for estrangement is clearly not missing in the situation(s) being discussed.

Nobody really gets disowned for voting for a particular candidate because voting is private and done in secret. You can lie about who you voted for and nobody can even prove it.

People actually get disowned for constantly talking about voting for a particular candidate, even after their friends and family ask them to stop.

They made their choice to put their politics before their family and need to cry publicly about it to get that sweet persecution complex.

Social psychologists have long understood that merely identifying with a group in competitive contexts can lead people to view those outside the group less favorably.

Ah yes. It's because they are on the other team that proud Trump supporters are being ostracized. The fact Trump and his allies have blatantly advertised goals that are dangerous, damaging, bigoted, hateful, and generally horrific... and their poorly hidden goals are even more so... has nothing to do with it. It's just competition bringing out the worst in the rest of us.

Gullibility and ignorant malice are an epidemic. Hate and stupidity are an epidemic. Estrangement is self-preservation and a symptom. We aren't boomers, we don't stay in abusive relationships because "that be how the world be".

I am recently estranged from a narc parent.

Unfortunately in my case, it isn't both of them. I have tried to explain to the other why I can't roll with it, but it has been very difficult. Collateral damage, but I feel like I have no other option.

Scruples are about the only thing a lot of us have anymore.

Maybe its just that I was disowned in 2015 for being trans, but I find it hard to be sympathetic. We choose who we vote for and if your loved ones say your political views are so reprehensible that they won't speak to you, either take the cue or accept that you shit the bed and now you have to lie in it

Calling the bigotry and violence of fascist rhetoric "political beliefs" is lying by construction.

If you want to be friends then why aren't you friendly?

They’re a bloodless thing, politics, abstract, almost administrative sometimes. Making decisions about who you associate with based on political views is apparently like getting into a screaming fight over an improper stapling methodology on one’s TPS reports, or ending a friendship over pizza toppings. And at other times, political views are sacrosanct, holy, the most special and personal part of a person’s belief structure, something that a decent person would be no more likely to critique, much less reject, than they would be likely to tell a new mother that her baby is ugly.

I have noticed that whether political views are trivial or sacred seems to depend on the point the professional mourner of crumbling civility is trying to make in the moment, in order to bolster civility. They are usually trivial when we are meant to make friends despite them. They are usually sacrosanct when we try to point out what they are.

But some of us have noticed that politics are neither of these things, have noticed that politics are where power is arranged and distributed, and have been listening not to the civility mourners or the supremacists they defend, but rather to the many people who are directly harmed by harmful policies driven by harmful political views, who have no luxury to believe in false separations. They know that politics are, in fact, a matter of spiritual alignment, and that spirit is not something to do with ghosts, but with the blood and guts of how collective belief touches their lives.

Two-thirds of survey respondents agree that ending contact with a family member because of political beliefs is not justified and that most family fights over politics could be easily resolved.

Ah yes those pesky, abstract “political” beliefs shouldn’t get in the way of family. Such esoteric ideals like

• I believe in human rights.
• Rapists should not be in power.
• Nazis are evil.

Who could ever let a silly disagreement over politics spoil a relationship? /s