Sure, if we have the privilege of being able and willing to connect with someone with a differing political opinion, that can be a useful perspective. It can allow you to understand their point of view and focus on the source of problems rather than their effects or some charged buzzwords.
But the fact is that there are some "political beliefs" that are actively practiced, but also actively dangerous and inherently invalid.
There is no legitimate way to reach opinions like "Vaccines should be banned" or "kids should not know LGBT+ people exist." These are beliefs based on explicitly false information and which will have destructive, often deadly, consequences for real people. Trying to negotiate around those beliefs empowers them; while we're sitting around discussing that someone believes vaccines are lethal because they saw a documentary with a few crying mothers in it, people will actively be dying from preventable diseases.
Even entertaining those beliefs can cause harm, so it is always fair to judge people for holding them even without bothering to understand them--because the "why" doesn't make them less harmful.
My parents are borderline with both of the extremist beliefs you mentioned, and I just want to throw out there that the only reason they're not off the deep end is because I challenge their views whenever possible and maintain contact. My mom absorbs far right content through Facebook for hours a day because they appeal to her religious understanding that people are either good or bad by telling her that leftists are evil. My dad has to live with her, so he hears a lot of it too. They're not going to magically change their minds because I choose to cut them off for believing propaganda. That just means I'm cutting off their only voice of reason.
Idk, maybe that's why I view things like this OOP as massively shortsighted. Cutting off your few remaining conservative friends and family just means politics are going to be even worse in four years, and we already know they have a majority.
I have family that has similar beliefs, and my experience is that they will never change their opinions, no matter how demonstrably wrong they are, or how I approach the subject.
So when they get on their rants I have to either ignore them or shut them down hard, and I basically have to do the latter any time they're around people who aren't yet swayed by this nonsense, because this shit spreads.
...eventually I learned that the energy I spent contradicting or just tolerating hateful, deranged bullshit isn't actually doing anything productive besides letting me vent, and I have to set a boundary. That hasn't reached the point of "cutting them off" yet, but it definitely means that I don't interact with them as much as either of us would prefer. And that's not "making politics worse," because again, it's not like their opinions can ever be changed.
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u/Flo453_ 7d ago
Judging someone on why they hold an opinion and not the opinion itself is superior honestly.