I have a friend whom I love dearly, respect tremendously, and have known for two decades. He's an intelligent, educated, decent, kind, generous, well-meaning, thoughtful person. He's in his 60's, a physician (specialist) by trade, and also owns and runs a separate, non-medical business with his brother, who fits the same description. He's quite simply one of my favorite people in the world.
And he's a Republican voter.
My friend (let's call him "K") is very much a traditional, mainstream Republican voter; not a wingnut or a bagger or a Birther or a Bircher or a conspiracy-theorist or anything like. He votes Republican, I guess, because he's very well-off financially and wealthy people tend to vote Republican, although to be honest I've never asked him. He doesn't vote Republican for the same reason a lot of right-wingers tell me they do, e.g., because he wants to stick it to minorities or to the undeserving poor, or because of "Christian values" (he's Jewish), and he's generally liberal on social issues from what I've been able to tell. He's even having solar panels installed at that other business, for crying out loud. I can only assume he votes Republican because he believes, rightly or wrongly, that the GOP is better for his bottom line.
I've never asked him why he votes Republican because I sometimes have a hard time talking politics with people I love and respect who happen to be Republican voters. The reason why is that even the most low-key, non-confrontational, non-wingnutty GOP fans like K still often rely upon and go by what's being said inside the paracosm, on Fox and elsewhere, and it's hard to point out to someone you love and respect that something they believe, that they depend in some way on believing, is wrong, false or unreasonable.
When a conversation like this, with K or anyone else, starts to venture into Fox-talking-points territory, I usually try to change the subject or keep things on an abstract level and not commit to a confrontational position. I try to say things that will make them think (or re-think) without flat-out saying they're wrong.
I bring this up because I had a conversation like this with K the other night, it upset me a bit, and I was reminded of why it upset me by this delightful, farcical "Operation American Spring" thing going on in D.C. today. Granted, these are mainly paranoid lunatics whose grasp on reality is tenuous at best; K would never attend or even support such a thing. But here's what bothered me about my conversation with K: At one point he said, speaking in very broad terms, that all elected officials, all politicians, are "liars," all are "corrupt," all "have an agenda" and all are "in bed with lobbyists," and so forth, followed by the obligatory declaration that these universal characterizations apply to "both parties" and "both sides."
Now, the "both sides" meme has been discussed and dissected nine ways to Sunday, so there's no point in pointing out that it's bullshit. The problem is that like most people who insist that "both sides" are the same in terms of dishonesty and corruption and all the other blanket statements people make about politicians, candidates and elected officeholders, when the conversation gets more specific, i.e., turns to specific political figures, laws, policies, &c., K expresses and directs his cynicism, criticism, contempt and derision only and exclusively at Democrats. I've never once heard him criticize a Republican by name; any Republican, past or present, or say anything negative about Republican policies either in the abstract or in terms of actual historical results. But he has had some choice words for and about Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and others, not to mention Democrats generally, and did the other night. For example, he repeated the talking point that Harry Reid has "refused to take up" the "dozens" of Republican bills to create jobs and boost the economy. He pointed out that Pelosi is one of the richest people in Congress. He blamed the President, the administration and the Affordable Care Act for the Hobby Lobby case.
To be fair, I've seen "liberals" and Democratic voters do this too; proclaim broadly that "both sides" are just as bad but reserve their more specific criticisms for Republicans only. This is not so much meant as a criticism of GOP voters as it is an attempt to understand why so many people feel the need to say that they are equally-disdainful, equally-cynical and suspicious, of "both sides" and then proceed to (quite obviously and ostentatiously) direct their criticism, cynicism, suspicion and contempt at only one side while dutifully carrying water for the other (by, for example, reciting its propaganda, talking points and lies). I'd like to say that in my observation, right-wingers are more apt to do this than "liberals," but I have no objective proof that that's necessarily the case.
The thing is, if it were anyone else, like some random blog commenter, I would have said all this to K. I would have pointed out that he has only ever directed his cynicism and contempt at Democrats, that while he paid lip service to disliking both sides he clearly only dislikes one side for the reasons stated and only regards one side as being guilty of the behavior he nominally attributed to both. I would have argued that if either party right now has a political incentive to deliberately prevent the economy from improving, it's probably not the Democrats. I might also ask if he felt this way about "all" politicians and officeholders, "from the President on down," as he put it, in 2005.
But I didn't. I just didn't want to call my dear, dear friend a liar and a hypocrite, I didn't want to accuse him of being suckered by propagandists and misinformation, let alone of not being smart enough to tell that he is being lied to. The best I could muster in response to the Reid talking point was, "Well, that's not quite true," and then change the subject. The best I could muster in response to his ACA talking points was that, "Well, there's a lot of misinformation out there, and politicians no longer pay a price for misleading the public," and change the subject to how politicians fundraise off the outrage generated by the disgusting things they say.
Am I wrong? Am I wrong to not confront K about things I know he is wrong about? Am I wrong to try to avoid political discussions with K and others like him, and thereby avoid risking harm to the friendship? I've lost friends before over political disagreements. It's become harder and harder to get along with people who simply vote differently, because for a lot of people, having a different voting preference is tantamount to the any and all of worst things imaginable up to and including pure evil.
In the end I don't know why this conversation bothered me so much. Maybe I'm just torn about it. As I was writing this I was thinking that maybe K and I were both trying to spare each other's feelings, respect each other's opinions, and avoid a nasty partisan spat, by attributing things to both sides or to politicians generally that we really only feel or believe about one or the other. As I think about it, I might have been doing this too; I didn't name any names, and the most I said about Republicans was that some of them, when they give speeches or interviews, are not so much running for office as auditioning for Fox News Contributor. So, maybe K felt the same way I did. I think I'll bear that in mind the next time we talk.