It’s OK to End Friendships Over Trump; Slate, 4/26/16

Isaac Chotiner, Slate; It’s OK to End Friendships Over Trump:

"Of course friendships should survive some political differences: I have friends who think differently than I do about everything from proper tax rates to abortion regulations. But having a friend who supports a blatantly (and proudly) bigoted candidate is categorically different. Everyone might have a different line about what issue to take some sort of moral stand on, but Trump has stepped over pretty much all of them. (The Lincoln comparison, moreover, doesn’t make much sense because it is Trump’s election that would tear the country apart.)

Wehner writes, “When political differences shatter friendships, when we attribute disagreements to deep character flaws, it usually means politics has become too central to our lives.” Call me moralistic, but I think being a racist or supporting a racist is a deep character flaw, and I don’t think I believe this because politics is too central to my life...

Of course, to say that decent people should have no social contact with Trump supporters is, for many of us, impossible and naïve. Maybe your lifelong chum backs Trump, or maybe your parents do. But people like Wehner—elites in every sense of the word—might want to ask themselves why they have friends or colleagues who are supportive of a bigot. The answer could have more to do with the political party they have long aided and abetted than the fraught and complicated subject of friendship."