Conservative Friends

Yes, despite my recent posts, I still do have some conservative friends.   If you're a 60-something white male living in Georgia, you're going to be pretty lonely without at least a couple of conservative friends.

Yesterday, I had lunch at a Mexican restaurant with a friend who, among other things, is an evangelical Christian and a Trump Republican.  We didn't talk about politics (or religion), but being friends, we fortunately had a lot of other things to talk about so it was fine.

Today, another conservative friend of mine posted this to her Facebook account:

Want to sell anything to an unsuspecting individual? It's not enough to tell them they have a problem. You must tell them they have a problem only you are able to solve. 

You can't sell someone on grievances if they don't believe they exist. But sow the seed of victimhood first and watch your money tree grow.  

#SadSociety #ConsumerLogic

Either my friend has changed her conservative views, or we may have finally found a place where conservatives and progressives can agree.  While it's possible that she was just talking about consumer marketing, in 2016, Donald Trump rose from the bottom of the polls to become the Republican nominee and eventually the president by telling people that they were the victims of illegal immigrants and crooked politicians.  Soon his followers were decrying a "War on Christmas," chanting "Build the wall," and complaining about so-called "reverse discrimination."

But after speeches that painted a surrealistically dark picture of Americans victimized by immigration, rampant crime, and class warfare, Trump then boldly and somewhat messianically declared that he and only he could fix the problems.

Did my conservative friend just make an about-face and was now ridiculing Trump, or did she not see the irony of her remarks?  Or was she somehow commenting in a code I didn't recognize on one or another of the Democratic candidates now running for president?  

I remember a similar exchange over lunch back in 2016 when a different conservative friend told me that President Obama was trying to divide the country using identity politics, "us versus them," for his own political gain.  Dividing the country, he told me, was a dangerous strategy.  But he refused to recognize that was exactly what candidate Trump was doing at the time by vilifying immigrants ("them") as the source of all of "our" problems.  The lunch ended acrimoniously.

Or were her comments not even about politics at all but, in my own polarization, I cannot see her remarks as anything other than political? If my mental schema has relegated her to the role of "conservative friend," not recognizing her as the fully-formed, complex, and multivaried human being that she is, it follows that I'd perceive everything she says as somehow "political."

Wanting to avoid acrimony, I resisted an urge to post the Trump quote above as a comment on her original Facebook post.   

I didn't post it because I knew that she wouldn't likely have agreed with my comparison, and since my response would have been on her Facebook page where all of her other friends, her conservative friends, would have seen it, she would have felt obligated to argue back.  We'd soon be fighting, at least over this one issue, and while we probably would have emerged from that quarrel still friends, why create disharmony when it can be avoided?  

So I didn't start something up that wasn't necessary.  Instead, I got it out of my system by talking about it here, and didn't call her out on her own, personal public forum.  I didn't create otherwise avoidable disharmony.

That's what it means to be a friend.  Friends don't do that to each other.