This Political Season, Americans Need To Chill Out

Are you voting for the presidential candidate known in some circles as Comrade Kamala? For her opponent who is allegedly simultaneously channeling Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini? For Chase Oliver or another third party candidate? Or maybe you’ve had enough with low-payoff gestures and you’re taking a pass on the political drama as a nonvoter.

In any case, you’re likely trying to making the best of a situation in which candidates vie to be less unpopular and options are more than a little unpalatable. There’s also a good chance that, despite your sincere efforts to choose the least-bad option, you’ve received a ration of shit from true believers who insist voting differently than them makes you just evil. Unfortunately, many people let politics taint their lives in weird ways and damage relationships. In truth, a lot of Americans need to chill the fuck out.

The spreading poison of political hatred is clearly affecting the way people interact—or if they interact.

Relationships Shattered Over Disagreements

“28% of Americans say they find it either very stressful (9%) or somewhat stressful (19%) to spend time with friends or family members who don’t share their political views,” according to a September Yahoo News/YouGov poll. “Some 26% of Democrats and 30% of Harris voters say they have had a friendship or family relationship end because of a disagreement over politics; 24% of Republicans and 24% of Trump voters also say they had ended a relationship over politics.”

I haven’t ended relationships over political views, but I have been cut off by old college friends because I don’t share their knee-jerk loyalty to the “correct” candidates and causes. I do understand how stressful this can all be. On the way to dinner, a friend in the shotgun seat of my car recently shouted objections every time he saw political signs with which he disagreed. There were a lot of signs.

My good deed for the week was not kicking him out the door while the vehicle was in motion.

Workplaces have been poisoned by political feuds, too. A survey earlier this year by the Society for Human Resource Management found “20% of employees said they had been mistreated at work by their co-workers or peers due to their political views.” A third of respondents say they expect things to get worse with the approach of the November election.

The problem seems to be getting worse. While 28 percent of workers of all ages told Indeed/Harris pollsters they might resign their jobs over political differences at work, “nearly 40% of workers aged 18-34 would leave a job because of political differences at work, and 40% of this same age range would also leave if their CEO expressed political views they disagreed with.”

Given that disinterest in reaching across partisan lines is especially pronounced with the younger, set, it’s no surprise that political disputes are poisoning male-female relationships. In recent years, young men’s politics have tended to the center or center-right while young women have drifted far to the left.

“In the US, Gallup data shows that after decades where the sexes were each spread roughly equally across liberal and conservative world views, women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries,” John Burn-Murdoch commented earlier this year in the Financial Times.

Inevitably, that has resulted in dating apps adding political criteria to their services so that users can filter out potential partners who disagree with them on taxes, social policy, or which contender should get a chance to make the government a bit more obnoxious and intrusive.

“Political polarization in dating represents a microcosm of a larger issue: of people choosing to ‘isolate ourselves from disagreeable points of views’ and being increasingly able to do so,” Casey Klofstad, a professor of political science at University of Miami, cautioned in a CNN piece this month.

An ‘Oil Spill’ of Politics Into Unrelated Areas of Life

The tendency to isolate ourselves from “disagreeable” points of view has grown in recent years. In doing so it has seeped into areas of life that aren’t explicitly political, like dating and workplaces. It’s also affecting music preferences and brand choices as they become badges of partisanship.

“Political divisions have become broader and it seems that these divisions have come to incorporate much more and include opinions that were once not involved,” Daniel DellaPosta, a Penn State sociologist, found in his research four years ago.

In his paper, DellaPosta referred to the phenomenon as an “oil spill” in which political polarization “spreads from its source to gradually taint more and more previously ‘apolitical’ attitudes, opinions, and preferences.”

Which is how we get potential romantic partners who might be capable of putting up with each other’s quirks rejecting matches because of voting preferences. It’s why workplaces simmer over partisan hostilities. It explains friendships that survived decades of good and bad times ending over a pen mark on a ballot. It’s how relatives who endured grandma’s cooking through several generations stop speaking to each other in the course of an election campaign.

It’s also how we get political violence. Reuters reported at least 51 incidents this year, including two attempts on Donald Trump’s life as well as lower-profile shootings, assaults, arson attacks, and the like. The news service describes these events together as “the biggest and most sustained increase in political violence since the 1970s.”

Political Differences Shouldn’t Taint All of Our Choices

That doesn’t mean political opinions aren’t important or that they can’t be deal-killers. Is that woman on the dating app an actual communist? Yeah, I’d take a pass on that. Is that guy at your workplace really a Nazi? I’d avoid him, too. Better yet, introduce those two—just for shits and giggles.

But within the normal range of opinion, nobody is ever going to completely agree with anybody else. Creating ideological and partisan litmus tests for family, friends, lovers, and co-workers is a guarantee of damaging social fractures—and greater splintering as the purity tests become more exacting. We can’t make space for deviationists, can we? And off we retreat into our shrinking bubbles.

None of this is necessary or inevitable. Americans need to chill the fuck out.

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