jackb
Lying About Your Politics for Fun and Profit
A Guide to Cultural Non-Aggression
I was recently invited to a friend’s birthday party where several of her other friends were in attendance. These were primarily people I had only heard of in passing (if at all) from stories the hostess told, such that the only people in the room I’d ever had a conversation with were the hostess herself and the two people who accompanied me to the party.
We had a lovely evening, complete with meat and cheese, booze, a cake with words written on it in frosting, and informal socializing. I don’t meet new people very often, so this was a rare pleasure for me, especially because I found everyone I met to be interesting and their company enjoyable. I found there was much that we shared in addition to our mutual friend and would be happy to invite any and all of them into my home or to cook them a meal.
I also found on at least one occasion that our views on certain issues are what I would until recently have called irreconcilably different. God forgive me, but I regularly use the internet, which means I encounter people saying preposterous or objectionable things daily. Fortunately, I am not a partisan or an activist, so I don’t experience a pathological compulsion to immediately attempt to either convert or destroy everyone who expresses politics that differ from my own. Still, I have learned through painful experience that the bloviating maximalist oppositionalism of professional pundits has trickled down enough to convince otherwise pleasant, normal people that the only distinction between their neighbor and an existential enemy is which posts they upvote.
The revelation of the gulf between their politics and mine was troubling for a few reasons. Obviously when you meet charming and insightful people, you want them to agree with you about things, but even more concerning was the realization that I might not be allowed to continue meeting them amicably. To express my earnest views would be interpreted as a declaration of myself as an enemy, which I did not want to do. I do not believe I could have converted them and I did not wish to try; they have a right to their views, and, more the point, I didn’t want to change our easy discourse into a challenging conflict of values or policy.
So when this person mentioned in passing their political conviction, and it was my turn to reply, I was well aware of what was at stake. To respond with my own opposed view would immediately set us at odds and inspire enmity in a relationship that was heretofore quite friendly, and would probably ripple out in ways that would negatively impact my relationship with the other people I had met there, including my old friend the hostess. All this would be balanced against the paltry benefit of arguing a point. I therefore determined honesty to be countereffective to our best enjoyment of the evening and each other’s company.
This is all well and good, but it left me in a position where I still had to say something; a conspicuous aversion to the topic would be noticed and quite possibly lead my audience to suspect me of the very thing I was trying to conceal, which would defeat the purpose of the whole endeavor. My only recourse was to lie through my teeth and express a warm affirmation of what they believed. Now I know any audience to this idea will have reservations. One of the few things most everyone can agree on is the virtue of honesty and the sin of dishonesty. Surely a person of conviction and character would rather rise or fall with sincerity than persist in malign cynicism; death before dishonor and all that. This is righteous and admirable for heroes receiving their call to adventure or denying the temptations of a villain, but for a young man making a friend in trying social times, perhaps a staunch moralist perspective is less valent than a fluid pragmatic one. I certainly doubt any meaningful good would have come from sticking to my guns; all that I stood to gain was censure and exile from a social group in which my membership was mutually enjoyable.
Some might argue that this is actually harmful to both of us; that my persistence in relationships where I feel unable to speak freely on the issues of the day can only lead to consternation and increasingly compromising concessions of my values in the future. Better to respectfully part ways and continue seeking Our People. You might even argue that this is a disservice to the other party, as they are working under a misapprehension that I am one kind of person while I am secretly the opposite kind, and that I have no right to subvert their freedom to be discerning in their relationships and weigh political values for themselves. What I ask you to consider is whether it truly matters, in any material sense, whether I agree with them about political issues or not. To my knowledge, nobody involved in this party has the right to propose or enforce legislation and does not occupy a station with any meaningful political influence over other human beings. This means that the significance of our political views extends only as far as our votes, a value whose calculation I leave as an exercise for the reader. I found the actual telling of the lie easy enough; it is not difficult to learn the talking points of your political rivals, after all. So I spoke, the conversation naturally drifted into less troublesome places, and it was over.
An analytical reader might identify in this perspective something reminiscent of an obsolete mode of socialization, the sort of bipartisan idealism that can only be remembered mockingly by residents of current year. I wish to dissuade you of this opinion. I remain as committed to my beliefs as anyone this side of the hysterical fervor commonplace in political agitators and their thralls. I read opinion and advocacy that confirms my convictions and I disparage the arguments of my political rivals in my private life. Those closest to me know my views and know I do not brook evil or harm as I see it. This can remain true even as I discard my politics in my extroversive conduct.
What I’m describing is not a nihilist or amoral abdication of belief. Nor is it a program for predatory subversion of your friendships with intent toward sabotage or some other nefarious end. I’m merely advocating for the same courtesy you hopefully extend to your mother over the phone or your uncle at Thanksgiving; the maintenance of your real relationships and the experience of a eusocial bond with your fellows is drastically more important to your continuing experience of love and security than any ideological program. Perhaps political or para-political motivations have been useful in finding your crowd and experiencing kinship, perhaps not. My experience and that of most people who talk about such things online is that, where politics are concerned, harmony is the rarer fruit than strife; and so I advance a theory of personal politics that suborns it to your best living, which is supposed to be the point anyway.