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Great post, reminds me a bit of my parents marriage, which has thankfully and surprisingly survived the Trump years.
My mom: heavily pro-choice, bit of a hippy, microbiologist PhD, main breadwinner doing government contracting stuff, likes reading books about myers briggs personality, or deep getting in touch with your feelings type stuff. Sucks at making friends, only talks well with very close friends or family. Can be bossy and annoying unless too drunk. (cavalier culture)
My dad: redneck, carpenter (but doesn't make much money doing that these days), was barely too young to ever go to vietnam and was sad about that, weed and age have helped his anger issues, ocd, generally republican, thinks trump is funny but doesn't personally like him, loves voting for trump, hates political correctness, likes racist jokes and dropping the n-word. Makes and keeps friends easily. Easy for everyone to talk with, fun to be around. (border culture)
Idk I feel like there are multiple scenarios where both of them could have just gone a little further off the deep end on their respective sides and it would have been an end for the marriage. As much as they sort of sound like stereotypes at times (my dad being the redneck stereotype, and my mom being the PMC karen stereotype) they also have the awareness of why those sterotypes are bad and annoying. They both have friends that have fully crossed over into those stereotypes, friends who would never get along with my other parent.
I get along with all of them, both of my parents, and all the crazy friends of theirs that feel like walking stereotypes. I think you are in a somewhat similar spot as me. You are no one's outgroup and everyone's far-group. You might as well be living in a different country. I used to think that I'd just learned some social skills and had the right attitude of "I can't lose friends over politics, because my views are too weird and I will have no friends." But its really more on other people. Having enemies is usually exhausting. Smart, well adjusted people learn to keep their enemies in the hypothetical.
I think it's understated just how much civil disagreement is a skill. It requires practice and conscious effort to be good at. Learning how to have fun with the little differences while knowing when to pull back before things get too heated is hard, and gets harder the more siloed your spcial circles are.
I've personally felt my muscles atrophy in this regard in recent years. As the group of people I spend most of my time with has become more politically homogeneous, I've found myself grow less politically tolerant and less willing to live and let live. Now, other people have genuinely become less agreeable, but I can feel it in myself as well, especially compared to when I was in school and spent half my time with the college Republicans and half my time with my socialist roommate and his hipster friends.
"How to disagree with your friends and loved ones without growing to resent and despise each other" should be a mandatory class in middle/high school.
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You briefly alluded to a system of culture classification i haven't heard of (cavellier, border). Where does it come from?
Albion’s Seed is worth reading, but it is fairly long. If you want an abridged version of the book, Scott wrote a good review several years ago.
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Not cjet but this is from Albion's Seed. A book analyzing American culture through the lens of British groupings. Cavaliers would be ex-gentry and influence plantation culture, Scotch-Irish borderers, working class rural types, then the more known Quakers and Puritans were the main 4 I believe.
The idea was that many of America's current sub-cultures can be traced back to the groups they descended from. (Southern gentlemen, Appalachian rural folks, and so on and so forth).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed
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This reminds me of one of my grandpa’s top pieces of advice- life’s too short to make enemies.
Then again, he also recommends eating an unhealthy diet to avoid having to deal with senility.
Since alzheimers is probably type 3 diabetes, not the best plan
He believes doing this will cause him to die before it manifests.
hope nobody tells him how heroin addiction correlates with dying with Alzheimer's
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I don't think I've ever specifically had this thought! I usually say something like "the lefts think I'm too far right, the rights think I'm too far left, and the centrists think I'm way too political" but "I'm just in everyone's far-group" has a ring of truth to it... most of the time, anyway. Every once in a while I get picked to be someone's nemesis; fortunately, it rarely seems to last.
Far-group just means no one thinks you are able to present a threat. A mongolian goatherder is, presumably, both of our far-group. Xi Jinping is, presumably, both of our outgroup. You are far-group to everyone because libertarians lose almost all the time(sometimes they have chainsaws and cloned dogs). If Elon was actually Trump's puppetmaster you'd be lots of people's outgroups.
It's not differentness, it's unworthiness of notice.
Yeah, I occasionally get the impression my left-wing friends view me with an almost anthroplologic curiosity. Like, I was at a party hosted by an old law school friend recently, and he walked around introducing me half jokingly as "the token libertarian" like he was Columbus showing off his indian prisoners to Ferdinand and Isabella.
To be fair, I'm guilty of the same thing. My best friend is a socialist labor organizer, and the number of times I've used him as a prop to win an argument or come across as worldly and tolerant is probably a little embarrassing. And much of the reason our friendship works is because we're both extreme enough to know neither one will ever actually be in a position to inflict our politics on the other. We joke about how im definitely going to be put up against a wall and shot come the revolution, but it's fine because we both know the revolution ain't coming.
So I guess, despite my first paragraph, count me in favor of far-group friendships!
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Not OP, but one of my favorite party tricks is to critique Ronald Reagan from the right by taking the left's criticism of him as accurate (Tell a Boomer that Reagan was a continuation of Carter with a more optimistic demeanor and remind the social conservatives that he legalized abortion and no-fault divorce as Governor of California along with screwing the pro-lifers by nominating O'Connor to the SCOTUS. Heads will explode.). Really though, while my beliefs best map at whatever JD Vance is stabbing at (I'm not sure he even knows at this point.), I'm not overly ideologically certain compared to my youth spent as a firm member of the Ron Paul camp. I can be polite, though, and as long as their arguments are well-reasoned instead of being cable-news tier crap I'm willing to listen to and respect anyone.
As for my parents, they divorced long ago but they're both shrieking harpies when it comes to politics. Mother has been a Hillary Clinton Democrat of the worst sort as long as I can recall while Dad went from caring little about politics to being a Catturd following Trumper who worships Elon Musk. I just don't talk politics with either of them.
Ask him what his opinion of the new rift is between Musk (no more debt) vs Trump (trillions of new debt)!
He's probably tired of winning at this point
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