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What are strategies for finding community in our polarized times? Almost all of my friends, family, and acquaintances are pretty damn progressive, and I always find it so irritating how they inject it into everything. Always, always when I have people over for dinner or something, something comes up at some point where people get into a progressive taking point that I disagree with, and I just sit there really uncomfortably and can't say anything because there's no tactful way to do it, or I don't want to get into a giant argument. Even at recent holidays, the progressives in my family have started inserting progressive variations on traditional observances, and I hate that sort of thing a lot.
On the other hand, I have a group of people whom I've met through meetups which were dedicated to more conservative or at least less progressive conversation. We all keep up via a messaging app, but I find they swing too far in the other direction. They're basically a sneer club, and this is similarly irritating. They're constantly lauding vitreolic conservative commentators like Ben Shapiro and Stephen Crowder. I don't agree with leftists and their takes, but I think this class of commentators only exists to leech off of conservatives, and generally does not put the best foot forward of anti-wokism. More than anything, this community of mine won't shut up about how much they hate progressives. I don't want that. I just want to live my life and not have to hear about politics so the time, not be infringed on from either side.
So what do I do, how do I find people and communities that aren't progressive, or at least don't talk about progressivism, but also don't talk about it from the other side? As has been cited here many times, if an institution isn't explicitly anti progressive, then it is susceptible to progressives coming in and making it all about progressivism. It makes for a tight spot for someone like me who wants to be around prior with similar values, but doesn't want to hear about politics all the time.
If it's friends and family, have you tried arguing with them? Progressive positions are wet paper bags. If it's people you know less well, then yeah I would be keeping my mouth shut as well. It's interesting that this happens to you. It's impossible not to notice that progressivism is injected into every bit of public messaging from everything all the time, but I have not personally been part of many conversations like this. I did undergrad/PhD in very blue places, so it's not like I don't know any progressives.
Are you by chance a woman? My friends and I don't discuss politics at all really ever. My fiancee tells me that these things come up semi-frequently with her friends though. In any case, I get all the political discussions I want on the internet and also with my dad. Works for me.
No, I'm not a woman. I don't know why there's this difference between your and my experiences, maybe in part that I have a lot of woman friends, maybe that I went to one of the most leftists institutions on the planet for undergrad, maybe that I live in one of the most leftist cities on the planet. Maybe something else, don't know.
I've argued with people many times before. It's not so easy to convince someone their views are wrong, and I don't think that progressive positions are so easily destroyed. Mostly they come from deep-seated value differences, or differences in our understanding of the facts. A hundred different times, I've argued with someone for over an hour and it comes down to core axiomatic differences. I've given up arguing, and I'd rather just get quippy words in edgewise if I can, but I can't always think of them on the spot.
This isn't exactly related to your OP, but what is this dynamic? I haven't ever had a woman I would consider a "friend" i.e. that I would hang out with alone and/or text/call in a totally platonic way. Does your wife/gf not have an issue with you spending time with these other girls? Is there actually no romantic interest on your part, as in you would say no and be surprised if one of them made a move or indicated they wanted you to?
Well, usually I hang out with people in groups, usually with my wife and these women's husbands/boyfriends all together. I don't usually see anyone one-on-one at all. Though in theory I could easily go hang out with one of these women and my wife would trust me, no questions asked. I guess I've done things like this before, though it was a while ago.
I find these women attractive, and if I were single, I'd try to date them. But as things stand I really would say no if one of them made a move, because I value my marriage far more than having a relationship with one of them. My wife knows this, and she trusts me.
Do you text with these women, mostly their husbands, or both? Who did you typically know first, husband or wife? Any tension with the husbands?
I text them, but I'm not the sort of person who texts "hey, what's up" and just chats with people all day long, whether they're male or female. When I text them, I usually am trying to make plans with them, or at least showing them some interesting piece of content I found on Youtube or whatever that I think they'd like, or getting their opinion on something.
In these cases of my female friends, I usually know the wife first, which is why I'm usually better friends with them. There's no tension with the husbands as far as I know, though.
Maybe it helps that my wife and I lived in a big fairly tight-knit coed community in undergrad while we were dating. Some of these women come directly out of that community. But since my wife and I were living directly with both men and women while dating, she couldn't follow me around everywhere, she just had to trust me, and I had to trust her. We'd often be doing things with other people in the community, and as such, the suspicion never really arose.
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