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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.
As someone who grew up in a quietly conservative area, I was still completely surrounded by politics. Like you said, political jeers somehow found its way into everything - even when we had a traditional thanksgiving dinner, there would inevitably be a few comments about how liberals viewed thanksgiving. I'm now on the left and find the same thing - people and politics are often inseparable. I think this is especially prevalent in America and I don't know if it's possible to avoid it entirely.
Here's how I make it work. I realized that I don't really care what people believe - I care about why people believe it. I'm firmly on the left but have always had an aversion to the hyper-woke crowd as many of us do. It was hard for me because I often partially supported their ideas but could just never fully get behind them or anything that they say. This was confusing because I knew plenty of lefties in my own life that expressed similar views (or sometime more extreme) yet I would agree or be ok with them. Finally, I realized that my primary aversion to the hyper-woke was their poor arguments and dogmatic attitude. This aversion also explains my dislike of other political groups that express similar characteristics.
Once I figured this out, I started to be more selective - If my parents (smart people but misinformed politically) make anti-left comments at thanksgiving dinner, I just ignore it because I know that they don't have great support for their beliefs anyway. Same goes for some of my more woke friends. I only engage, care, or listen to people who's beliefs I consider to be well supported. My friends are much more politically diverse now because even if I don't agree with their conclusions I can at least respect how they got there. Just my two cents.
The realization that even if one side is right and one side is wrong, no side has a monopoly on bad takes or bad arguments.
I rarely see people on the right introspect about the right this way though, which I find fascinating. Maybe the lefty identity is so tied up with being intellectual or being correct that we can't abide a useful idiot, even if it means arguing against our own team, the old left wing circular firing squad...
I don't know, even if there's a lot of infighting on the left due to lots of factions, there's a distinct up-your-own-ass-ness that I see from leftists about any individual's own positions, as well as the correctness of leftism as a whole (even if they believe other people on the left have it subtly wrong) that would not make me think that leftists are introspective in the correct way. For example, I'm totally sick of the leftist meme of "reality has a liberal bias". No one on the left that I see really seems to stop and think, "Hey, what if I'm wrong? Or what if my movement is wrong?", even if they love throwing rival factions other under the bus.
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This is definitely a low-key factor, even when it's not "own side". The iron worker with a shitty conservative take doesn't have the sheer pretentiousness that I see in the adjunct or media flunkey with a shitty progressive take. I think the more intellectually-inclined people on the right ignore the idiots on their side in the same way that progressive leaders politely ignore e.g. hoteps. I think there are still meaningful asymmetries that give rise to this visceral reaction to the woke and large parts of general progressivism, but I'm not sure I can describe it in a way that sheds more light than heat.
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