I think so, but I’m not totally sure because certain topics are just too dangerous to discuss. Trying might seriously damage some relationships, even with relatives. I don’t know exactly what they believe and they don’t know exactly what I believe. If we knew, maybe we would agree to disagree but maybe we would never want to have anything to do with each other again.

The funny thing is that I’m talking about people who vote the same way I do. (I’m not counting a couple of conspiracy-theorist relatives whose ideas are too strange to be really offensive. They generally don’t bother to vote because they think the system is rigged anyway.) Would I ever be friends with people who didn’t vote the way I do? No, definitely not, although I would be polite to them unless they really pushed me.

I feel like the “Republicans and Democrats can’t be friends” thing has been true for my entire adult life. (I first voted in 2004.) However, “Democrats and other, different Democrats can’t be friends” is relatively new. I don’t even know how people these days do something like go on a date without reading each other’s manifestos first. I’m not even joking - I wouldn’t date someone whose views about, for example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were substantially different from mine no matter how compatible the two of us were otherwise. Do I put that on my dating profile?