Losing friends over politics? Sadly, it’s becoming an everyday event

The culture wars have marched from the periphery – the preoccupation of journalists and tweeters – to the centre

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Back in the 1970s, the brilliant insight of the Women’s Liberation Movement was that the “personal is political”. Their analysis was spot on – and indeed very prescient. Most people would now consider the exploitation of women, whether at work, in the bedroom or in the kitchen, unacceptable and a matter to be addressed at the political as well as the social and cultural level.
But if the personal has well and truly made itself political, we now live in a stressful age of the reverse: the political has become personal. Painfully so. I have spent the days since the US election watching people tear each other apart over Donald Trump’s victory, a fight to the seeming death.
How can someone remain friends with, or even married to, someone who seems to support theories and attitudes that one honestly believes will hasten the implosion of all that one holds dear, including civilisation itself?
One friend who visited me from New York recently said how grateful she was that I was still willing to be her friend: she’s a Trump fan while I am not, nor are most people in our milieu, which originated in a middle-class childhood in one of America’s most liberal states.
When it comes to external events that people took personally, Brexit was the beginning of this lonely, spiky, unstable new age. I voted Remain in good part so that I could say I had voted Remain, in honesty, and keep some of my closest friends (also because I was rightly terrified of what Brexit would mean for travel in Europe, and also house prices). The onslaught continued with the election of Trump in 2016.
It was these two seismic events – the outcome of a free and fair Western election – that immediately represented whether you were on the side of good or evil, values affixed, depending on who you were, to populism, racism and stupidity on the one hand and intolerable elitism, arrogance and unreality on the other.
In being flexible on Brexit, I was lucky not to lose any friends over Britain leaving the EU.
But if you really think someone is a xenophobe who has voted to make your world harder, scarier and poorer for the hell of it, then no wonder you don’t feel like being friends with them. The green cause has also fractured intimate bonds with similarly existential-seeming, and therefore personal, stakes.
Meanwhile, the culture wars have marched from the periphery – the preoccupation of journalists and tweeters – to the centre. And again, they have divided people along the highest-stakes terrain.
The issues the cultural battles have thrown up are so mad – like whether we are all racist or whether biological sex is simply a matter of say-so – that they could only ever be lethally divisive.
The two moral ecosystems are reflected in, on one side, big votes about real things such as Scottish independence, Brexit or the US presidency, and on the other the strange, post-modern, identitarian beefs of the social justice movement. And they have woven themselves together in a toxic brew that feels as though it has spilled into every last household and friendship.
Another mum I met in a cafe, and with whom I have arranged a few play dates so that our babies can hang out, told me the other day that, having googled me, she must warn me upfront that there were certain political matters over which she would have to reject our friendship. She had dared not read my writing further in case I was one of the bad guys – her two sackable offences were Brexit (being pro), and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (being a Putin apologist).
Happily I was able to reassure her: I was not a particularly ardent Brexiteer, and was vehemently in agreement with her over Russia. Both Brexit and Russia are intensely personal issues for her, since she is from Eastern Europe.
I understand her feelings. I have similar ones over the Middle East and, it won’t surprise you to know, Israel. Indeed, nothing has been so continually political in my personal life than Israel. I have had skirmishes with people since I was an undergraduate about the legitimacy and rationale of the activities of the Jewish state, defending it against the lies and bias that have characterised respectable mainstream coverage, especially that of the BBC. But only recently have I had to cut friendships dead over it.
Normally I avoid the topic with people whose position I suspect won’t be quite what I’d like. However, there are some lines that cannot be crossed, such as blaming Israeli “apartheid” or “ethnic cleansing” and “occupation” for the Hamas attacks of October 7; such as gaslighting Jews about the reality of the anti-Semitism inherent in, to give but a few instances, the attacks in Amsterdam last weekend, the Palestine rallies held in city centres and college campuses across the West or the refusal of certain European hotels to accommodate Israeli visitors.
I understand there are other ways of looking at Israel’s actions, and some of these are entirely fair. But if you are the sort, post-October 7, wearing the insignia of the violent “pro-Palestine” cause, from the keffiyeh to the watermelon to the map of Israel done up in green, red and black, I would not feel like having a friendship. I just can’t do it.
Avoiding or ignoring the beliefs front and centre in such garb, and the positions it represents, is no longer possible.
And so, as with so many other political and geopolitical issues these days, and the people who feel strongly about them, I am another one who feels that rather than just defending a point of view, or an argument, it’s my right to life itself that feels as if it’s on the table.
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