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this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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I am way, way, way more progressive than my husband but we both grew up before things got so polarized. It's hard to talk to him about politics because he has gotten sort of propagandized and will spit out sound bites instead of arguing in good faith.
But in terms of what do I think? He's a great guy, stays in shape, does the dishes, holds down a job, and our sex drive matches (which is a difficult thing to find at this age, more difficult than you might expect). He respects me, is loving and is easy to talk to about anything except political stuff. We are both adventurous in foods, like the same movies, his family likes me. We do not have a gun, live in the city now (he moved to town as I balked at moving to the suburbs). He is not at all racist as far as I can tell, we hang out with whoever and he lived around the world as a kid, one of his kids in interracial relationship, he did not bat an eye at that either. He's a good guy in and out with some crazy ideas is what I think. Agrees on some things that I'd consider progressive (universal healthcare) but still thinks "regulation" is the root of all evil, as I think corporate greed is.
We just have really different ideas about what is wrong with society and what would help. Also I'd note - his ideas might actually help in some very socialist country, but here in the US and especially Florida they make no sense. He doesn't see that, and I think that's the root of the problem.
I can't tell you what a right wing woman would think though. I do know some religious conservatives of various religions but they aren't politically conservative exactly. The rest of our friends are maybe right of my politics but all our kids, mine and his, and their spouses and partners, are at least Democrats and some socialist/social democrat. So I won this generation and am satisfied.
Oaf. Give your perspective for someone who asked for insight and immediately be told by people that your life/relationship is wrong.
I want to take a moment to just thanks for your reply with no judgement.
I don't think I would want to be with someone that went to the voting booth every few years and pulled the leavers to take my health rights away, because ultimately that's what is happening. It would be a betrayal, it's not benign and all the affable personality traits mentioned wouldn't make me forget it.
For these rebuplican men, it's saying "I respect you but regulation has gotten out of control, and your bodily autonomy is a price I'm willing to pay to fix it".
The man shows no signs of sexism, of xenophobia or racism , or bigotry, but pulls the leavers for those things anyway.
You find his ideas crazy, note he has become propagandized, and is difficult to talk to about politics. I dare say if you pushed those conversations you'd be shocked at what you find.
Ultimately voting is an act, not speech or opinion, it's an act to manifest your will and your priorities onto others through force of law.
So while one can take the approach of getting along to get along when it comes to regulation and corporate taxation, it becomes less easy when you recognize that, as a functional adult making an informed choice, your husband acted to end women's bodily autonomy, erode women's health care, end same sex marriage, deny and delay climate change action, and a whole host of other abhorrent policy goals.
I want to say, I take no pleasure at all in saying this to you. None. Your response to the post is just so personal it feels impossible to respond to in an impersonal manner. I just felt the need to challenge the idea that affable personality traits can make up for abhorrent policy goals.
There's a reason why the feminist saying "the personal is political" is so threatening. Because it denies precisely the reasoning seen above and elsewhere in this thread.
Conservatives often complain about progressives ending relationships and friendships over "politics". Because they want to draw a hard line between the two, where as long as they behave civilly to people's faces, it doesn't matter when they vote to make the same people's lives materially worse. Because "politics" is something... I don't know, abstract?
My experience living in a couple of countries in Europe is that people's tendencies for how they relate at an interpersonal and also towards society are cultural and that further, interpersonal and societal forms of relation are in fact separate.
For example, in The Netherlands there is more a tendency to consider the broader impact of one's actions (and being called "asocial" is actually considered insulting), whilst in Portugal if you don't take advantage of "The System" when you can get away with it you're considered a sucker (the dutch tend to think of "The System" as "everybody else", whilst the portuguese do not) but in both countries screwing people (not in a good, sex, way) is considered a bad thing and I would even say the portuguese tend to at least express more their concern with other people on a personal level, quit likely even be more ~~emphatic~~ empatetic.
Meanwhile in the UK taking advantage of others, personally, whilst being very polite about it, is the essence the upper class upbringing (the "gentleman" is certainly no such thing).
I expect that you get the same thing in US were culture is not broken along language barrier lines but none the less seems to be siloed by other factors.
That’s an interesting take. Conservatives tend to have an image of hypocrisy - ie, maybe treat a woman well, yet seek to restrict her legal rights or prevent women from protections, and they seem to think that this hypocrisy cannot be questioned. They never like being called out or questioned on it.
The problem is that many personal decisions have systemic consequences. Things like weight gain, smoking or even poor resource utilization cause serious societal and environmental harm, and yet terminating relationships over them is generally criticised. (Many of the biggest issues {climate change, healthcare, drug abuse etc} faced are directly caused by poor personal habits, not voting).
So the question is out of all personal decisions, why are political views being carved out as an exception that is worthy of terminating a relationship?
"is so threatening"
Sometimes when you are criticised it's because you are a complete moron, not because your ideas are so brilliant they send people running.
This is just such utter nonsense. Many places around the world have made massive inroads into solving these problems and every single time, the solution has come from systemic policy decisions.
Healthcare has been addressed by various universal healthcare systems, drug abuse has been addressed through decriminalisation, offering of rehabilitation, and making sure people aren't living under crushingly miserable economic conditions.
And climate change is not caused by individual decisions, but by the fact that our economic system only values profit, and thus incentivises the destruction of the environment to increase profit.
Because politics affects people's lives. I could not care less if you're a nice person to my face if you are voting for policies that make it impossible for me to live my life.
You talk about personal choices as if someone being overweight is going to measurably affect your life, when it just isn't, no not even through increases in health insurance costs. And then downplay the actual effect of conservatives criminalising my healthcare.
One of those actions clearly has orders of magnitude more impact than the other. Yet strangely, you are concerned about the one with negligible impact, and want to ignore the one with considerable impact.
You are below my contempt. Your ideas are simplistic and have been addressed decades ago. You are painfully boring.
"This is such utter nonsense" So you don't think that people choose to be wasteful?
Laws and personal decisions both cause systemic changes. And guess what, laws do not pass if people do not already engage in personal habits that the laws encourage. The tobacco restrictions would never have passed if it weren't for personal decisions that lowered the rate of tobacco use.
"You strangely are more concerned about the one with negligible impact"
No, they both have consequences. I'm pointing out that the distinction being made that somehow political views have special considerations over all the other personal actions is worthless. (Remember what the actual topic was?)
Additionally do you realise how completely insane your argument is? A single voter does not determine laws, groups of voters do. Just like how a single smoker does not burden the healthcare system, millions of them do.
"Someone being overweight isn't going to on measurably affect your life"
It is. Here's the hard facts, overweight people are less happy, they have worse socialisation, they are unattractive ( which as much as people want to pretend like attractiveness doesn't matter, it absolutely does when it comes to casual interaction), they have shorter, less productive lives, they increase health care costs. All of these effect society as a whole and the individual.
"And downplaying the actual effect of conservatives criminalising my healthcare"
I have no idea what you are talking about, I never downplayed any laws, you're just fabricating that so you can justify your whining.
Look, I'm not a conservative but more importantly I'm not someone who conjures nonsensical arguments to justify some vague gut feeling I developed while eating poisonous mushrooms.
That's not what I said. Read again.
Of course they do. Behaviour can follow legislation. Furthermore most of the legislation would need to target corporations, not individuals. In which case behaviour definitely follows legislation.
Because one primarily affects the person making the decision, with smaller secondary effects on other people. And the other primarily affects other people, doing significantly more harm.
People being overweight does not affect you nearly as much as people voting to ban gay marriage or trans healthcare affects LGBT+ people.
Oh please.
Which is none of your business.
You are deeply unpleasant yourself, take the log out of your own eye.
Nobody owes you attractiveness you little freak.
None of your business, how other people spend their lives.
Old people increase healthcare costs. If unhealthy people die earlier as you say, then they probably save the system money.
Not even remotely to the degree that political action does. Voting outweighs all of that by many orders of magnitude.
It's called an "example" sweetheart.
Progressives aren't ending relationships based on political stances around taxes. They're ending relationships because of bigotry against marginalised groups.
"Further most of the regulations need to target corporations"
Guess what is also a way of targeting corporations? Market forces. If people aren't buying your products/services, do you keep selling those products? The reason why boycotts generally fail is because people are spineless, not because the actual action wouldn't cripple a business.
You so desperately want to prove the point that the only personal choice that matters is voting, that you are willing to deny reality.
"Then they probably save money"
Probably? Is that the strongest statement you can make? People who die younger don't have lower healthcare costs (unless it's an accident or homicide), because they are sicker throughout their end of life.
"Doesn't effect you as much as people wanting to ban gay marriage"
Pretty, sure that more of my taxes go towards paying for emphysema treatment than are effected by the tiny amount of same-sex married couples (which incur costs how?).
"None of your business how other people spend there lives"
It's everybody's business. If this was true, then things like tobacco restrictions wouldn't matter because healthcare costs are nobody's business.
What happened to the good old socialists that recognised that if society has a responsibility to support you, you conversely have a responsibility to not be an unnecessary burden? Nowadays we just have libertarian-poisoned socialists who think that nothing you do matters.
"Nobody owes you attractiveness" They owe themselves attractiveness. It is an objective fact that obese people suffer socially, and that translates to societal problems.
"Not even to the degree as voting"
How many companies do you think have dedicated blocks of consumers amounting to 50 million people? A boycott of 50 million people would destroy most companies (if they even have that many customers). You are confusing the fact that most people don't engage in personal action (because they are just like you), with asserting that personal action does nothing. The reason why political action works is simply because people do it in coordinated groups.
"Progressives are ending relationships based on taxes ..."
Motte and Bailey argumentation. The topic was whether or not it is appropriate to end relationships solely on voting (but not personal habits), you explicitly argued that it was (because only voting actually matters) and are now narrowing it down to only "bigotry against marginalised groups". When that was never the topic.
"You are deeply unpleasant yourself" Are you sure about that? Would you prefer a dishonest liar, who said "Oh my gawd. So true, sweetie." to every nonsensical claim you made? (Obviously, yes you would, because posters like you are accustomed to sycophantic behaviour).
Interestingly something like 41% of women identify as pro-life. I know you and the person you were responding to probably wouldn't, but my point is just that there are a lot of women who would see their conservative male partner vote for anti-abortion candidates and not be bothered at all. Not because they're rationalizing it, but because they don't see it as a negative in the first place.
Of course
Allowing it to be called "pro-life" has been the greatest lie told by the oppressors in quite some time.
Both pro-life and pro-choice are sanitized descriptions of the beliefs they refer to. Both movements contain people that believe completely insane things on the topic, like that women or doctors should be imprisoned or worse for making a certain difficult health choice, or that unborn children aren't really people until they're on a particular side of their mother's vagina.
And you are further sanitising the PC position. In the vast majority of cases abortion is not about health, but convenience. The vast majority of PL support medical exempts as shown by the actual wording of the laws passed.
That changes a lot depending on what time period of pregnancy you're looking. The later you look the more it's about health. By the time you get to third trimester abortions they're almost exclusively about health. The ones of convenience are early, it all makes sense.
Citation? I can't find anything to support this, just vague gesturing by organisations with no hard data. The only rigorous data I can find is a study from France which is irrelevant because France bans late-term abortions except for medical reasons. In fact I suspect that this is the cause of this belief, third trimester abortions are primarily medical, because most states in the US and countries in the world ban them except for health reasons. So of course the studies that address them are all going to be covering medically indicated abortions, and then journalists take this to the presses.
There is Kimport's paper which doesn't support your claim, but I find it quite shoddy regardless.
Where I do think you have a point is that I find any conservative hypocritical because they think one rule for them & different rules for others. He knows this. But am I perfect? No way. And on voting, when I vote I also have to make compromises because no party here is willing to protect the environment or give us healthcare or push back against our oligopoly. I think yeah he convinces himself on the social stuff because he believes the R will bring a better economy by some magic, and that's about it. I cancel him out and 11 votes back me up, all our kids who are old enough to vote, all their companions.
But no, I'd not give up a loving and mostly compatible relationship because of politics, and apparently he wouldn't either. I think without these connections, we'd be so much worse off. He would be worse in an echo chamber, and isn't an idiot in other ways at all.
Obviously your calculation will be different. But I can love someone who is not me.
Alright, sure. But that's still just him being not just willing, but actively trying, to strip your human rights away for this magic economy and you rationalizing his actions as an acceptable compromise.
I would see that as a clear example of disrespect and disregard for my well being and the well being of people who I care about.
This isn't about finding someone just like you to love, far from it, compromise is normal and differences between people in love are wonderful. What this is about, for me anyway, is that I would draw the line at someone who is actively supporting the deterioration of my human rights regardless of how many dishes they do.
True. I mean, it's sad for her to be with someone who's got such a low bar. Does the dishes? Honey, you can use a machine for that. I'm doing them right now!
That's the opposite of why people stay together. Usually people say, "Well they have trouble doing the dishes, but at least our major beliefs are similar."
Honestly she seems pretty similar to her husband in how illogical she's being. He's like, "Well Republicans might be terrible socially but they might lower my taxes!" She says, "Well he votes for people I despise but at least those dishes got done!"
They are similar people in that they both make bad life choices. So maybe it works?
Love is not logical. If she's happy, I don't see the issue. It's up to her to decide whether she believes he's a good person, and apparently she does. Who are we to tell her she's wrong about someone we don't even know?
Yep. She’s lying to herself.
“Oh honey, you’re so good at doing the dishes” while he votes to remove all of her rights.
Not only her rights, the rights of people who aren't straight, the rights of people who aren't cis, the rights of kids to have a decent education, the rights of indigenous people, the rights of non-whites. That's even not to mention that they're against providing people with healthcare so that they don't die, against trying anything that might make this planet livable in the future (for the kids that they claim to want to protect), and against not trying to fucking overthrow democracy. I don't need to agree with my partner's every opinion and political ideal, but at the very least I have to be able to respect them, and throwing everyone who isn't a well-off white man off a cliff for "lower taxes" isn't something I can respect.
Socialist? Yikes.