Should I Stop Speaking to My Trump-Supporting Friends?

The polarized state of our politics, alas, means that people are so taken up with their political identities that they’re unable or unwilling to consider the views of those outside their political tribe.

Once the fog of political warfare that surrounds an election has cleared, we could discover that most of our fellow citizens are not irredeemably indifferent to Trump’s evident vices; that whatever explains their attachment to the president, it is not that they repudiate the values he does not respect. Our tribal prejudices are at their worst in mo

Our beliefs depend not just on our own brains but also on the social worlds we live in. One way of capturing this truth is what some philosophers have called the extended-mind hypothesis: Our minds don’t simply repose between our ears (the argument goes) but extend into the world around us, a world that may or may not include Fox News, Parler, talk

We get many of our false beliefs in the same way we get true ones: by listening to the views of people we trust. You can be partially responsible for being in an unreliable network if there are signs that something is wrong and you don’t examine the possibility that it’s misleading you. But the misjudgment here may not reflect bad moral values.

In a democracy, we the people are supposed to be guiding the ship of state together. To do that, we need to be able to talk to one another, which suggests that engagement, rather than confrontation, can be a civic act. It can also be an act of friendship, because one thing we want to do is to save our friends from making serious mistakes. Just bear