On Political Differences

What to do when someone you love votes what you hate?

I had a conversation recently with someone I am close with. Somewhere in the middle of it, when the talk turned to who should govern us, I realised I was speaking with a stranger. Not in any dramatic sense; they had not transformed. The shape of their face was the same, the laugh, the gestures I had known for years. But what came out of their mouth did not belong to the person I had thought I was talking to. It belonged to a kind of competing inner map of the world, one whose coordinates I could not recognise, and whose moral geography placed things I find frightening in the position of things to be welcomed.

I have been thinking about that conversation ever since. Not because I want to relitigate the argument (I do not), but because the encounter raised a question that I think a lot of people are quietly nursing right now, and which the prevailing discourse handles with extraordinary clumsiness. The question is whether political difference, of the kind we are currently living through, is a difference of opinion, in which case adult human beings can presumably tolerate it the way they tolerate disagreements about novels or restaurants, or whether it is a difference of moral substrate: a fundamental misalignment about what a human being is for, what a society owes its weakest members, what counts as freedom, what counts as cruelty. If the first, we can stay close. If the second, intimacy starts to feel like a category error.

I want to argue here for an answer that is neither of the easy ones. Not the social platitude that politics doesn’t matter and we should all just love each other, and not the harder, more fashionable position that you cannot in good conscience break bread with someone whose vote enacts harm on people you care about. The truth, I think, is more uncomfortable than either, and it has implications that reach further than the conventional discussion lets on, including into corners of life one might not expect, such as the small, fractious, weirdly consequential world of occult and esoteric practice, where the political fracturing of the last decade has played out with a particular intensity that I think is diagnostic of something broader.

The argument that politics is character

The strong form of the position is this: a person’s political views are not a hat they put on at election time. They are a public statement about the kind of world they want to bring into being and the kind of people they think deserve to flourish in it. When someone tells you who they vote for, really tells you, with conviction, they are telling you something about who they think counts, what they believe history is for, and how much suffering they consider an acceptable price for the things they want. You can no more bracket that and “still be close” than you can bracket someone’s belief that you, specifically, are subhuman. Politics, in this view, is character made legible at scale.

There is something to this. I find it hard to fully dismiss. The philosopher Elizabeth Anderson has written for years about how moral disagreement that goes deep enough stops being epistemic and starts being practical: at some point you and your interlocutor are not assessing the same evidence differently, you are living inside different commitments. And the recent empirical work on what political scientists call affective polarisation, the visceral, identity-level dislike partisans now feel for the other side, separate from any disagreement about specific policies, suggests this fusion of politics with selfhood is not a misperception. People really do increasingly experience their political affiliation the way they experience an ethnicity or a faith. Iyengar and Westwood’s foundational work on this, replicated many times since, has shown that Americans now discriminate against members of the opposing party at rates comparable to, and in some cases exceeding, the rates at which they discriminate along racial lines. That is not nothing. That is a society whose civil tissue is being torn along a new fault line.

So the maximalist position is not crazy. It is responding to something real.

But it cannot be the whole answer, and I want to say why.

What the maximalist position misses

The trouble with the “politics is character” view, taken to its conclusion, is that it treats political identity as if it were the deepest layer of a person, the bedrock, when in fact, for most people most of the time, it is something more like the topsoil. People arrive at their political views through an almost embarrassingly contingent process: the household they grew up in, the economic shocks they happened to live through, the friends they made at twenty-two, the algorithm that served them a particular video at a vulnerable moment, the church or the union or the subreddit that happened to be available. Underneath all that there is usually a layer of more durable stuff (what frightens them, what they love, what they think dignity looks like, how they were treated as children), and that layer is what produced the political conclusions, not the other way around. Two people can share that deeper layer and arrive at opposite ballots, depending on whose narrative reached them first.

This is not a claim that political views are arbitrary, or that all positions are equally valid, or any of the other lazy moves that get made when someone wants to avoid taking sides. Some political positions really are monstrous, and the people who hold them really have failed at something morally important. But the typical case of cross-political intimacy, the parent, the sibling, the old friend who has drifted in a direction that alarms you, usually is not the case of a monster. It is the case of a person whose deeper instincts you may still share, but whose surface reasoning has been organised, by forces neither of you fully chose, into a configuration that hits you like a slap.

That is why I cannot accept the strong position. Adopted as a rule, it would amputate from one’s life a great many people who, on the layer that actually matters, are still recognisably themselves. It would also, more quietly, flatter the person doing the amputating into thinking that their own political clarity is the result of superior moral perception, rather than the result of their having been exposed to a different stream of narrative at the right time.

The case for staying in the conversation (which is not the case for staying nice)

Here is where I want to push back on a different orthodoxy. The standard liberal line, the one I myself used to repeat, the one that probably motivated your sending me this, is that conversation across difference is good for democracy, because it softens views, builds empathy, and prevents the slide into mutual demonisation. Talk to your uncle. Read the other side’s newspaper. Don’t unfriend.

The empirical picture on this is messier than the line suggests, and it is worth sitting with. Chris Bail’s experimental work at Duke, published in PNAS in 2018, exposed Republicans and Democrats to a month of curated tweets from the other side and found, to nearly everyone’s surprise, that this made participants more polarised, not less. Republicans became more conservative; Democrats became (somewhat) more liberal. The mechanism, plausibly, is that contact with the opposing tribe’s worst exemplars activates a defensive identity response that overwhelms whatever modest persuasion the better arguments might have managed. More recent work in Media Psychology (a panel study out of South Korea, 2024) has found something even more telling: the relationship between cross-cutting exposure and depolarisation is curvilinear. A little exposure helps. A lot of exposure backfires, especially among those with strong prior commitments. There is a sweet spot, and most of us, fed by feeds engineered for engagement, are well past it.

What this means, I think, is that the prescription “just talk to people you disagree with” is too crude. The kind of talking matters enormously. Twitter-shouting at strangers about politics is not the same activity as sitting at a kitchen table with someone you love, even though both are technically “exposure to opposing views.” The first hardens. The second, sometimes, can do the work the maximalist position says is impossible: not changing minds, exactly, but maintaining the texture of relationship across a divide, so that the divide does not get to become absolute.

That is, I think, the actual case for staying in. Not that you will persuade your father-in-law that he is wrong about immigration. You will not. But the alternative, a society in which everyone has successfully sorted themselves into communities of the pre-agreeing, is not, as it turns out, a society in which the disagreements go away. It is a society in which they curdle into something much worse, because the only image you ever encounter of the other side is the one your own side’s worst polemicists draw of them. The echo chamber, where it exists, is less a place of comfort than a forge for grotesques.

A small parenthesis on algorithms, because the conventional story is wrong

The standard account, that algorithms silo us, that echo chambers radicalise us, that social media has caused the polarisation, is half-true at best, and the half that is true is not the half people usually mean. The 2023 Meta-collaboration studies (Nyhan et al., Guess et al., published in Science and Nature) ran genuinely large-scale experiments where they algorithmically de-siloed people’s feeds during the 2020 U.S. election, exposing them to more cross-cutting content. Polarisation did not budge. A separate experiment had people quit Facebook entirely for several weeks; affective polarisation went down a small amount, but issue polarisation did not. The picture that emerges is not that algorithms are innocent (they clearly amplify outrage and reward extremity), but that they are not the cause of the polarisation in any clean sense. They are an accelerant on a fire whose ignition source is elsewhere: in the political realignments of the last forty years, in the collapse of cross-cutting civic institutions, in the genuinely traumatic economic dislocations that have made it rational for people to look for someone to blame.

What this means for our purposes is twofold. First, the consoling story that we used to agree more and that the algorithms ruined it is mostly false. We have been pulling apart for a long time, by mechanisms much older than the iPhone. Second, the conclusion that we should therefore log off and have more face-to-face conversations is correct, but for slightly different reasons than people usually give. It is correct not because that will heal the body politic (it will not), but because the individual experience of mediated outrage is genuinely toxic, in the way that pulling a slot machine handle for six hours is toxic, and one does not need it to be a civilisational pathogen for it to be worth getting away from.

The esoteric question

Which brings me, by what I admit is a strange route, to occultists and esotericists. I want to talk about this because the politicisation crisis has hit these communities (small, intellectually serious, often very online) with a particular savagery, and I think the dynamics there are unusually clear, almost like a chemistry-set version of what is happening everywhere else.

The scholar Egil Asprem, in a 2020 article in Nova Religio called “The Magical Theory of Politics,” documented what he called the “American Magic War” that broke out among esoteric practitioners around the 2016 election. On one side, a widely publicised mass “binding” working organised against Trump and his administration, drawing in thousands of witches, chaos magicians, and the curious. On the other, a constellation of right-wing occultists and meme-magicians, several of them gathered around imageboard culture, claiming to have already manifested Trump’s victory through what they called “meme magic” and treating the binding as an act of war. What followed, in the years since, has been ugly and granular: friendships dissolved in occult communities, lodges split, anthologies cancelled when contributors turned out to hold views the editors found intolerable, public denunciations of authors whose books had been on people’s shelves for twenty years.

There is a particular reason this hit esoteric circles hard, and I think it is illuminating beyond the niche. Esoteric practice, in most of its modern forms, is built on a premise of personal sovereignty: the practitioner is doing the work, the practitioner makes contact with the unseen, the practitioner is responsible. This makes it a tradition unusually inhospitable to coercion and unusually congenial to a kind of philosophical individualism. But that individualism cuts in more than one political direction. It can sponsor a libertarian-left commitment to bodily autonomy and the dismantling of hierarchies; it can also, and historically very often has, sponsor a right-wing valorisation of the exceptional individual, the initiated few, the natural aristocracy of those who can see what the herd cannot. The two readings have always lived in the same texts. They have always lived in the same lodges. The work of Amy Hale and others on the longstanding right-wing currents within Paganism and ceremonial magic, currents running through Evola, through Crowley’s more uncomfortable passages, through the völkisch streak in early twentieth-century occultism, has made it harder to maintain the comforting myth that “real” esotericism is naturally progressive. It is not naturally anything. It is a set of techniques and a body of symbolism, and the politics it produces depend on who is reading and what era they are reading in.

What this means, for the practitioner trying to navigate a community in which the magician you trained with turns out to vote for people whose policies you find abhorrent, is that the temptation to purify the community (to draw boundaries, to expel, to denounce) is enormously strong, and is also a more fundamental departure from the actual logic of the tradition than is usually admitted. Most genuine initiatory lineages survived precisely because they did not require political agreement among their members. The Golden Dawn included Tory imperialists and Irish revolutionary nationalists in the same temple. The OTO has, at various times, included pretty much everybody. This is not because esotericists are unusually tolerant (they are often the opposite), but because the work the tradition is built around does not run on political consensus. It runs on something else, and the political fight, when imported into the lodge or the working group, tends to consume the something else without producing any actual political result. You end up with a smaller community of the politically pure and the same election outcomes you would have had anyway.

I am not arguing that occultists should refuse to take political positions. Some positions are clearly incompatible with any serious moral practice; a Thelemite who advocates ethnic cleansing has fundamentally misread the texts and should be told so. I am arguing that the reflex, the constant litmus-testing, the policing of who is or is not still acceptable, the readiness to vilify a long-respected teacher because of a tweet, has a specific cost in this kind of community, and that the cost is the destruction of something that took generations to build and that was, in its way, an unusual achievement: a tradition that held together across political difference because it was oriented toward something more durable than politics.

What I have actually concluded

So here is where I land, for what it is worth, after the conversation and all the thinking it set in motion.

I do not believe you have to be friends with everyone. There are political positions whose practical effect is to deny the personhood of people I love, and the relationships I have with the human beings holding such positions cannot be, and should not pretend to be, intimacy. Calling them friendship would be a lie I tell to flatter myself.

But the line that determines this is much further out than the current discourse suggests, and the territory between agreement and unforgivable is where almost all of human relationship actually lives. In that territory the task is not to maintain a perfect ideological seal and it is not to pretend that politics doesn’t matter. It is something subtler: to learn to talk to the person, not to the position; to find the layer underneath the political topsoil where you may still recognise each other; and (this is the hard one) to bear the loss when that layer turns out, on inspection, to be thinner than you hoped, without converting the loss into a moral victory.

The person I had that conversation with: I am still close to them. We are not the same as we were. The conversations have a new careful quality, and there are subjects we now route around the way you route around an old injury. Something has been lost. I am not going to pretend otherwise. But there is also something that has been preserved, and I do not yet know whether what has been preserved is worth what has been lost. Ask me again in a year.

What I do know is that the alternative (clean break, moral clarity, the satisfying snap of having drawn the line) is too easy, and easiness, in matters of this weight, is almost always a sign that one has stopped paying attention. The harder thing is to stay attentive to the actual human being in front of you, with their actual confused mixture of love and fear and inherited stories and votes you find appalling, and to keep being attentive even when it would be more comfortable to file them under a category and move on.

That, in the end, may be the only form of political activity that has not been entirely captured by the machinery making us all worse. It is also, not incidentally, a form of magic in the older sense: the deliberate maintenance of attention against the entropy that would dissolve it. Which is perhaps why the esotericists, for all their current mess, are worth paying attention to. They at least know they are doing a working. The rest of us mostly think we are just having opinions.

---

Comments are open. I am genuinely interested in disagreement, including from people who think I am letting myself off too easy. Especially from those people, actually.