I Love You, but I Hate Your Politics by Jeanne Safer

Author:Jeanne Safer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

5

Relentless Hope

The Dangerous Delusion That We Can Change Another Person’s Politics

There is a pernicious assumption that transcends party lines, ideology, gender, and age. It is responsible for the most bitter, persistent, and interminable fights—the kind that destroy relationships with people who love each other. This is the unshakable conviction that it is not only possible but imperative to change another person’s political opinions. People on both sides of the aisle are convinced that they can do this, if only they are persuasive and persistent enough. The same compulsion embroils us in hopeless love affairs—something that 98 percent of the population has experienced.1 Political persuasion is our national bad love affair.

People do change their minds about politics and many other things, but never because we make them do so. Yet we cling to this goal and pursue it unceasingly—even desperately.

Why does the fantasy that we have this superhuman power continue to seduce us? The compulsive need to convert clouds our judgment because the alternative feels unbearable, particularly in the contemporary world, where politics has become so central to identity that not sharing ideology with an intimate partner seems inconceivable to most people. If someone we love votes differently than us, we have to do something about it, or we feel left alone. We can’t win, but we refuse to give up; human nature makes it so.

An enormous amount of energy is wasted in this tragic pursuit, yet this travesty of authentic hope (the psychoanalytic term for it is “relentless hope”2) springs eternal, sowing grief, rage, bitterness, and despair—without ever effecting the ideological transformation we long for and believe we can and must bring about in another person’s heart and mind. It is an unshakable conviction, and a task many people are devoting themselves to—with disastrous results.

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