My world on Facebook recently got ugly.  I’ve recently been called weak, stupid, immoral, and unprincipled – but by my affluent, urban, Democratic friends, not by the bigoted, misogynist pro-life  xenophobes who occupy a range of the political spectrum.  I want to delete my account to keep me going from back, but, like Apple and iTunes, I have too much stuff there to leave.  But there’s a thought there:

My FB world contains four constituencies:

1. HS friends, re-connects, and curiouses – these are people with whom I grew up in a semi-depressed steel town in Western PA.  It was and is more working class than any of the towns 90% of my current colleagues have ever experienced outside of a movie or a visit upstate.  Politically they are (a mix of) New Deal Democrats holding on, skeptical Democrats who resisted Reagan Dems, straight up Republicans, and Trump supporters. Many move along the spectrum within a conversation and most are sympathetic to each other having grown up with all those views. That sympathy allows them to see friends who really hate HRC/theClintons/Dems and who support Trump as something other than racist xenophobes.
2. day to day friends – people that I stay in touch despite no longer having time or ease of access to stay in touch.
3. political friends – overlaps with day to day friends, but these are people with whom I was active in college, as a union organizer, congressional staffer, or volunteer.
4.  acquaintances or work associations – these are people who I know from work or connections to work circles.  This one is tricky, because I don’t really have friendships with them, but you don’t want to not be friends with them, and you don’t want to unfriend them if the friendship stems from early promiscuous days.  

A HS friend of mine once mentioned that he thought it was great how we grew up in one kind of town and work in a much more rarefied environment as it gave us different perspectives.  But it gets tricky on FB where I may be talking to one group (or the post has one group in mind) but others weigh in, misinterpret the post or simply want to get in that conversation.

The most educated and sophisticated of these groups is the last. They are all graduates of prestigious colleges (and care about the colleges other people come from), are generally Democrats and call themselves liberals or moderate liberals.  And they are brutally dismissive of views as stupid, ill-informed, are able to quote lines about complicity to make insufficient hatred of Trump and insufficient support of HRC into something akin to those who allowed Hitler to come to power (seriously, the wording can’t be accidental).

Group #1 is a mix of education, income, and worldliness.    Within that group are strong Trump supporters/HRC haters and people who are truly disenfranchised/disconnected from the political system.  Many of them work hard, are frustrated at the diminishing return they get for that hard work.  They don’t see the connection between the all-important SCOTUS appointments and their lives that is an article of faith within Democratic orthodoxy (“it’s SCOTUS, stupid” runs one clever re-tread).  They associate with a racist Trump, though I don’t think they’re the enemy (and they might have some race and diversity challenges) out of party loyalty, Clinton distrust, and a fatalism that nobody is really going to make their work go farther toward a better life.  In more honest and elitist terms:  they are the least educated, least worldly, most small-minded (on average) of the groups.  And they are also the most open, most civil, and most compromising group of people in my admittedly narrow life.

Anyway, my point here is that the orthodoxy of the educated liberals in group 4, combined with a papal infallibility because they read more newspapers with college-educated minds has made them the savage ones in my life.

If this strikes any chords, let’s go with it.  I’m aware this might be re-treading old issues or merely complaining.