My Friend Broke Up With Me

His Hypocritical Moralizing Led Him to Bigotry

In one of my favorite comedy specials of all time, Chris Rock said, “I love rap music, but I’m tired of defending it.” I feel the same way about the foundations of the Republican party. It’s a trite statement, but in nearly all of my political conversations with left-leaning individuals, it feels like the starting point is: all Republicans are evil people. It’s odd because I approach conversations assuming that the other person has the best intentions and is not a caricature with views necessarily aligned with party dogma, regardless of how misguided I may think they are in their proposed solutions. This is part of why it’s nice to have friends to talk to who have different views.

How our friendship started

I have a few friends I can openly discuss politics with and not feel this air of hostility. One of them was the only friend I had living in the United States when I moved here. Luckily, he lived in the Bay Area, where I was headed.

This friend is a U.S. citizen who completed his undergraduate at an Ivy League institution and traveled north of the border to my home country (Canada) to complete his MBA. I was doing the JD/MBA program at the same school, and our first years in the MBA overlapped, which is where we met and became great friends. He is a very knowledgeable guy, and we share common interests, similar senses of humor, and largely similar views on society.

We immediately respected each other’s intelligence and largely agreed on the prescription for most political issues of the day. We valued each other’s commentary on both U.S. and Canadian political affairs. At the start of his final year of the MBA, his apartment wasn’t ready to occupy, so I let him crash at my place — we lived together for almost a month. We were close.

After his final year, he returned to the United States. When I finished my program two years later, in 2016, I moved from Toronto to Calgary and began working a lot. By the start of 2019, I hadn’t seen him since he graduated in 2014. Luckily, we had kept in touch through the years and messaged often. He had rightly lamented that if we didn’t make an effort to spend time together in person, life would pass us by, and I agreed. I intended to travel to San Francisco, where he had settled, and visit once I paid off my student debt (which would be the end of Q1 2019).

As luck would have it, I ended up getting a job in Palo Alto in 2019 (just after paying off that debt), and the table was set for us to rekindle our friendship and spend quality time together. I was busy with work, but I made time whenever I could. We had fun, introduced our girlfriends, went to MLB and NFL games, played video games; it was great.

When we began drifting apart

In 2020 something changed. COVID restrictions were tight, and he was understandably nervous about meeting because he had an elderly aunt he needed to see semi-frequently, so we would only infrequently meet outside. But it wasn’t just that. He became progressively more distant, and our hangouts became shorter. He always seemed to be bookending me with something else and could never find more than an hour or so.

I am a mergers and acquisitions attorney, which means in 2020 (after a slump in June/July), I was working all of the time. He has a more traditional 9 to 5. The idea that he’s the one who couldn’t find time does not accord with reality. I wondered if something else was afoot, but I gave the benefit of the doubt and chalked it up to COVID heebie-jeebies.

I didn’t recognize the toll the 2020 election cycle was taking on him. While I generally don’t let politics affect my emotional state, I sometimes forget that not everyone is like me. His social media posts became darker and almost anti-American (in my opinion). They focused mainly on the country’s blemishes and never acknowledged its accomplishments or showed any gratitude for all it has given him. He was striking the same tone that has rendered many centrists fed-up with the bulk of content produced by publications like the New York Times and Washington Post.

When Joe Biden won, I was moderately disappointed (but I was happy he won over the other Democrats who ran for the party’s leadership). Even though I wasn’t a big Trump fan, I enjoyed certain things about him and believed that Trump was the better choice of the two candidates. I won’t get into why because that’s not the point of this article but suffice to say, I don’t say that from a place of ignorance. I take policy and politics very seriously, and I’m not a buffoon in intellect or attitude. The fact is, in Presidential elections, a person has only two real choices.

My friend disagreed with my assessment, which is reasonable and fine with me; I respect his views and supporting rationales. However, he did not reciprocate that respect. Keep in mind this is before the events of January 6, 2021, and before Trump went on a campaign bent on questioning the integrity of the election after his loss. All of which was a violent slap in the face to moderate Republicans who did see value in Trump’s presidency. On November 3, 2020, I would have been okay with another four years of Trump, but not after.

I think there are real issues to be addressed about the fair dissemination of information in American media, given the asymmetry of journalistic bias in this country. I believe it is appropriate to criticize that paradigm. Still, I do not think it is reasonable for a sitting President to cast doubt on an election that he or she has just lost without substantially more proof of wrongdoing than the Trump campaign ever presented in court.

At the end of 2020, my soon-to-be wife and I were looking for a place in San Francisco, where he lives. One place we considered was a condo building across from Oracle Park (go Giants!) and just down the street from the condo he shares with his wife. I messaged him asking a question about condo fees for comparability and showing him where we were looking — he gave a dry factual and terse response. Nothing more. It mirrored the tenor of messages I received from him in response to my last few outreaches.

I was concerned for my friend. I wondered if I upset him with a text I sent him after the election. It said (in an admittedly snarky way), in effect, that while I didn’t think the result was the right direction for the country, I hoped he was happy with the outcome and could start to feel better because Trump was out of office. I bemoaned his silence and his apparent growing distance from me to my girlfriend; she said nothing.

The big reveal

On Christmas, trapped away from our families due to international travel restrictions, she and I were hiking in California. I sent him a text wishing him Merry Christmas and expressing hope that we could get together soon. He read it but did not reply. I again wondered out loud what was going on. My now-wife exclaimed, “maybe he just doesn’t want to talk to you anymore.” I got pretty annoyed at her for saying this. I launched into a defense in his favor about reasons he might be having personal issues he’s struggling with, given I could think of no valid reason for him not wanting to talk to me anymore. It was a tense exchange.

Nothing significant had happened (seriously, the text I sent was, although snarky, innocuous, and no one in their right mind would end a friendship over it). About a month later, I again expressed frustration about his lack of engagement with me (keep in mind, we’re deep in COVID, and this is my only friend in the country). Only then did my now-wife spill the beans.

She told me that this friend of mine had decided that I wasn’t worthy of his company; he didn’t want to be friends with someone who thought like me. She knew this because he had sent her a direct message saying, in effect, “I guess [Augustus] just isn’t getting it, but I don’t want to be his friend anymore. He’s said too many nice things about Trump, and his comments on my posts are making my other friends ask who he is and why I’m friends with him, and I’m sick of having to explain.”

Making sense of it all

My comments were basically, “No need to be so down on America! Things are okay, don’t let the news toss up your emotions; it will be alright!” I’m not an extreme person. It’s not like I was saying: “MAGA MAGA MAGA, Biden is a joke, Dems suck, blah blah [insert other crazy extreme right-wing nonsense].” He continued, “we were good friends in business school, but that’s done now we have nothing in common, and I don’t want to hear from him what is best for my country.”

Some observations:

First, since when do we not have things in common? By any objective measure, we have many things in common. That hasn’t changed.

Second, he lacks the conviction to stand by a friend that he knows is reasonable and deliberative, not extreme. In effect, he is unwilling to give his friends the respect they give him when it becomes slightly difficult for him to do so.

Third, “my country” — I live here. I pay way more tax than he does, and unlike him, I had to earn the right to live here because I wasn’t born into it. I’m proud of America, and I love it; I’m not constantly bitching about it. Also, his wife is an immigrant. Is she not entitled to have an opinion, or is she now because she has a Green Card? What about my wife, who legally works here? Because we weren’t born here, we can’t have thoughts on American politics, even though we’re educated people immersed in the society? Do my views only matter once I have a Green Card, or is it only when I get citizenship? Are these the thresholds for when we’re allowed to express ourselves without risking offending someone based on our immigrant status? I can’t vote; that’s fine, but I can think! I can opine! And, I should expect to do so without being dismissed because I don’t yet hold a green card or have citizenship. I would never say such a thing about his views on Canadian politics. Why? Because of this little thing that civilized people consider important among friends and in discourse: respect.

I was shocked that he demonstrated such immaturity in refusing to discuss his issues with me, choosing instead to circumvent me and place my girlfriend in this awkward position. It’s a weird choice because had he spoken with me, I would have said, oh, let’s not talk politics — I only talked about it with him. After all, I thought he enjoyed it. Why would I want to keep talking with him about it if he didn’t? There are plenty of other things to discuss.

The irony of my friend’s reasons for dissolving our friendship is overwhelming. First, he addressed his concerns about a politician creating an environment where people can’t think freely by removing someone from his life for thinking freely. Second, his method of showing solidarity against what he perceived as anti-immigrant sentiment was to remove an immigrant from his life for having an opinion about U.S. politics. It’s a stunningly beautiful manifestation of hypocrisy on both fronts.

That’s the thing about losing your footing as a reasonable person in our hyper-political environment. When you become too sure of your worldview, your moral paradigm can entrench itself and render you a hypocrite if you allow yourself to caricature those with different perspectives. This disposition is the modern signifier of a political bigot, as my former friend is. If you hate intolerance but are intolerant of people with different perspectives not rooted in prejudice, you are a bigoted hypocrite.

I later reached out to him and proactively apologized for not being more aware of and sensitive to his feelings and assured him that his friendship meant legions more to me than politics ever could. He did not respond in kind, noting again that he does not want to be friends with someone who thinks like me. I suppose thoughts guided by constantly reading writings of thinkers hailing from all political dispositions across history and the modern age, combined with patience, kindness, empathy, and over ten years of post-secondary education, is insufficient for him. Lest you forget, Californians are the most tolerant people in the world.

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