But never, EVER let your guard down. They screw people over because they get off on it.
Something really, really bad is going to happen if we don't get our country back PDQ.
Others may remember differently, and my memory isn't the definitive one, but this is the way I recall it: when I was growing up, politics played little, if any, role in associations between two individuals. One person was a Republican, the other a Democrat. Big deal; it didn't matter, because there were other things (shared interests, shared tastes, shared talents) that counted for more.
Politics didn't make any more difference than if one person collected postage stamps, and the second person had blond hair. It was a difference, but it was so trivial.
That all changed in November 1980.
And man, did it change.
That was when I first discovered that people who were Democrats didn't want to have anything to do with me.....only, and only, because I was of the other political party.
It got evil. I was stunned.
Of course, the elections of 1980 had a profound effect on Democrats, liberals, and primitives; it was after all a crushing, humiliating, embarrassing defeat for them. (Everybody nowadays thinks only back to the landslide of 1984, forgetting that 1980 too had been a landslide of historic proportions, although not as big as the one four years later.)
But hey, as a Republican, I'd lived through crushing, humiliating, embarrassing defeats myself, and that never affected how I felt about family and friends who were Democrats.
Why were these people taking things so
personally; it was only politics, after all. There's bigger, more important, things in life than politics.
It got worse and worse and worse as we went through the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush prosperity; these people were really angry, really bitter, and didn't want to get along at all.
I haven't even bothered to try befriending a Democrat since 1992. It's pointless.
They, not us, were the ones who made ideology the single criteria for friendship, or non-friendship.