Does friendship nowadays require homogeneity of political ideas?

Today, I think, for my generation, politics very strongly intrudes into the domain of friendship.

Some months ago I gave a friend of mine my traditional-conservative take on something and was told “if I knew these were your opinions, I wouldn’t be your friend” line -- what bothers me is why/how we’ve become like this? (I can’t remember the subject, but it was a fairly innocuous topic of current events).

Society didn’t used to be like this, and I think the below article shows this.

I suspect it’s the nefarious influence of social media on our culture.

Politics is about ideas; and civil discussions - especially among friends - should be the norm in a liberal society with a diversity of opinions. Ideas are either right or wrong. And we should engage and discuss things, and I always love a discussion that makes me re-think something. And I have quite often reversed positions on issues because of it.

But today, we’re walking on eggshells. A hypersensitivity to just about everything. And at any moment people can be ostracised for wrongthink.

I think we’ve been subtly programmed to hate people who think differently to us. Buckley and Galbraith (who were very anti and pro New Deal) always remained good friends. That, I don’t think, seems very possible today.

I sometimes think I was born in the wrong age.

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Jeff Greenfield writing in “The Pleasure of Disagreeing with Bill Buckley” (National Review, Feb 2025):

If you’re at all familiar with the contours of Buckley’s life, you likely know that he was friends with and/or an admirer of an array of figures on the left: the brilliant socialist columnist Murray Kempton, longtime activist Al Lowenstein, novelist Norman Mailer, economist (and skiing buddy) John Kenneth Galbraith. The intriguing question is why. Why, given the withering “take no prisoners” persona he presented in public debate, was he so comfortable in the company of his political adversaries?

The key, I think, is less our scintillating personalities and more how much he savored the give-and-take of argument — emphasis on the give and take. As William Kristol put it, “Buckley really believes that in order to convince, you have to debate and not just preach, which of course means risking the possibility that someone will beat you in debate.” ... Those whose exposure to political “debate” these days is confined to outlets that never open themselves to contrary views would likely be startled by the parade of figures who jousted with Buckley on air: Noam Chomsky, Saul Alinsky, Allen Ginsberg, Julian Bond, and Jesse Jackson, among literally dozens of other ideological adversaries.

It was one of Buckley’s admirable attributes — one unfortunately shared by too few across the political spectrum — that he was comfortable with changing his mind. He came to regret his early arguments about race; he came to see that Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose work he had championed in a book, was an impediment to the cause of anti-communism, and he wrote a novel reflecting that revised view. 

From a more civic point of view, Firing Line stands as an unhappy reminder of the distance that political discourse has traveled since its time, mostly because it would be difficult if not impossible to find a host both ideologically committed and open, even delighted, to engage in lengthy, civil discourse with his or her foes (much less breaking bread with them).