How does Sobel respond? He says: “Don’t kid yourself, Jelly. It doesn’t get more personal than this.” In this response, he clarifies that just because Vitti and Jelly follow a Mafia code that allows killing to be an impersonal decision, that doesn’t change the fact that Sobel values his life, and deciding to take that life away will always be taken personally.
Likewise, it is dogma in America that you have the responsibility to be civil and respectful to someone no matter who and what they vote for. It is their personal decision, and taking how they choose to exercise their right to vote personally is a violation of their autonomy on a level that is essential to a free society. It is even sometimes suggested that inability to be friends with certain people because of how they vote is a sign of immaturity.
This ethos, unlike the Mafia ethos of impersonal killing, has an important purpose. It is indeed a wise ethos – but only to a limit. Where someone’s basic rights and/or survival needs are on the line, telling the person for whom so much is at stake to not take how someone votes personally is as absurd as telling them not to take someone’s Mafia-style decision to kill them personally.
This truth is as old as democracy itself, and to an extent is as old as any form of political decision-making. It is always true, and throughout United States history there have been issues for which it was pertinent – but these days, it is more pertinent than it has ever been since the Civil Rights era.
Second Wave Feminism coined the term “The personal is political”. That is a saying of great wisdom – but now it is time to point out that the reverse can be just as true – the political is personal.
The current President is persistently hostile to transgender rights and to protections that transgender people need in order to be able to fully participate in society, even to survive. As a trans-woman, there is no way for me to not take this personally. And if you are okay with such aggressions against a demographic of which I am part, it is absurd to suggest that such a decision on your part is at all compatible with being my friend.
Trump’s campaign and his rhetoric then and since have normalized not only microaggressions against Jews, but even acts of overt anti-semitic violence. As a Jew, I take that very personally. Not only do I take this personally against Trump, but if you choose to be an enabler of this outrageous behavior, I take it personally against you too – and no lecture about social respect for voter autonomy will change that.
If you vote for Trump despite all these things, you are not my friend. Even if you vote for him for different reasons, if you were an actual friend of mine, these outrageous things would be deal-breakers.
Also, there are other things that, though they don’t affect me personally, as a human being of conscience I can not be unmoved by the fact that they affect other people on a deeply personal level. The separation, often irreversible separation of families who are seeking refuge from foreign persecution is unacceptable – not only to me, but to anyone who has enough of a conscience to be worth my esteem, let alone my friendship. The same goes for every other instance of Trump’s pattern of persistent hostility to refugees. Of course, I am a bit more sympathetic to refugees out of knowledge of the fact that if the Trump administration goes unabated much longer, I could very well end up being myself a refugee in another country – but even without such added sympathy, I would have a hard time being respectful to someone who is okay with such atrocities.
Once again – someone who votes for Trump, or for his Republican enablers, might claim that they do not vote in such manner because of these atrocities, but despite them over different issues. It is all fine and dandy to know this – but for a decent human being, such atrocities would be deal breakers. Not only would they not be the primary reason for voting for someone – but they would be irrepressible reason to reject a candidate no matter how much you favor them otherwise.
Social respect for voter autonomy has its place – but its place is votes in which all of the options available are within the pale of basic human decency. And yes – even in such situations, there could still be political disagreement, even contentious political disagreement. But those would be the kinds of political disagreements on which you and I could be on opposite sides and still remain friends, even good friends. I would very much like to see a society in which those kinds of issues are the ones at the forefront of national debate – and limiting my social respect to only those who vote within the pale of human decency is one way of not just wanting, but demanding such a society.
