I'm pretty far to the left on a lot of issues, but I manage to maintain friendships across a pretty wide political swath. That wasn't always so; I was pretty hotheaded when I was young. But I've mellowed a lot with age.
Part of that is because I've had to change some of my positions over the years, as more information became available, or as I had different experiences that gave me new insights. A lot of my core beliefs have remained essentially the same--I've always been some flavor of lefty-libertarian--but while I've gone further left on some issues, I've gone further right on others than my younger self would ever have expected.
Because of that, I'm now much more aware that while I might hold a certain view on a given issue at this time, and feel justified in it, I know that view is still subject to change with knowledge and experience. I don't know what the future holds, or what might happen that could cause me to completely re-think a given position, but I accept that it could potentially happen. So it's hard for me to get too dogmatic over a political position I didn't hold 20 years ago, and might change my mind on in another 10 years--that's not a hill I want to die on, and losing friends in the process of defending it would be a Pyrrhic victory.
Having experienced this, I know that other people's politics evolve across their lifespans, too, even if they maintain a certain core set of values and political identity. And just because somebody calls themselves a "conservative," or a "liberal," or a "socialist," or a "nationalist" doesn't mean they toe the party line 100%, all the time--far from it. It's a label they use for themselves that feels right, but individual people are much more varied and complex than those labels would suggest.
So I prefer to avoid arguments over politics, preferring instead to ask questions. I like to know how people reached the conclusions they did, and how they came to adopt their political identity. Their views didn't just come out of nowhere; each person chooses them (however consciously or not) for certain reasons. And by discussing our own lives and the reasons behind why we've adopted certain positions, it's possible to talk about some really charged, hot-button issues without going at each others' throats. And we each might just learn something new, and see things in a different way.
And it's also pretty cool to find the issues we agree on, even if our respective political labels would suggest otherwise. Given how horribly divisive American poitics are these days, that always gives me some hope that we might not end up completely Balkanized, after all.
