A bunch of social science research, including our own survey, suggests that liberals are *WAY* more likely to cut off conservatives than the other way around — and that young voters (and young liberals, in particular) are especially likely to cut off friends and family in a way that older voters are not. I’ve struggled with this for a while. At an individual level, I understand and cannot fault anyone for choosing to cut off people over politics. And this makes sense: if you view politics as a reflection of your values, then why would you choose to spend time with people that stand in opposition to that? And yet what’s right for the individual isn’t always right for the group, and that’s the tension here. Liberalism relies on positive persuasion to make the world a better and more inclusive place. The onus is on us to convince people for that. And there’s a lot of social science research (which we go over in this piece, along with our survey) that suggests making cross-ideological friendships helps reduce ideological hostility. How do we do that if we, as a group, don’t want to talk to people that disagree with us? And put aside the moralistic arguments for a second: Trump won the popular vote. Even pragmatically, we as liberals don’t even have the numbers to make isolation workable.