I Asked My ‘Libertarian’ Friend A Question About Trump. His Response Told Me Everything.

Going to school full-time and working nights as a security guard would barely cover the rent, and with a new baby in the house, it wouldn’t cover everything else. I needed a real paycheck, health insurance, and savings. I needed security.

I took a job in 2007 with a large corporation that had little to do with writing but paid well, had great benefits, and gave us some breathing room. I didn’t have a college degree, but the leadership skills I learned and honed in the infantry opened doors and allowed me to make a comfortable living. As an added bonus, I worked with some really great people and made friends there that I still talk to regularly, even though I no longer work for the company. One of those people was Zach.

Zach and I hit it off right away. We had similar backgrounds. We had both served in the military and been deployed to Iraq around the same time. We both had young families, similar tastes in music, and the same dry sense of humor. It made going to work, if not fun, at least not miserable.

One place we didn’t always see eye to eye was politics. While we both had a libertarian slant to our views, mine was shaped more by personal freedoms and civil liberties, while his leaned further right. He opposed government regulation even when it came to safety and workers’ rights.

Zach and I had endless debates over beers about the line between freedom and the collective public benefit of laws meant to protect workers. He would argue that these issues should be settled in court, not by government intervention. I would counter by asking whether he really thought a worker had a fair shot in court against a large corporation if they couldn’t afford a good lawyer and the company could hire as many high-powered attorneys as it wanted.

We talked about the problems I saw with a pure libertarian political philosophy, and I would bring up examples like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Sometimes I thought I made headway. Sometimes he did. At the end of the day, it didn’t really matter. We were friends.

When I was growing up in Texas in the ’80s and ’90s, this kind of disagreement felt normal. People either avoided politics entirely or treated it as something you could argue about without blowing up relationships. Neighbors who were Democrats would have the Republicans next door over to play cards, talk politics, and crack jokes at each other’s expense. Nobody would get offended, and nobody probably changed anyone else’s mind, and then the night would end with a friendly goodbye and a promise to do it again next weekend. There wasn’t much hate or vitriol among the folks I was around. It wasn’t like today.