I don’t have any answers for you, I just want to commiserate by sharing my own story of talking to a lib friend about Ukraine:

This was not terribly long after the invasion first happened, maybe a few months. I make my stance clear that I don’t believe the US should be engaging in a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. They ask my why I think it’s the US fighting a proxy war and not the US aiding Ukraine in defending itself from Russia’s unprovoked invasion. I explain that after Ukraine agreed to surrender its nukes in the '90s it bounced back and forth between being basically a Russian satellite state and being a Russian satellite state that’ll play ball with the US, which was always a shaky situation, until the US played it’s hand with the Maidan coup trying to bring Ukraine firmly into the US’s control.

They say that’s not true. They ask why the US would want to control Ukraine, sort of incredulously. This from a guy who was opposed to the Iraq War, and the Vietnam War.

I think I came back with something like “Russia has refused to subordinate its economy entirely to the US, so the US seeks to destroy Russia. Controlling Ukraine is part that.”

And from there the conversation devolved. Putin the madman vs. Putin the guy with explainable motivations and historical reasons for his actions. Me explaining why I think NATO is bad. I know I said at some point that prior to the invasion western media had been pretty clear that Ukraine was a barely legitimate gangster state, and that the Ukrainian state and the United States were prolonging the war at the expense of Ukrainian people. Pandora Papers.

And I guess what I’ve realized, not just about this guy but all the libs I know—hell not just the libs but the people I know from all over the spectrum—is that their politics are highly individualistic. When I was a baby leftist I’d see people make analyses like that and I’ve realized I didn’t fully understand what they meant. But I think I see now that individualistic in this sense doesn’t just mean “self-centered” or “antisocial” or “opposed to community” but that they literally think of politics in the terms of individual actors. So this lib I was talking to hates Putin, and Trump, and Netanyahu, and George W. Bush—and therefore hates the politic projects these men engaged in when they had power—but he doesn’t recognize that the long-term aims of US foreign policy, which both predates and outlasts any individual president, are a force for destruction and evil across the world.

I don’t want to belittle my friend here, but I suspect his opposition to the Iraq War was almost entirely because it was a thing George Bush wanted, and not because he was opposed to the US destroying a stable-if-hostile state in the Middle East and remaking it as a neocolonial project.

Normally I just refuse to argue politics like this with friends and family, though. If someone asks what my opinion is I’ll tell them, or if they’re saying something homophobic or transphobic I will push back there, but otherwise I don’t think fighting about Donald Trump with my MAGA uncle or Obama/Biden/Harris/Clinton with my lib aunt or Tulsi Gabbard with my father who claims to be politically nonaligned but libertarian curious is going to do anyone any good. And I’m certainly not going to try and convince any of these people that the American project is evil, or that capitalism is bad. If they asked me about these things I would tell them my opinion, but mostly this shit isn’t worth burning bridges over. Except for the lib mentioned in this post, I will argue with him because he invites it. But he enjoys arguing politics anyway.