Should You Break Friendships Over Politics?
In the years since 2016, a peculiar genre of personal essay has emerged: the friendship autopsy. A relationship of ten, twenty, thirty years ends because of a vote, a yard sign, a social media post. The writers of these essays often describe the break as a reluctant necessity. They could not, in good conscience, remain close to someone who supported a particular candidate or policy. To do so would be to condone what they found unconscionable.
I understand the impulse. I also think it is usually a mistake.
The clearest illustration of what such breaks cost comes from Paris in 1952, when Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, two of the most celebrated intellectuals of the twentieth century, ended their friendship over politics.
They had met in 1943, during the German occupation. Sartre was a philosophy teacher turned playwright; Camus, a decade younger, had edited the principal Resistance newspaper. For seven years they moved in the same circles, contributed to each other’s publications, and appeared together often enough that the public saw them as leaders of a shared intellectual project.
Their friendship ended after Camus published The Rebel, a book arguing that revolutions, from the Jacobins to Marxism-Leninism, often begin by seeking justice but end by prioritising power. Political violence, even when justified by history or ideology, remained violence and could not be excused.
The argument was aimed at the French Communist Party, with which Sartre had been closely aligned. He had defended Soviet policy and dismissed reports of labor camps as bourgeois propaganda. Camus treated this alignment as moral evasion.
Sartre’s journal published a hostile review. Camus responded with a letter addressed pointedly to “Monsieur le Directeur” rather than to Sartre by name. Sartre replied in the same issue. He accused Camus of philosophical incompetence, described his humanism as sentimental, and concluded that he had become “a victim of a dismal self-importance.”
The friendship was over. No reconciliation followed.
Sartre and Camus had disagreed before. What changed in 1952 was not the fact of disagreement but its character. Each stopped engaging with the other’s arguments and began instead to treat those arguments as symptoms of a deeper moral failing. Camus became, in Sartre’s account, a man whose moral seriousness masked complacency. Sartre, in Camus’s view, became a man whose political commitment licensed cruelty.
Today this pattern repeats constantly, accelerated by social media and sharpened by polarisation. Someone posts something; we decide what it says about them; we act on that judgment. The sequence can take minutes. We speak of “cutting people off” as though relationships were tumors.
The cost is easy to underestimate. Disagreement permits reply, clarification, and revision. Silence permits nothing. Whatever Sartre might have wished to say to Camus after 1952 remained unsaid. Whatever reconciliation might have occurred did not.
I am not arguing that all relationships must be preserved regardless of political difference. Some positions genuinely are intolerable. But the threshold should be high, and we should be honest about what we sacrifice when we cross it. We lose not only the relationship but also the possibility of influence and the chance of persuasion.
When Camus died suddenly in a car accident in 1960, Sartre published an obituary praising his “stubborn humanism” and calling his death an “unbearable absurdity.” The tribute revealed how much the loss still mattered to him, despite eight years of estrangement.
Whatever he might have wanted to say, he had waited too long to say it. The answer to what has been lost in such ruptures tends to arrive only when it is too late to be of any use to the people involved.