Friendship: Reframing Politics

We have grown used to seeing politics as an arena of contests—where rival ideologies duel, interests are negotiated, and victories are often measured by numbers. It is, we assume, a place of strategies and calculations, of speeches and slogans, of power asserted and resisted. But somewhere along the way, we stopped speaking of one quietly radical idea: friendship.

Not the kind formed over dinner or shared music tastes—but a rarer kind, older and deeper. Friendship, in this richer sense, is the capacity to care without counting. It is the instinct to ask not “What can you do for me?” but “How might we live well, together?” It is rooted not in contracts or convenience, but in trust and the belief that the other person’s life—though unknown, unfamiliar—still matters.
What if politics, at its most human, was not about managing enemies, but about cultivating this kind of friendship?

Should we care strangers? There is a quiet moral revolution contained in the phrase political friendship. It doesn’t require sentimentality or shared biographies. It demands something simpler but harder: to carry the wellbeing of people we’ve never met into the decisions we make. To include them—equally and sincerely—in the circle of concern.

In a world increasingly shaped by profit, polarization, and performance, this is not easy. We are trained—by institutions, by markets, even by fear—to calculate, to measure worth, to define others by their usefulness or their alignment with our side.
But friendship, as a political principle, resists this. It is not transactional. It does not dissolve with disagreement. It does not withhold dignity. It asks us to remain loyal to the idea of others—not because they are like us, or because we agree—but because they are human.

Of course, we cannot speak of political friendship without speaking of power. Friendship cannot flourish in a vacuum. It grows—or withers—in the conditions we build around it. In societies marked by inequality, oppression, or historical violence, friendship is not merely a warm feeling; it is an act of justice. It asks difficult questions: Who sets the terms of recognition? Who is heard? Who belongs?
To practice political friendship in such a world is to commit not only to kindness, but to justice. It is to dismantle hierarchies that keep some people perpetually voiceless. It is to offer not just care, but solidarity.

Now, can friendship be a resistance against dominant power? In a time of increasing polarization—where people are reduced to labels, where politics risks becoming a form of civil war with or without guns—friendship may seem anachronistic. But perhaps it is exactly what we need.
Friendship, politically understood, is resistance against the flattening of others into enemies. It is the refusal to cancel complexity. It insists on dialogue, even in disagreement. It protects us from the cynical temptation to believe that politics is nothing more than domination dressed up in policy.

All politics rests on a slender thread: trust. And trust, like friendship, cannot be legislated into being. It is not built by surveillance or slogans. It grows slowly, in the patient work of showing up, listening, acknowledging harm, and not walking away.
When we lose friendship, we reach for control. More rules, harsher punishments, thicker walls. But none of these teach people to care. Only relationships do. And without care—without even the possibility of it—politics ceases to be a space for peace. It becomes a war managed by paperwork.

Let's think about unity. To speak of political friendship is not to demand agreement or sameness. In fact, the best friendships grow in friction—in the honest tension between difference and loyalty. Friends disagree, but they don’t discard each other. They stay, even when it’s uncomfortable. It is diversity in unity, not mere unity in diversity.

Political friendship, then, is not a mere utopia. It’s a discipline. It asks us to keep negotiating shared life across deep differences. To remain committed to each other even when trust is hard-earned. It invites us to reimagine conflict—not as a threat to be erased, but as a space where dignity can still be protected.

We might also ask: Who gets to be a political friend? Too often, our compassion is shaped by habit—by the boundaries we inherit from nation, race, religion, or ideology. But if friendship is to renew politics, it must unsettle those inherited limits.
It must teach us to ask not only “Who do I care about?”, but “How did I learn not to care about others?” And what might it mean to undo that learning?

I argue that Friendship is probably the Most Political Idea of all. Aristotle once called friendship the highest good of human life—not because it was easy, but because it reminded us that we are not solitary creatures. We are beings made to live with and for one another. Politics, if it is to heal rather than harm, must recover this reality. Not as a sentimental decoration, but as a foundation. Friendship might be the most demanding thing politics could ask of us. But it may also be the most liberating.

Because friendship teaches us that justice is not about fixing people, or sorting them into winners and losers. It is about sharing space, negotiating needs, and choosing dignity—together.

And perhaps that—more than power, more than profit—is the most radical political idea of all.