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I Don’t Need You To Agree With Me, But There’s a Limit

Finding common ground is possible, but we need to agree on the basics.

Taru Anniina Liikanen
6 min readJan 31, 2022
Photo by Icons8 Team on Unsplash

All my friends studied politics, and most of us work in politics. We’re pretty much the most boring people you can hang out with. It’s impossible to escape from those conversations.

The great thing about our chats, though, is that we don’t agree on everything. Actually, we barely agree on anything. There are many different views in my group, in social and economic issues and all the way to foreign policy.

Most of my friends are Peronists, while I’m a firm anti-Peronist. While I acknowledge some of the good Peronism has brought to Argentinians, such as paid leave and the female vote, the movement has its ideological foundation in Fascism and still carries some anti-democratic inclinations. (And the women’s suffrage movement did exist before Perón, he merely coopted it.)

Apart from Perón’s friendships with the likes of Spain’s Franco and his admiration of Mussolini, I just can’t get behind populism, because it requires an almost religious adherence to the leader and his words. But it doesn’t matter in the conversations with my friends. We’re still able to talk.

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Taru Anniina Liikanen
Taru Anniina Liikanen

Written by Taru Anniina Liikanen

Stand-up comedian and recovering political ghostwriter. Finnish by birth, porteña at heart. Bad jokes frequent.

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