Meghan McCain's time on The View reveals the reality of across-the-aisle "friendships"

Salon.com

"There's a dark side to that viral meme of the stick-figure best friends, Sally, a Democrat, and Bob, a Republican, who are both presumably white," says Kylie Cheung. "The glorification of across-the-aisle friendships, which The View has tried to simulate with McCain as a co-host, ignores the toll these relationships can have on people of color, LGBTQ folks, women, immigrants, survivors, or, of course, people hailing from countries that have been devastated by U.S. military actions and imperialism. The reductive notion that politics is 'just' politics, and we can be friends with those who 'disagree' with us, doesn't apply to people who don't have the privilege of being able to treat politics as abstraction, rather than their everyday, oppressive realities. Politics isn't something those who are marginalized can just compartmentalize and neatly put aside for the comfort of those who are complicit in their oppression. The implosion of McCain's time on The View is the natural outcome of such a hackneyed sociopolitical experiment. It's the natural outcome of planting an unapologetically entitled and problematic white woman on a show to spar with or even argue against the humanity of her female co-hosts who generally know better. Now that McCain's time on the show nearing its end, it's worth revisiting her highlights to recognize just how harmful it was for ABC to platform her all these years." ALSO: McCain tweets about "always taking big risks, rolling the dice, and making unpredictable life and career choices."