Talking Our Way Forward

How to have a conversation with a political enemy.

Look, I get it. (Photo: Getty)

“The average voter” is a term that exists primarily for political consultants to commandeer as an avatar of their own advice. “The average voter believes things have gone too far. The average voter cares about kitchen table issues. The average voter wants common sense solutions for his family. That will be one million dollars.” You can derive a statistical “average voter” from polling results, but this is a useless abstraction, the flavorless product of a large number of competing beliefs held by individuals that cancel one another out in aggregate. The only really useful thing that can be said about the average voter is: They don’t know much about what they are voting for.

This is not an insult. It is simply an observation. It does not mean that voters are dumb. It means that most voters are regular people who have jobs and kids and do not tend to spend 12 hours a day reading political news on the internet, like politicians, political strategists, and journalists—the people who are trying to divine what is the minds of voters—do. This behavioral gulf accounts for the hilarious inability of people whose job it is to talk about what voters will do to genuinely understand voters. For political professionals, “voter” is a person’s foremost identity. For the person in question, though, it is usually something that is created not by a lifelong process of reasoning but by what their parents said and what their idiot friends said and what they heard on 38 seconds of morning talk radio and what lie told by a politician strikes them as most plausible after two to three seconds of thought. The position of The Average Voter on specific policy questions is often like the position of a quantum particle: It snaps into existence the moment you ask them about it, but the rest of the time it could be in an infinite number of places.

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Coming to valid, well-reasoned positions on knotty policy questions requires deep study of facts, which requires time, which is something that most of the 150 million or so voters in America don’t have, because they have other stuff they need to do. Most political opinions of most voters are shallow for the same reason that your own opinion of the most effective way to design jet engine parts is shallow: You haven’t had time to study it. You probably defer to an expert, or to someone you trust, or a news source. This is true of all fields of knowledge. To assume that civic life is any different is folly. The main thing that separates politics from other fields is not the deep expertise of everyone involved in it, but rather the large volume of people trying to manipulate one another on purpose.

One important takeaway from this is that political leaders should spend their time thinking about what is right and then lead people there, rather than spending their time chasing around poll results that are an inch deep. That is not what I am going to write about today, though. Today, I want to briefly discuss what this means for you. I will define “you” here as “A person who cares more deeply about politics than the average voter, as demonstrated by the fact that you are reading this essay.” Even if most voters do not think particularly hard about this stuff, there are many millions who do—and who spend time agonizing over how to convince the idiots who vote incorrectly of the error of their ways.

As America’s political situation has deteriorated over the course of this year, many distraught citizens have asked what they should do. There are some valid answers to that question: You should protest; you should donate money; you should unionize your workplace and strengthen the labor movement; you should get involved with a local organization; you should plan not to cooperate with ICE. All of these are good things to do. But the one action that I do not hear suggested as much is one that is available to just about everyone: You should talk to other people who may have different political beliefs than you—not only for the purpose of understanding them, but ultimately for the purpose of persuading them to change their thinking. This is the fundamental work of organizing. It is not work that is restricted to professional organizers or strategists or media spokespeople. It is work that is available to you, if you know anyone who voted for Trump. Changing a mind means changing a vote. You can do that with a conversation. You don’t need anyone’s permission. You can start now and keep doing this for the next four years. It is very possible for you to have a greater political impact by doing this than by attending marches, although you should do both.

I have precisely one useful thing to contribute to a discussion about how to productively talk to people with different political beliefs. Like many of you, my tendency is to react with rage to people who think bad things, which does not lead to fruitful conversations. On top of that, I am not even friendly, or charismatic. The only way that I learned even my one useful thing about this stuff was by having a career in journalism, which forced me to interview thousands of people, and also by being involved in union organizing, which forced me to have respectful conversations with colleagues who thought differently than me, for the purpose of producing a consensus that would allow us to move forward in solidarity. After years of doing these things, I am still neither friendly nor charismatic nor free of rage, but I have learned something relevant to the task of changing minds about political beliefs.

Here it is: When you talk to people with competing beliefs, do not start out by talking about political positions. Instead, talk about values. Do not say, “What do you think about issue X, and why?” Instead say, “What are the things that you think are important? What are the values that you want to teach your kids? What are the qualities that you think make a person good? What are the values that you try to uphold in your own life?”

Some conversations are harder than others.

If you can get down to the bedrock of values, you will often find that you and the enemy across from you will say that you believe the same things. You both believe, for example, in fairness. You both believe that people should uphold their responsibilities. You both believe that people should respect one another. You both believe that everyone should be treated equally. You both believe that it is good to help people in need. Etcetera. The kindergarten stuff.

If the person you’re talking to cannot immediately enunciate their values, feel free to suggest some for them that are easy to accept, like the ones above.

Then, when you have established that you both think that people in general should be, you know, responsible and considerate and nice to one another, you proceed to talk about how those values translate into daily actions. You pay your taxes. You put away your cart when you leave the grocery store. You don’t cut people off in traffic. You take care of your family. You give a dollar to a homeless person. Etcetera. Then, move the conversation into how these values and actions that you both agree on translate very broadly into politics. What responsibilities do leaders have? Who are the neediest people in our society, and how should we take care of them? How should resources generally be divided among the haves and the have-nots? What are some things that the government could do to help out the greatest number of people in the most effective ways? By following this path from broad values and principles towards more specific ways of carrying those values out in the world, it is possible to maintain a surprising level of agreement between you and someone you thought of as an opponent. And when you have maintained this broad agreement as long as possible, you can gently lead the conversation towards the existing policies and actions of our political parties, and discuss how and whether those positions accord with the values and priorities you have already discussed.

Is it possible for these conversations to go off the rails? Yes. Do they work every time? No. This basic method, however, can produce a shocking amount of common ground. Start with a right wing Christian conservative, and you might find that they do huge amounts of charity work through their church—work that is motivated by the same sort of care that you, a socialist atheist, have for humanity.

By starting with what you both agree on, and what you both believe is morally important, you can, at the very least, accurately locate the point at which your political beliefs depart from one another. Where do similar values become opposite policy prescriptions? You may find that there is some genuine unbridgeable philosophical gap there. But more often, if we’re being honest, you will find something kind of irrational. People like or dislike a particular political figure, and therefore adopt or reject all of their policy positions. People choose a political party, and then stop thinking about specific issues. People picked up some aphorism that may or may not make sense, or overheard some bit of information that may or may not be true, and that become the basis of a political choice that is perceived to define their identity, but which in fact is a millimeter deep, and has never been closely examined. The mere act of having a good faith conversation—not a debate, not an argument, but an attempt to locate the actual foundations of people’s beliefs—about these things is, in many cases, the most profound act of philosophical self-examination that someone has ever experienced in their entire life.

(Keep in mind that none of us are exempt from the need for self-examination. Forgetting this is how you turn into a haughty dick, which will kill your ability to convince anyone of anything.)

People, who are voters, think all types of bullshit for all types of ridiculous reasons. Weighty political outcomes are determined by bare slivers of thought. The bad news is that this provides fertile ground for evil bastards to manipulate people. The good news is that it also provides fertile ground for incredible political evolutions to take place just by having honest and good faith discussions. It’s fucking wild! Try it! Most people are more or less the same as you, meaning that they care about other people, in the abstract, as much as you think you do. The path from “I think humans should be nice to one another” to “I voted for Trump because we need mass deportations” is inevitably strewn with a number of false beliefs, misunderstandings, tricks, and areas of ignorance that can be fixed by gently, patiently, rationally talking things through.

Yeah, some people are bad. But most people are just normal. They are busy, selfish, and distracted to about the same degree as you. Fascism preys on that. You can turn it around, one conversation at a time. Try it!

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Happy How Things Work-iversary

Today is May 2, and the publication you are reading, How Things Work, is now officially two years old. I wrote our annual update on the state of the site last week, and you can read it here. The takeaway is: This experiment in independent media is working so far, thanks to the support of all of the readers just like you who choose to kick in a little bit of money in order to keep this place free for everyone to read. It’s nice and I appreciate all of you and you should all feel good about yourselves for helping this place survive. If you like reading How Things Work and want to be a part of keeping us going for another year, take a second and become a paid subscriber yourself right now. Affordable! Good karma! And righteous!

On top of that, you can now buy the fly ass How Things Work t-shirt by clicking on this link, which can also be found under the “Merch” tab on top of the homepage. See you all in the streets.

How Things Work reader Taylor B sez: “My dog is a filthy communist.”

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• Related reading: They Are a Minority: To Unfuck Politics, Create More Union Members; People Don’t Know Anything About the Government.

• To organize your workplace, contact EWOC. To get involved in politics in your community, join DSA. Feel free to drop ideas for other things people can do right now in the comment section.

• Did you know that I wrote a book? It’s called “The Hammer,” and it is about how the labor movement can be our actual path out of all this madness. You can order it wherever books are sold, and I hope that you will. And let me suggest a few other recent books that you might enjoy: “Bad Company” by Megan Greenwell, about the evils of private equity, which you can preorder here; “Disposable” by Sarah Jones, about the American underclass during the pandemic, which you can order here; and, for the kids, the new young readers version of “Fight to Win!” by Kim Kelly, about the history of the labor movement, which you can preorder here. Support books! They are good things.