This post started out its life on Friday when it was—and still is—a follow up to what I wrote about being politically clinically depressed last week and what one can do about it.
In that sense, you shouldn’t read it as a commentary on the tragic attempt on former President Trump’s life. Still, I had to deal with the aftermath of Saturday’s events which did end up helping me the case I started out making even stronger and led me to make this post a bit longer than normal.
I know that it doesn’t contain anything resembling an alternative to political violence.
What I try to offer, instead, is a way for activists and others to rethink how they approach America’s political differences and the toxic emotions they evoke.
These days, I find myself working with people who run for the clichéd hills whenever a discussion turns political.
Some think they have to because they work for supposedly nonpartisan organizations like Rotary or the Alliance for Peacebuilding where I spend most of my time.
More frequent and more worrisome are the friends who find political discussion so toxic that they end up being what I called politically clinically depressed in last week’s post.
Here, I want to make the case that we don’t have to treat politics as if it was a four-letter word, best avoided in polite company. I know it because I’ve been doing things ind a different and (I think) better way my entire professional life.
Actually longer.
Discussing divisive political issues has been at the heart of who I am and what I do since I was in high school in the mid-1960s.
I was often the intermediary who built bridges between my fellow activists at Oberlin and Michigan and more conservative students and faculty members. In my sixteen years teaching at Colby, I loved teaching the majority of my students who thought of themselves as Republicans. In the thirty years that I’ve been in Washington mostly working as a peacebuilder, I have taken great pride in work I’ve done with the military and Evangelical Christians—despite having been a conscientious objector during the Vietnam war era and having been raised Jewish.
I’ve actually lost count of the number of times when I realized that I learned a lot from working with people who were on “the other side.”
Political discussion even between people who disagree with each other doesn’t have to be toxic. It can even be fun.
So, I thought it was worth my while—and hopefully yours—to lay out a few of the things I’ve learned along those lines in my half century of disagreeing constructively.
Reactions to July 13, 2024
But first–how the events of last Saturday made what I had already written all the more compelling.
My wife and I switched from the PBS News Hour to the CBS local news at about 6.25 on Saturday. Within seconds it was clear that there had been an attack on former President Trump’s life and that the Secret Service seemed to already have things under control. The former president had been taken away by the time we switched channels again, this time to CNN, which we watched until we knew that Mr. Trump was safe and that the shooter had been killed.
Somewhere in that hour or so, my mind drifted back to November 22, 1962.
I was sitting in my high school American history class when Miss Sullivan gave me the keys to her car and told me to go listen to the news. I then had to come back and tell my classmates that President Kennedy had indeed just been shot. The rest of that day was a blur. But my high school and college years were filled with assassination attempts, far too many of which were “successful.”
Sixty years later, we are more divided and our polarization is more toxic than it has been at any point in my lifetime.
We have been able to reduce the number of assassination attempts, largely because the Secret Service and others have gotten a lot better at providing security at public events like the one on Saturday.
It certainly isn’t because we’ve made any progress at dealing with our divisions.
Of course, trying to kill a candidate for office or anyone else is never acceptable.
But for someone like me, saying that is not enough.
It’s long past time to address the anger and polarization themselves.
Political ≠ Partisan
We have to talk about politics.
We just have to do it differently.
And better.
Nonprofits like Rotary or the Alliance for Peacebuilding enjoy tax-exempt status which means that means that they cannot endorse individual candidates or political parties.
Even if they could do so legally, it would be ethically inappropriate for them to do so given their missions.
There is nothing in their legal status or ethical guidelines that bars them from tackling tough and divisive issues. In fact, I’ll use the rest of this post to make the case that they have an obligation to do so for one simple reason. They can begin leading the country out of toxic polarization by modeling how to disagree constructively and help the rest of us do so as well
Dialogue ≠ Debate
To get there, we have to rethink how we go about discussing politics and disagreeing with each other.
In my case, that starts with the fact that I rarely try to convince someone else that I’m right, especially early in a relationship. Instead, I begin by trying to figure out why someone might have qualms about affirmative action, be pro-life, doubt the threat(s) posed by climate change, or otherwise disagree with me on the issues of the day.
Then, instead of debating them and trying to show them the “errors of their ways,” I try to start what the late pollster and philosopher Daniel Yankelovich called a dialog or a “discussion that is so charged that it leaves neither party unchanged.”
I also do that because of the first lessons I learned in the classroom as a student and as a teacher. In the end, I can never convince you of anything. You have to convince yourself.
Sure, my students might parrot back my views on an exam or in a paper, but those “conversions” ended the day I handed in their grades.
More generally, people have to convince themselves through a Yankelovichian dialog rather than arguing with me or listening to a sermon from me disguised as a lecture for one simple reason which we forget far too often. A discussion that leaves neither party unchanged opens everyone’s mind sand makes them more curious—a point I’ll return to in ending this pot.
And it’s not that hard to do. These days, I find myself repeating the three one syllable words that Kelly Corrigan used in entitling both her most famous book and her PBS series.
Tell Me More.
Just click on the image and watch the first minute or two of the first episode of her show’s sixth season and see what can happen when you do.
Calling People In
Regular readers will already know that I’m a huge fan of Loretta Ross and other progressive activists who “call in” their opponents. We’ve all just watched an academic year that was filled with protests on our campuses in which activists (many of whom I agreed with on the situation in Gaza) “called out” the people they disagreed with. Supporters of Palestinians named, blamed, and shamed anyone who even vaguely resembled a Zionist. Far too many of my fellow Jews did the same to people who protested Israeli policies after October 7.
It is all but impossible to have a dialogue under those circumstances.
But if I call the people I disagree with in to a discussion, use prompts like tell me more, and treat them as equals with whom I happen to disagree on issues that really matter to me, it becomes possible to get somewhere.
Back in the day, those kinds of discussions helped my once pro-war friends to change sides. More recently, I watched as the tides turned on marriage equality more fully and more rapidly than I ever dreamed possible.
Why not now?
How to Convince Others (When it is the Appropriate Thing to do)
There are times when our differences are so great and when I care so passionately about an issue that simply asking my interlocutor to tell me more just isn’t enough. There are times when my sense of right and wrong tell me that they are wrong and that I have to do something about it.
At those times, I do have to defend and insist on my own point of view.
My experience is that you can be an effective advocate without demeaning the other side. You might be even a better advocate if you can avoid turning your opponents into what social psychologists call an outgroup which often takes you down the slippery slope toward stereotyping and demonization.
I know that discussions about what I just said can get awfully abstract. So, two examples might illustrate the point without my having to rehash some awfully nerdy research.
First, I’ve had the privilege of being in two kinds of rooms with Daryl Davis.
Professionally, he is an award winning keyboard artist.
That’s how I first met him—at my wife’s first husband’s seventieth birthday party, which was a swing dance. We exchanged a few words and may even have discussed why there were so few Black people who were into swing dancing.
At the time, I had no clue about what makes Davis special or why he deserves a place in this post. That happened shortly after the pandemic began and his other persona began showing up on my Zoom screen.
That Daryl Davis helps lead people out of the Ku Klux Klan and other racist organizations. All that happened when he encountered Klan leaders while he played in country rock bands in clubs at which most of the customers were white. I don’t have time to go into details which you can see on his web site or in this TED Talk, but basically he set about getting to know members of the Klan and their supporters as human beings and, when possible, helped them see alternatives to the prejudices they espoused in public and to the lives they had been living.
Then, earlier this week, I was listening to the most recent TED Radio Hour podcast while walking to my grandkids’ house. Manoush Zomorodi began the episode by talking with Kate Stone who survived a bizarre accident—she was gored by a stag whose antlers got lodged in her throat and almost killed her. At first, I couldn’t figure out why she was on the show and almost switched to a different podcast, but then the two of them got to the real reason why she was there.
The British tabloid press had had a field day covering the accident because they ended up implying that she was gored in part because she was transexual. The coverage never mentioned that she was a world class physicist and entrepreneur who happened to be out with friends for an innocent evening of drink and music when she had the unfortunate (literal) run in with the deer.
Stone was furious. But, instead of responding in kind, she asked for a simple apology posted in the trade publication of the agency that monitors such breaches of British media standards and that no one other than professional journalists reads. She also decided to reach out to the writers and editors who published those stories as one human wishing to get to know those other humans who had—in her opinion—violated all sorts of journalistic and ethical norms. To everyone’s surprise, Stone and the journalists have since begun building a constructive relationship. And if you know anything about the British tabloid press, that is one hell (sorry about the four-letter word) of an accomplishment.
The Right Kind of Politics Makes the Right Kind of Leader
If you figure out how to have your version of these kinds of discussions, my experience is that you become a different kind of leader. One of Rotary’s tag lines is “service over self,” and you can be a kind of servant leader even if you don’t buy into what I’ve been calling for here.
But if you do find your way of leading like Loretta Ross or Daryl Davis or Kate Stone or Kelly Corrigan, you end up leading in a very different way.
I figured out a version of this early in my teaching days at Colby and then at George Mason. I tried to stay one mental step ahead of each of my students and then implicitly invited each of them to take a step toward me. More often than not, that step was intellectual, helping them come to grips with a new concept in political science or peace studies. But if the students showed any interest in my own views and exploring the ways in which we disagreed, I did the same thing. I tried to find an easy “on ramp” in which we could explore our differences and learn from each other. Some of those conservative students are still friends and colleagues decades later.
It has made me a different kind of teacher and political leader. And, if my Rotarian and AfP friends go down some version of this path, they can be role models of the kind of political leader we want and deserve.
Bridging Social Capital
As regular readers also know, I have been a huge fan of Robert Putnam’s work since I took a graduate seminar with him at Michigan in the early 1970s, long before he had gotten interested in social capital or I had discovered the world of peacebuilding.
At the core of the work that has made Bob famous is the idea of bridging social capital in which we forge connections with people who are NOT like us. They help us build trust and open up possibilities for working together because we ask questions like tell me more.
I can hang out with Ohio State and Red Sox fans. Why not MAGA Republicans? Or, because I have built connections with the parents who show up at my grandkids’ soccer fields or band recitals or wait with them to pick up the kids at the end of the school day, our discussions can turn to social and political issues without their rejecting my (weird) ideas out of hand because they know me as Kiril and Mila’s grandpa.
Coincidentally, Lulu Garcia-Navarro had a long interview with Bob in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. I first read it on Saturday afternoon, nodded approvingly, and moved on.
Then I read it again that evening in a new light. And then again on Sunday.
She obviously could not has asked him about anything vaguely resembling what happened on Saturday, and the conversation rarely touched on political violence in any form.
Still, her questions and his answers and her answers to his questions are all worth pondering as we deal with the events on Saturday and our toxic polarization in general.
Curiosity Amid Conviction
The older I get, the more convinced I am that there is no quick fix that will get us out of our political mess that only got messier Saturday evening.
But I’ve learned two things.
Of course, I want people to know where I stand on the issues. Given what I do for a living, it is all but impossible for me to hide my beliefs and pretend that I’m neutral. That was true when I began my teaching career in 1975. My students only had to notice that I did my PhD dissertation and first book on the new left in France to get a pretty good sense that I wasn’t exactly a conservative. They could also look at the length of my hair or my beard. Today, anyone who reads this blog will have no trouble seeing the same thing. I care passionately about what the Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation refers to as America’s neglected needs. And I’m proud to wear those emotional passions on my metaphorical sleeves wherever I go.
At the same time, I’ve also learned to approach my political opponents with curiosity. I really do want to know how they respond to Kelly Corrigan’s prompt. I’ve learned a lot from being curious around libertarians or from spending time at Wheaton College and the military academies. I love getting together with my pro-life peacebuilding colleague even if he doesn’t call me when he comes to DC for the annual right to life march.
I’m not sure I’m prepared to take on Klan leaders, and I’m definitely not looking forward to seeing how I would respond after I was gored by a deer or any other animal with antlers or horns.
Still, treating political differences as learning opportunities and more has allowed me to (mostly) avoid becoming politically clinically depressed while building communities of people who want to solve our problems together, whatever their disagreements.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Alliance for Peacebuilding or its members.
