How to mix red and blue without color combustion

These Times

Kirk Ericson | Sep 19, 20240

“We seek to disagree accurately, avoiding exaggeration and stereotypes.” — from Braver Angels website

By Kirk Ericson

Here are some comments made at this week’s membership meeting of the Mason County League of Women Voters:

“Wish I had these skills so I wouldn’t be afraid to talk to the neighbors.”

“I tend to just get angry when I’m interacting with someone [I disagree with politically]. I just stop. I don’t like getting that angry. It’s not good. It’s not healthy.”

“I have neighbors I know that I don’t want to talk to. They know the signs in my driveway. … Before the signs went up, we liked each other.”

The topic of the 90-minute gathering Tuesday in Shelton posed a fundamental question of these times: How can we talk to people we disagree with politically? A sub-question also seemed to be: Should we even bother?

Braver Angels is a nonprofit organization, born in 2016 and based in New York, that aims to teach people how to talk to people in ways that are more likely to yield gladness than sadness. The organization has a presence in several states and has a variety of outlets for its message, including meetings, one-on-one conversations and podcasts, and workshops such as the one Tuesday in the Olympic College library.

Braver Angels identifies its workers as either “red” or “blue,” and aims to maintain a balance of both throughout the organization, and in each state. The person who presented at the League of Women Voters event was a red. Elizabeth Doll, the director of Braver Politics, lives on Bainbridge Island and is a Republican political professional. She’s worked on many partisan and nonpartisan campaigns for more than a decade.

Before the League meeting, I watched a podcast from 2021 that featured Doll, and I’ve got to say, she’s some red. Here’s a couple of comments she made on the podcast:

“You need to have meaning in your life,” Doll said. “People, in my opinion, have begun finding meaning in their political philosophy and that is not helpful to the end of actually advancing your political ideology. That’s not actually helpful to advancing any policy goals. If you are emotionally attached to your policy goals, that’s a goal that you cannot evaluate objectively.”

Not what I was expecting …

And this: “If you organize the same group of people that shows up to a public protest or demonstration to instead show up at your state representative’s office or to show up at on the hearing floor in the Legislature, that will accomplish things. That will move your legislators. There are very few things that are more effective in terms of moving legislative policy than actually showing up in person. … So. Show up. Be heard.”

When Doll showed up Tuesday on the Zoom call, she wore a hoodie displaying the name Taylor Swift, the singer who crossed the big red one last week.

So … here are, briefly, some tips on talking:

Listen deeply, listen carefully.

“Turn off your inner debater,” Doll said. “We’re thinking about what we’re going to say next. We’re going to stop that. We’re going to listen to those concerns. Focus on their viewpoint. Not the policy disagreement. The reason for it. Look for something you can agree with.”

Make a connection.

“Connect first,” Doll said. “That’s the prime directive, before you can build a relationship. It’s like the saying, ‘Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.’ ”

And be ready if the person you’re trying to engage refuses to play along.

As one of Tuesday’s attendees said, to a few snickers, “Let’s talk about the elephant in the room.” If people don’t want to talk, “I don’t see how any of this is going to work.”

Yes, Doll said. That can happen.

There’s more, lots more. You can go to the Braver Angels website to learn more.

A woman at the League meeting told a story that illustrated what doesn’t work. She said she was talking to a neighbor when he said, “This country is sliding into socialism.”

She said she started laughing. “It went downhill from there,” she said.

For many of us, this effort to communicate is not an academic or a political matter. It’s as intensively personal as personal can be. It’s separating loved ones from loved ones, turning people into people who avoid the thing they most want to talk about, but dare not.

I sat next to a woman at the League meeting. A couple of times the conversation came around to her inability to talk about politics with her parents, who are in their 80s.

They don’t want to hear their daughter’s views, at least in any way that she wants to deliver those views. She’s frustrated she can’t present her ideas in a way that they’ll hear.

We need to learn to talk about these matters.

First, we need to learn to listen about these matters.