How to talk (or not talk) politics at family holidays

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It also makes a great holiday gift for someone you love. Reven just like. There's a link at search engine.show. We'll also throw a link in the show notes. Thank you so much for everybody who's supporting. After this very short break, our episode. Okay. This is our search engine. I'm P.J. Vote. Every theory is definitely not bold proof. Let me just try it out. Anyway, if you really wanted to know how things were going in America year to year, you could try just bugging the turkeys. Like, you'd go to the Butterball Factory the week before Thanksgiving. You'd stick a bunch of recording devices up the turkeys buds before they got shipped down. And then you would just measure the average annual decibel levels in American homes. I don't have to explain Thanksgiving to you, but I will. Anyway, Thanksgiving is the one time a year most people get crammed in a room with their extended families, not just siblings and parents who can be challenging in their own ways, uncles, aunts, and laws. People you have to love, but might not always like. People you have genuine differences with and can't abandon or cut off. There are no presence to distract you. Everybody's fried from travel. It's often right around elections. And people are drunk Thanksgiving in my lifetime. I feel like I've watched it get harder. After Trump was first selected, it was the place I could most feel internet polarization invade real life. There's this idea that I remember started kicking around after 2016, which is that all good liberals should go home over the holidays and go nuclear on their macro relatives. Like it was a moral imperative. I think that moment has passed. But Thanksgiving has stayed hot. The one or two days every year where we remember how far apart we all are. Where someone repeats something they remember reading on blue sky to someone who mainly half watches Fox News, where everything devolves into a bunch of articles people barely remember. And statistics that feel pretty made up. I am a Thanksgiving pass fest, a non combatant. I've been to a lot of holidays with a lot of families, with a lot of views, and have mostly voted the landmines. But I think we're in a moment both where everybody wants the country to get better. Everybody wants to figure out how to talk through our differences. And I believe if we're going to fix the country even a little bit, it might happen in late November. So in honor of the holiday, I wanted to talk to a person who is often trying to have conversations with people he disagrees with politically, often with great success occasionally a way that makes everybody yell at him online. As a client, welcome back to search engine. PJ, good to see you, man. OK, so just start. I was hoping you could just give me like a speedy montage of your family Thanksgiving's from teenager to now. Like in your time on earth, in your family, have you experienced emotional climate change? No, I love Thanksgiving. Really? Yeah, I find this whole discourse bizarre. You don't have tense family Thanksgiving? No, never. I don't think so. Well, once the fire alarm went off, freaking everybody out, leading to like a chaotic trying to figure out if there was a fire situation and then another time like smoke began pouring out of the oven, but I feel like we have more humorous Thanksgiving mishaps than we do political meltdowns. And that isn't because I've not had growing political polarization in my own family. I have. And you know, there's a mega dimension to it. And I am very political myself. It has never really occurred to me, despite being near a lot of internet content, telling me this is what Thanksgiving is for that you should use the precious time you have home with your family to try to persuade them of your political views. And nobody in your family like three hours into Thanksgiving starts baiting somebody else with something. Oh, no, people definitely get baited. I think this whole discourse is very telling because what I think you're seeing is that most of the time, particularly for highly educated, highly mobile, probably liberal leaning people, they are in chosen community, chosen community. They're getting out with people they agree with. Yes, they have moved to a place. If they have moved or stayed in a place where they find their surroundings, relatively politically congenial, they maybe are around friends or around co-workers in an industry that now leans very much towards them. And so over time, we ended up in much less politically mixed communities than we once had. And that means we are not naturally around as much political difference. So then you get Thanksgiving, which is a time when we have not chosen the people around. Yeah, it is a time when we are in a place that might include difference. And that difference is non-elective. And I think what you see with the rise of all of this, how to debate with your family of Thanksgiving is maybe a signal that we have gotten worse at living in an ideologically diverse and vast country. Yeah, and it's funny. I really am. One of the things that I struggle with as a person is that you've traits you notice in yourself and you can't tell if they are flaws or qualities. I will often say that I'm very portable. I can go to different places with different values and just hang. But part of the reason I can hang is I just don't argue with people. I think I get exposed to more American opinions than a lot of people I know because my ability to just not smile or nod, but ask questions or make jokes and not really persuade or convince is, I mean, ability, just like my proclivity for that. And it's funny. I want to talk about both. I feel like in the first term term and in the second term term, there's a different idea about political differences, particularly among the center to the left. But term one, it was very much like we must annihilate these people with the reason and logic. And everyone has to like John Oliver style destroy everybody else. And I remember feeling like as somebody who wants to be a good citizen or wants to be a proof of people on the internet, even if they're not actually paying attention, that moment gave me a real stomach ache. And I remember like genuinely having more fights with my family members and having fights that I think they were confused by. Like they were like, why are you yelling at me? I think the point you make about term one in term two is sharp. And I think in term one, there was, I don't think the idea was you needed to annihilate your family members. I think that the idea was that this was an aberration. Trumpism, the wrenching of the Republican Party into this much more cruel and ethno nationalist form, was an aberration, a sort of unholy freak event in which a reality television star with a long history as a public face in America was able to use the coin of attention and convert it into currency in the political realm to take over the Republican Party and then win in an unusual election decided by James Comey. Yes. And maybe if you just beat it, it just goes away. Yes. And then next time it's Marco Rubio or someone normal and we can go back to the much more comfortable form of political division, we had in 2012. And I think in term two, I will speak for myself, I have moved beyond that. You cannot beat this in the sense of making it disappear. You should actually understand it as having always been here, which I think many of us did understand that, but thought it was weaker at other points, right? Maybe you could put that put back into it. You locked back in the basement. And right now you're going to have to for a period live with it. But I would maybe go further in my own politics and say, I have come to the view that part of beating it is going to be understanding how to live with it. What does that mean part of beating it is going to be understand it a little bit. We are perfectly good at talking. talking. We are not very good at listening. And so by view, if you want to treat Thanksgiving as some sort of political testing ground, as opposed to a holiday with a meal where you get to see your family, it's a great moment to try to test the other end in some ways having more importance at the political skills, which is how do you listen and absorb views you disagree with? Almost the weakest position in politics is to be arguing views you have no sympathy for, that you can't even conceptually or empathically spin up a version that compels you in any way. Because when you can't do that, when you can't cross that empathic gap at all, that gap of intellectual empathy, then you're probably not going to be able to make an effective argument to somebody who holds any dimension of those views because the thing people can track before they can track whether or not they agree with your wonderful, beautifully constructed argument about immigration, before people are going to track that. They can track it. Do you fundamentally seem to respect them? Yeah. And if they feel you don't, and they feel that your response to their views is you idiot, you racist, you bigot, you dummy, you authoritarian, you fascist, what you have is a political project here, and you're trying in any way to build a bridge on which you can walk over to them and then get them to walk back with you. They're going to first have to feel that you're listening to them and hearing them on some level. But so then you're talking about it's like, I feel like what you're saying comes before the level of compromise or not, compromise. It's just like literally can you listen well enough to show people that you respect them, to show people that well, you might have different preferences for how the world would be. You you can fundamentally understand their values and you can understand their values as coming from someplace other than they are bad. I also think to be honest, this is one thing I've learned, not from Thanksgiving specifically, but from intrafamily, political arguments. They're people in my family who disagree with me profoundly on politics. And even so, I am maybe the person they trust most in the world. They love me. They think I'm a brilliant political pundit. I happen to be the member of the family who became a professional political communicator. They read everything I do. They listen and I cannot convince them. So what does it look like? Like what does it look like? If you have a family member where you have this bridge of love and respect and the fact that you have vast political differences doesn't create horrible fights all the time, do you explicitly talk about the things you disagree about? Yeah. What does it look like? I'm not saying nobody ever gets annoyed. I actually find it much easier to talk about politics with Ben Shapiro in some ways than with them because I'm really not trying to persuade Ben Shapiro of anything. I don't go into a podcast with him and think, on the other side of this, if I make my arguments well enough, I just appear as well as the Democrats. I just have no illusions about that. My entire interest in that show is to understand him better to hear the way it looks to him. With my family member on some level, I actually do one persuade them. And one of the best things I've ever done is give up on that. Why? Because it's not my job. I mean, it's your job to persuade politically. It's not your job to persuade politically. That is not the nature of a familial relationship. And it is not the level on which people's politics operates. People's politics is, for most human beings, right? It's about their values. It's intuitions. It is what people like them think. It is a media they consume. It is a feeling this country is not what it once was for them. And it is so much more valuable for me to understand their perspective and to be able to feel it inside of me and make some intellectual concession to it, some emotional concession to it, to believe it as real and valid and willing to lead a person I find to be moral and wonderful into a politics I find to be more complicated. The idea that what I'd be doing is, you know, at all costs trying to convert them, that's not what a real relationship is. One thing that I think is worth saying is that it's hard to realize how much most voters, because their ideologies are more mixed in all over the place are constantly voting for people who they mostly are cynical about and recognize they don't agree with on lots of things. So there are a lot of voters who have very hard line restriction issues and immigration, but say, want legal cannabis or there are a lot of voters who want economic populism, Medicare for all, but are very Christian and have very traditional views on social issues. And it's just so people all over the place, it's actually unusual to agree so heavily with one side or the other. And so most people are making compromises all the time. And part of the way they make them is this fundamental feeling of, do these people like me? Do I like them? Yeah. A lot of people don't tune in on the policy that much anyway. So those of us who feel like, how can you ever vote for somebody you disagree with on things? You know, most Americans experience politics as an endlessly voting for people they don't like. And they're doing it. Yeah, figuring it out. Yeah. What I don't understand is, if you have an idea about which direction the country should go in, just as a citizen, not as a professional political persuader. Like for somebody who's like, I genuinely feel like this country is an amendment of a liberal crisis. Yeah. And let's say that half their family members are like, we're enjoying the liberal crisis. We like more of it. Obviously like one day a year, you're not going to sit down with a bunch of printed out articles or a book or strongly worded statements and change their minds. But if what you're saying is that these have to start as conversations, they have to start as trying to understand other people. Where do they go from there? Like if somebody was like, no, no, no, legitimately, there's someone I'm close to, who I think that our values are the same or our values are close enough, but their preferences are misinformed, valve-formed, wrong. I think this is really hard. Let me be honest about this. And I don't have an answer that is some plan for how to save the country Thanksgiving. But I think the first work to do is to get better at politics yourself. And that means trying to figure out how to cultivate maybe skills you don't have. And I guess my thesis on myself and on many people I know and on a lot of people who are in this kind of argument in debate is actually we're perfectly good at arguing with other people. There was an onion article once. It was just one of these headlines. It just said, smattering of half-remembered facts from the other client show fails to change family members in tire worldview. And it's like, yeah, that's fair. That is fair. If what you're saying is what can I do? And any one of us in this country of 300 million plus people's not that much is, you know, you can yourself get better at politics. You can ask questions. You can try to understand how somebody who in many other ways you love and have commonality with can end up so far from you can end up so incomprehensible to you. The project of being able to hold how they got there in a place of not agreement. But where you can look at it and understand it. I think that is worthwhile work if what you're trying to do is do political work, which of course, by the way, is on some of all obviously when we talk about immigration now, there is a widespread understanding in the Democratic Party at least that, oh, it turns out you cannot abandon the idea that you're going to have a secure orderly border. But you had that whole thing around 2020 of most of the Democratic politicians saying we should decriminalize illegal border crossing. And Biden didn't say we should do that, but kind of allowed an unfathomable mess around the asylum system at the border. And that ended up for the people who, you know, don't feel comfortable with immigration. They just completely lost faith in the Democratic Party, like completely lost faith. And they embraced the other thing, which is masked men, ripping parents away from their children, like doing raids on preschools. Yeah. You don't want that to happen, right? You don't, if you care about immigrants, you don't want that to happen. So you need to start reweaving something that has some of their views, not the, like, maybe we need mass deportations view, but we need to secure orderly border. I start there. My version of this that I remember was like during, I don't know if it was like first Trump term or Biden, but like, I have a family member. Sometimes we're Thanksgiving together. They're conservative. They like Trump. And I was doing this exercise, which was a strange exercise that I do sometimes where they're all Facebook posters. And I'll just like sit and read their Facebook wall, and I'll read everything they post. Like I'll just like read it like a book. And I'll challenge myself where I'm like, find the thing you agree with here. Because like a lot of times I'll read things that like to me feel wrong headed or make me mad, I'll just be like read until you find something. that you can just like see clearly. And so I was reading through this like relative thing and they're in the South and they're very much like the borders are unsure, the borders aren't secure. And there was this post where they were talking about how in the place where they lived, there was a lot of just like people literally, it wasn't a silent claim 'cause people actually, it's just like crossing. And people there were finding corpses. Like they were finding dead bodies in their backyard where people died and this wasn't like a meetup thing. There's like photos, not like super gruesome ones. And the person wasn't saying, I hate non-Americans. They weren't saying I hate immigrants. They were saying like, this is bad. I don't like this. And I was like, yeah, that is bad. I would not argue for a system where people are dying in your backyard. And it was confusing for me because it was the time where I found myself listening in a digital way. It didn't give me ammunition for an argument to have. Weirdly, it just made me, it just made things your complicated. - I mean, a lot of these things are complicated and there is this question of what problems your media diet helps you see and which problems you completely miss. - Yeah. But I get, like I think what I still feel confused by is like, like I understand it like the idea, the idea that like the briefing counters we have their family members is the time to shift them. It's like a sort of like a relic of a Denver era. But in an era where like many more people are trying to on a micro level do politics and most people are practicing these weird online anti-politics. How, I think my question about Thanksgiving is really like, how do you be a citizen in a democracy in a way that is even useful in a small way? - I think that my first advice on this is that if you want to use either Thanksgiving day itself or the kind of unchosen interaction we're using Thanksgiving here to represent. - Yes. - As a venue for politics. - I'm not saying you have to do. I just wanna keep, you could just be normal and watch the game and you know, you'd food. - But what if you wanna be abnormal? But if you wanna do this, then probably doing politics for you the most effective way you can do it is not talking but listening. And so I just think our conception of what doing politics, the thing you are saying here means is just wrong to use a more maybe podcast appropriate example here two men podcasting in a room. If you go to the gym and you are always pushing, I had always doing bench and always doing exercises at the Expensive Force Outward, you will become very imbalanced and you will get injured and you will not be a good weightlifter or athlete or whatever you're trying to do. You have to push and pull. That's how you weigh left. You work out both sides of that. And we do too much pushing and not enough pulling. Too much talking and not enough listening. And the point of the lesson is not to just sit there passively. You are trying to expand your sense of the positions you can hold respectfully within yourself. So you can have a more complex view of this country of the other people and live with more ease around them. And I'm not saying that your Thanksgiving will ladder up to some political change that will lead to the end of illiberalism in this country, it probably won't. It's just gonna be Thanksgiving. But always politics in this country is the aggregation of individual acts that on their own functionally don't matter. No one person's vote typically decides anything. But laddered up to the mass actually do matter. Politics, the elections, all of it. It's a phenomenon emergent from all of these, you know, millions of individual acts. And I think like my thing I'm trying to do here is just get people to have a different definition in their head of what it means to do politics. It does not just mean trying to persuade people you're right. It means trying to be good at listening to people about why they think they are right, not so you can deliver an amazing counter punch, but because then you just need to sit without for a while. But I understand why sometimes people get freaked out. We were like, I know this is really scary. I know you're worried about literally like the fall of the republic, you gotta go home and listen. Like it feels like a scary time demands stride and see instead of just trying to hear. I didn't tell anybody that they have to do that. Right, I guess it's a response, right? That's you. But I'm saying that if what you want to do is politics and you have to do politics and you have to ask yourself, what is the political project you're trying to achieve here? And if the political project you're trying to achieve, is it you believe the mega side has become really dangerous? And you want to empower back then, yeah. I mean, if you think you can win over people who don't like you and disagree with you with stride and see, I mean, then give it a shot, but I think we tried. (laughing) And it's not that everybody should be doing politics. I actually don't believe everybody should. But some people have to be doing politics, not just politicians, but that is a very, very attenuated idea of democracy. You know, there's all kinds of stuff you can do to be politically involved. But again, if you are saying, as I am being forced to answer, you're gonna be the like, that you want to be doing politics yourself, then I think this is closer to what it means to be doing politics. Look, hard problems don't often have emotionally satisfying answers. - Yeah. - You know, when somebody, or in a relationship, when somebody's angry at you, or has done something that you're hurt by, responding with as much or more anger or hurt, rarely heals the relationship. But at some point, the fury has to exhaust itself, and the finding each other again has to happen. (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) - When you talk about this stuff about like, what it would look like to do, sort of, person to person's, is in level politics correctly. I, it's a weird conversation because A, I agree. B, I'm not a big persuader of people. I am just natural listener to people, but the experience that I've had in the last 10 years of internet, in the last 10 years of like, sort of like, liberal spaces, is that, everyone's become highly political, and the thing I constantly have to remind myself is, these people who are acting like assholes most of the time, you do largely agree with them. Like, my experience of the thing that you're saying people need to not do, which is just like, berate, annihilate, destroy with logic, and sort of name, call, signal, whatever. Like, I'm talking about it as if it's happening to somebody else. But it's the thing I literally experience like, all of the time. Like, all of the time. All of the time, I will see people, I know in like, in real life, online, or in real life, talking about how I ought to support candidates or policies who I agree with. And they will be describing a way where I'm like, you're making me have to remember that I agree with you. Do you know what I mean? I do. My honest joke that Twitter is where, I learn not to like people I like, and podcasts are where I learn to like people I don't like. Yes, they're completely accurate. Let me make this other point, which is that I don't think that all this content about how to destroy your family with logic and Thanksgiving was actually ever about persuading your family Thanksgiving. I think it was always about people genuinely being somewhat nervous about how uncomfortable it feels to sit in political disagreement with people they care about or cannot escape for a long period of time. And one thing I will say is that I find it difficult too, right? I find it much harder with my family than I find it with anybody else. But more than that, I try on my show to have on people I really disagree with. And not people, you know, if I try to, if I have some people on the right, it's not never a Trump or is it's people who, you know, believe things I truly don't believe. And those conversations stress me out a lot more beforehand. I finally lead up to them. I prepare harder. I'm more nervous going in. I'm more nervous about not representing what people want me to represent in the moment and being yelled at by other people for it. And I'm not saying that the experience of doing a political conversation shows the exact same as doing Thanksgiving. But I actually do think the experience of just fearing the discomfort of disconnection and disagreement is pretty widespread. And at the same time, my experience of doing this almost all the time with family, with professional conversations, is that I gain a lot from it. What do you gain? I become bigger. What do you mean bigger? I understand someone with more texture than I did before, and I understand an idea with more texture than I did before, and I can represent it accurately in my own thinking. When I talk to people, I agree with, I stay the same size. Yeah. And when I talk to people who think something very different than I do, my picture of the world, I think of it, like when you put your thumb down on that iPhone thumbprint, in order to open your iPhone with your thumb, you keep having to put it down, and then you watch it like filling in a little bit more, and a little bit more, and a little bit more of the thumbprint, I feel that way with my picture of the world. And I find that to be a very rewarding feeling. Your experience can be legible to me, without me having to agree with your politics. It makes me interesting. I think part of the reason you're able to do what you do professionally is that, and not to like broad brush everybody, but I think there's a lot of people where they're afraid of having conversations with people they disagree with because they're afraid that it will change them. And you're like, no, no, no, I want to be changed. It gives me an expansive feeling to have one more perspective. Yeah. I guess one thing I think about is there a way that without sacrificing social progress, I consider fundamentally moral. I can make you feel my politics can make you feel safer here, and not push to the side. Again, I think people are very complex and they change over time too, but actually usually a precondition for them changing is safety. And so in a condition where people feel very defensive and very unwanted or rejected, one, their own views are unlikely to change, their views are likely to harden. That's true for most of us. But two, there is just a fundamental project we have to be engaged in in politics to make this place feel welcoming for as many people as they can simultaneously. And I think we often mistake what that means as agreement and often agreement on the end points of these issues. It's not possible. It's irreconcilable. But I think that often beneath the issues are more fundamental. Questions people need to feel of respect, of safety, of being listened to, of having their space and politics to work with. And so I often think that by understanding perspective better, you can maybe find ways to meet its emotional needs that are not disrespecting its substantive concerns, but a lot of politics and meeting people a quarter way, a half way. That's true for all of us all the time. And I think doing politics means you're the one doing it. Yeah. That's almost what to make that an active verb, you're the one doing it. But again, not everybody has to do it. But if you want to do politics at Thanksgiving, put you again, it's not necessary. But if you're asking me what I think that means, go home and listen. Yeah, and, and, and absorb and, and, and get bigger yourself. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay. I'm trying to think if I want to do that. Again, you don't have to. As we're crying, he's the host of the excellent podcast, The As We're Crying Show, and co-author of the book Abundance. The episode of Surge Engine is brought to you in part by Mooby. If you're tired of endlessly scrolling through streaming algorithms designed for passive background noise, you need to check out Mooby. Mooby is a global film company, bringing great sentiments to the world, curating and elevating visionary filmmaking that's hand-picked always. It's the kind of platform for movies you'll actually watch, fall in love with, and keep thinking and talking about long after the credits roll. 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