By Chris Satullo
Part one of two.
Amid the ear-to-ear grins and joyous fist pumps that many of you indulged in on Wednesday, as Joe Biden’s pitch-perfect Inaugural celebration unspooled, there lurked, I’m willing to bet, a few skeptical eyerolls.
You tolerated the new president’s talk of unity, healing, listening and ending the “uncivil war” as high-flown flourishes suitable for this ceremonial moment. But as serious exhortations? God, no.
Unity with them? With the Fox-watching, lie-swallowing, mask-rejecting, “sheeple”-bating, journalist-hating, bias-showing masses who supported Donald Trump until the last drip of hair dye smeared Rudy Giuliani’s cheek?
Listening to them? Pursuing healing with them? Unimaginable. Pointless. Doomed.
You subscribed to the Beto O’Rourke school of inauguration planning, wanting the likes of Ted Cruz to be kept away from the Capitol that day by at least the width of a good-sized Texas cattle ranch. You were baffled by Biden’s indulgent, sure-come-on-by mindset.
I know that some National Interest readers, as well as millions of other progressives, feel this way. I hear from them, in Facebook posts and emails, every time I opine – based on my 25 years’ experience leading civic dialogues – that the healing through listening that Biden proposes is not only doable but an urgent national priority. In fact, it’s every bit as vital as repairing the damage done by the Trumpian assaults on immigrants, the environment and the very notion of scientific fact.
Our deepest problem in America, the root of our divisions, comes down to this:
My idea of you, and your idea of me.
As long as each side in our national disagreements is content to hunker down on one side of the chasm, telling itself that the other side is too ignorant, hateful, hypocritical, scheming, evil – too Other – to be engaged with, let alone respected or trusted, then the audacious transformations our society needs will remain forever beyond our grasp.
You can’t do really big things on a continental scale when you can’t even talk or explain yourself to nearly half of your fellow Americans, let alone grasp their valid concerns.
Sure, staying on a path of lofty disdain, you can eke out an invigorating electoral win here, cobble together a slim majority there.
But all policy successes that ensue will be fragile, prone to being cancelled as the other side snaps back and wins the next election or appoints the next justice. Transformational change that sticks requires supermajorities; it rests upon a considered, hard-won, stable “public judgment” by the American people, one that isn’t open to reversal by one election result, that earns the grudging acceptance even of those who lost the argument.
Here’s a small but telling example of such a public judgment actually settling over America:
When I started working in newsrooms in the 1970s, it wasn’t uncommon for the ink-stained wretch at the next desk to fill up an ashtray with butts while pecking out a 12-inch story on his IBM Selectric. Today (or, I should say, in pre-pandemic modern times), you can see those hunched-over clusters of nicotine-addicted workers outside office buildings, glumly tapping their ashes into sidewalk receptacles. By their shivering compliance, they bear witness to the public judgment that smoking in shared spaces indoors is just not OK.
It may seem routine now, but this public judgment on second-hand smoke was a long time coming and bitterly contested. (It was one of the many rehearsals we’ve had for the current masks-violate-my-liberty argument.)
Just imagine, then, how much patient dialogue will be needed to weave, say, a stable public judgment on climate change.
I do grant some of the objections to what I’m saying. No, the hyped-up members of the conspiracy-drunk mob that attacked our Capitol on Jan. 6 are not suddenly going to be tamed by one dollop of sweet reason, one taste of empathetic listening. There are hard cases – perhaps, tragically, tens of millions of them – who will be immune to the steps I’m getting ready to propose here.
Still, plenty of people whose Trump votes have dismayed family and friends are nowhere near so far gone.
Here’s what worries me: If none of us ever offers them a friendly, flesh-and-blood counterbalance to the portrait of all Democrats as amoral, sneering socialists out to destroy America that the Sean Hannitys and Ben Shapiros relentlessly feed them, they might just wander ever deeper into the fever swamps. Your willingness to chat and listen without lecturing might be what saves them from being part of the next mob. Maybe not, but you’ll never know if you never try.
Consider this:
- Since the election, thanks to the Big Lie and Jan. 6, Trump’s approval rating has dropped about 10 percentage points, to 33 percent. Which means that millions of his voters were not, despite what you might assume, all-in on the Big Lie, the authoritarian rants, the racism, the ramifying Q-Anon fantasies. Perhaps they do like low taxes, flag pins, country music and the Republican brand more than you do, but surely you could talk to them. Maybe you could land upon one or two pieces of the Biden agenda you could actually get them to back, if you grasp how those proposals connect to their values and their concerns. That’s how stable public judgments get built.
- Ditto the millions of Republican Never Trumpers and independents whose switch from Trump gave Biden part of his critical edge in swing states. Ignore, disdain and equate them with the rioters and you risk sending them marching back to the GOP side in 2022, costing the Dems their narrow control of Congress (i.e. 2010 redux).
- No, you probably won’t get anyone to flip fully. As I’ll delve into next time, that shouldn’t be your goal. But if you can give some folks just a little pause, a dose of useful skepticism about the most toxic narratives of Fox et al., you’ve created some breathing room for Biden. You’ve created a tiny opening for him to make his case for toning down the toxic rhetoric, for giving him a chance to prove himself.
How to do this? One reason you may think it’s impossible is that modern commercial and social media give you almost no examples of how to do it properly.
Holding difficult conversations, with active listening, is a complex skill. It has to be learned and practiced. I’ve been working at it and teaching it for 25 years now. Yet I still screw up all too often, failing to practice what I preach.If this came naturally to human beings, we wouldn’t be in this mess. It is hard, patient work.
It is also, at this crossroads of history, a patriotic duty.
Next time out in this space, I’ll lay out five key, road-tested principles for how to hold productive conversations on difficult topics with someone of differing opinion. They’ll be buttressed by eight ground rules that serve as guardrails to keep any conversation from hurtling into a ditch.
These tips, I promise, will help you not only to deal with MAGA Uncle George at Thanksgiving, but also improve your interactions online, at work, at book club and over the backyard fence.
See you back here next weekend.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia