Washingtonians work to bridge the political divide with loved ones
As election night and the holidays approach, experts discuss how political differences can cause conflict and how to have productive talks instead.
News Story by Jake Ellison | CascadePBS.org
No one expects the 2024 elections to end with political peace and tranquility in the nation, in our cities and towns or in many of our families. And yet many will keep trying for common ground, sharing personal experiences, detailing scientific or faith-based insights, presenting information, questioning to understand political views alien to them, all to keep their relationships in spite of it all.
If we are to heal our divides, we need not change each other’s minds, which is very unlikely, as a geneticist with a focus on politics told us. Instead, we should try to understand each other’s “lived reality,” as Seattleite Victoria E.H. Johnson put it.
Johnson, 36, grew up in Spokane, spent college years in the Midwest and now lives in Seattle. Johnson, who is married, describes themselves as a “bisexual and gender-fluid” Christian and former Republican. Johnson says any pronoun will work, but we agreed to use the gender-neutral “they” in this story.
Johnson currently manages the home shared with their husband and is an aspiring writer with a strong desire to lean into meaningful arguments. In college, Johnson campaigned for John McCain and Sarah Palin in the 2008 presidential campaign, primarily because of Palin.
“I was more excited about her back in 2008. So she was my main driving force for why I was campaigning — while in college — at almost full-time capacity,” Johnson said.
Finding a north star to guide conversations
But since then, Johnson explained, they no longer feel “welcome in that party.” That shift for Johnson – who came out to friends and then family between 2012 and 2014 – meant that they went from “being the conservative having cross conversations with the liberal” to a “liberal — not crazy, really far-left liberal — but I’m the liberal now having cross conversations with conservatives.”
Breaking through the vitriol and getting to an understanding that one person’s life and views, their “lived reality,” do not invalidate another’s is Johnson’s “north star.” As part of that effort, Johnson joined an organization that helps people learn to talk through their differences called 3 Practices.
The toughest conversations Johnson has are with their mother.
There is no “agree to disagree” between them, according to how they both describe their desire to dig deep into a tough conversation, political or otherwise.
How does one “‘live and let live’ the fact that you want to completely invalidate the fact I’m telling you I’m gender-fluid?” Johnson said about their desire to keep diving into hard conversations, including with their mother, “and that coming out as gender-fluid has been completely … amazing for me to help me get over a whole bunch of lifelong issues.”
Navigating sensitive areas like sexual-orientation
Johnson’s mother, Wanda E.L. Howie, is a retired engineer who has lived in Spokane for 30 years. She tends “to find more agreement with the Republican side of the equation.” Howie and her husband have a “strong Christian background” and says “the love of God permeates” their conversations with Johnson. Their faith, she said, provides “consistency” in their relationships.
“I think the more sensitive areas for Victoria and I are the sexual-orientation stuff. So we’ll touch on it,” Howie said. “The last visit, she came in, we had a conversation for maybe three minutes or five minutes on the subject. It got a little heated … once it got too heated, then it was time to stop.”
In bringing up her tension with Victoria, Howie explained that Johnson “went through some changes. So she hasn’t always had the beliefs that she currently has.” Howie too is reluctant to let a disagreement go unexplored. But when Howie felt Johnson had “backed off of us,” she said she didn’t push to re-engage on the topic.
Nevertheless, there has been follow-up between them.
“We’ve had that [moment of]: What did you mean by this? … Even in the heated conversation we got into, we worked at coming back to try to sort through some of the stuff, like you know, ‘Are you resenting my parenting techniques?’” Howie said. “Some of it was brought up from youth. So we come back to, OK, what are you really saying here?’”
‘Just keep working on the conversation’
Howie echoed Johnson in saying about that conversation, “I won’t say, ’Oh, we’re just going to disagree’ if I’m trying to understand what the heck you’re saying. … We can get a little passionate. It’s OK, but you just keep working the conversation.”
Johnson agreed that it is OK to take a break from a conversation “for the relationship,” but not to simply let it go.
“When she was saying something political or saying something political-adjacent that had to do especially with [sexual] orientation, I would be like, ‘Mom, that hurts my feelings,’” Johnson said. “You’re trying to live through your reality, and you’re trying to share that reality with someone who you love and who professes to love you.”
So the conversations can be fraught and hard to maintain, they agreed.
However, Johnson added, “My mom is the exception that proves the rule about who I can have conversations with, like, maintain a conversation with. … If I were to try and talk with anyone else who was going to stay that hot the whole time, I would stop talking to anyone else.”
The struggle, even outside of the family, is important, Johnson said: “I am wrestling so that we both become stronger.”
Focusing on the narrative behind beliefs and opinions
Aaron Cohn is a clinical lecturer and therapist at Northwestern University’s The Family Institute whose clinical work focuses on couples and individuals, especially those who are neurodiverse and LGBTQ+. In addition to academic studies, Cohn has published essays on bridging the gap between couples and within families when politics and cultural issues cause problems.
Cohn’s essays narrate how subtle differences can lead to relationship breaks when those differences are ignored or allowed to fester through neglect. In one essay, “Time Is (Way) Out of Joint: On Systems, Politics, and Truth,” Cohn tells a story of a couple trying to stay connected to family during COVID lockdowns. They visit one partner’s sister, but the visit turns to disengagement and conflict within the couple’s relationship.
“On a first-order level, certainly Ben showed some emotional intelligence or communication skills deficits that, once addressed, could have helped him predict conflicts and negotiate differences before they became too severe,” Cohn writes of one of the characters in that story.
Cohn said in an interview that finding out that a person’s “ostensibly political comments” could come from that person’s underlying needs, and understanding the story behind those needs, can help build trust between interlocutors.
Bring openness and curiosity to the conversatons
He acknowledges that this sounds easier than it sometimes is, but bringing openness and curiosity to a conversation about what’s personal to the individual about their political beliefs can help.
“Just knowing that importance to them, knowing that value of those positions, maybe even the story of how they arrived at those positions, any way you can kind of thicken the narrative, can really open up possibilities,” Cohn said.
And part of that work has to be on yourself.
“The more easily thrown you are when someone mischaracterizes your thoughts and feelings, the more that sort of freaks you out, the more likely it is that you will get defensive, that you’ll go on the attack,” he said. But when you are in touch with your beliefs and have a deep sense of who you are, you can more easily distinguish what other people think of you and your beliefs from what you know to be true about yourself.
Facts and racism
Jimmy Son, 46, left both the Republican Party and Christianity and became a Democrat when he and his wife moved to Seattle five years ago, where he works in IT. The trigger for Son’s dramatic change in party and personal beliefs came after 2016 and the rise of Trump and the MAGA movement.
“I was having doubts about the Republican Party prior to that,” he said, “but didn’t really want to admit it. And that kind of also ties into, you know, evangelicalism. I was a pretty hardcore evangelical at that time as well. They kind of go hand in hand. … Once 2016 hit, once Trump got elected, discourse, I think, had been kind of nasty for a while, but I thought it started getting especially nasty then.”
Nevertheless, most of Son’s friends are still Republicans. Son holds to the ideal that most people want the same thing politically: “They want the country to do what’s best for its citizens.”
One example Son gave of trying to break a “buddy” out of his media bubble in order to defuse some of the rhetoric driving his friend’s hardline political views involved the 2020 protests in Seattle after George Floyd was murdered.
The Capitol Hill Occupied Protest in 2020 created an “autonomous zone” in the middle of that dense Seattle neighborhood. Protestors clashed with police, leading at one point to the Seattle Police Department abandoning its East Precinct station. The situation was covered by media far and wide, and some of that coverage was more myth than reality.
Sources of information matter, but how you show that matters more
Son’s friend was getting his information from sources like Fox News and Newsmax, Son said.
“They’re telling him that Seattle is just blowing up and everything’s on fire,” he said.
So Son went to the area around Cal Anderson Park to see for himself. He took photos and video to share with his friend to bring some perspective to what the friend was hearing and seeing on television and the internet.
“He and I still disagree on those things, but he took [those images] and said, ‘You know, I appreciate that. You’ve given me pause to think about what I’m seeing on the news.’ I took that as a positive interaction,” Son said.
But he couldn’t find common ground with all of his friends. One told him that Christians were going to be persecuted out of the country and he would be blamed for his “unfounded hatred of Trump.” He had to let that relationship go, at least for the moment.
Then came the amped-up racism.
“I’m Korean. I’m a minority,” Son said. And while he grew up experiencing some racism that was mostly “under the radar” and “insidious,” in 2016, especially on social media, he felt that racism broke out into the open.
“To me, it just seems like any guardrails came off at that point,” he said.
Son persists in his efforts to keep his friends.
“I feel like it really comes down to a mindset, and it’s one that you have to actively reinforce day by day,” he said. “For the people I care about, not to forget that what I value is not what they believe politically. What I value is who they are as a person.”
Staying curious
Modeling a similar approach, Seattleite Eric Fisk said his experience on a community council taught him to “understand where everybody’s coming from, what their underlying issues are, and then you look for common ground.”
Fisk, 53, is a retired software engineer and describes himself as “a good-government liberal” who has voted for independents in primaries. He said he was raised an atheist who had no familiarity with religion.
“But of course most people are religious, so I’ve spent a lot of time just trying to understand why people would believe [in a religion], which I still think is still a fundamentally irrational point of view that I don’t really understand.”
He finds it fascinating, however, to hear a religious person’s story of how they came to believe what they believe. That practice, he said, helps during these contentious times.
“I mean, if you’re talking to someone and you feel like they’re coming from a separate planet, then that’s very helpful for today’s political discussions,” he said.
Humor not the best method anymore
However, one tactic Fisk has found that no longer works is humor. He said he has lost friends over his joking around. He is quick to point out that the jokes he has tried to use to lighten the mood are “thought-provoking humor” and not attacks on people or lifestyles.
“I’m not a both-sides-er as a rule,” he said. “But you definitely see it on both sides — just a lack of humor and a lack of tolerance for the other side.”
One of Fisk’s tactics for keeping sane, one he recommends to others, is to monitor your media intake. He said he likes to read Seattle Met magazine precisely because it covers “happy things you can do,” like restaurant reviews and community-building ideas.
“If you visit a news source … and you come away from it feeling more angry at others and less understanding of them, then that’s probably not a good place for you to go visit,” he said.
What’s really driving our political attitudes?
My older brother and I share a father, but we were raised in two different states in two different homes. I lived with our father and my mother. He lived with his mom, our father’s first wife. We occasionally spent summers together on the small farm my mother and our dad owned, but there were often six other kids around. We were a raucous, blended family of his, hers and theirs. For a couple of years, my brother and I worked construction together.
Then we left our father’s construction company to go to separate universities and didn’t see each other much over the next nearly 30 years. He became an engineer working and living in Billings, Montana, and I studied philosophy and writing working mostly in Seattle.
A couple of summers ago, he invited me to go fishing on a river with him for a week. We got along great and took two long river trips over the next couple years, and on those trips we recognized that we had nearly identical political alignment and attitudes.
Penn State professor Pete Hatami said it’s likely genetics played a role in our similarity. After all, we share genes from our father and lived with his choices, even when apart.
Do genetics determine political behavior?
Hatami has published widely on “psychiatric genetics,” a complex discipline exploring the genetic roots of political and other behaviors and attitudes. While my brother and I have common views with different backgrounds, Hatami said he is interested in “understanding why people differ even when faced with the same exact experiences, the same environmental pressures, same social economic class in the same family.”
First, though, Hatami points out in conversation and in his published works, there is no single gene or collection of genes that will prescribe whom you will vote for. Genes and environment are a complex interactive system that altogether motivates one’s ability to decide moment by moment what you’ll do, who you’ll trust and what tribe you will feel comfortable belonging to.
In one of his review articles published in the Annual Review of Political Science, he and a colleague wrote: “We argue that although attitudes constitute some function of social forces, they also represent neurological systems and biological processes, which, once instantiated, take on a life of their own and update the cognitive, emotive, psychological and neurobiological processes humans use to select into environments, and perceive, view and evaluate their social world.”
He explained in an interview that while there’s a piece of us we’re born with, those genes are expressed or not within one’s environment because of the environment, especially during childhood.
In a more open environment, one’s genetically influenced attitudes can arise early and you become your own genetically influenced person more freely.
But even in very constrained environments, like having domineering parents or strict social rules and customs in the society you’re raised in, “Once those kids leave home, they start to self-select into their friends, environment, experiences, [economic] classes and everything that they’re going to do anyway.”
Focusing on similarities best option to communicate across differences
The lesson he suggests we take from this research for communicating across political divides is that one cannot change another person’s attitudes.
“You can’t even ask them or try to find some of them to agree with you. That’s just not productive,” he said. “The data show that trying to change somebody’s politics is like trying to change their religion. It’s like trying to change their personality. Once you go down that road, nothing good comes out of it.”
Instead, he said, we should try to focus on the things that we do share, that affect our day-to-day lives.
Currently a freelance journalist, Jake Ellison was recently a science writer for the University of Washington. He has reported and written for The Boston Globe, New York Times, NPR, Hearst Magazines and other publications. For 25 years, he was an editor and reporter at newspapers in the Pacific Northwest, including 10 years at the once great Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He can be reached on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jake-ellison-293825b/
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