Learning to Disagree Well
"Fighting over facts is very unlikely to convince anyone."
In his weekly column "How to Build a Happy Life," Arthur Brooks tackles probably the most challenging question before us today: how do you love people who love conspiracy theories? While Brooks makes several excellent points that we will get to, I suggest starting at the end of Brooks' column because it is a necessary reminder for everyone: don't ruin something you love by focusing on what you hate.
Brooks is talking about not ruining relationships with people you love by focusing on the conspiracy theory they buy into that you hate. That is good advice in and of itself. No one wants to continue in a relationship with someone constantly bringing up their shortcomings, no matter how dire they are. It can make you question if the person critiquing you genuinely loves you or loves to hate you. Especially since conspiracy theories tend to provide those who believe them with gains when it comes to feeling as if they understand their lives and offering new communities of belonging. Focusing on the one thing you hate about your parent, sibling, aunt, or best friend slowly pushes them away.
However, this idea works for more than just conspiracy theories. Brooks talks about sitting around the table over Thanksgiving, and instead of antagonizing Aunt Marge over her QAnon adjacent rants, focus on being with your family. Aunt Marge has not always believed in denying elections, and it is a disservice to your relationship with her not to bring up the good times and things you still hold in common. This strategy can also work for our politics at large.
You and your co-worker may disagree on abortion policy, but maybe you both care about your children's education and want to work to improve that. Good! Work on what you hold in common. It is a disservice to the city, state, and country you call home to only focus on the issues that are wedges between you and your neighbor. And the focus on those wedge issues will only divide and silo us even more than we already are. Brooks calls this step focusing on what you have in common.
His other piece of advice is to resist the urge to debunk. I'd phrase it another way, resist the urge to win the argument. Whether it is conspiracy theories or which candidate you believe is best in the next election, winning a fight does nothing to win people who oppose you to your side. It may even harden their desire to see you lose. Because no one likes to be a loser, no one wants to admit they are wrong. Politics is about how we relate to one another and work toward a common goal, so politics has to provide a safe space for all people to feel comfortable being wrong until they can see what is right. Besides, your influence over someone is gone the minute they assume you are an enemy, which you have proven yourself to be, if you cannot resist the urge to browbeat them into submission.
Before we get too far into the weeds here, be aware that none of this is easy. There may be some issues you have to take a hard stance on and leave little room for disagreement, but it's only some issues. It is only some positions on some issues. And if Aunt Marge's belief in a conspiracy makes her unsafe to be around, you can't focus on what you hold in common. But we have become so quick to focus on what we hate and the impulse to be right that we now must ask: what is my goal? What do I hope to gain? If your goal is posturing and winning the day on Twitter, Truth Social, or Facebook, then, by all means, keep focusing on hate and being right. But if you desire to care for people genuinely, now is the time to focus on shared values and deny ourselves the satisfaction of winning the moment. It is a hard path, but it is the only one that moves us forward.
3 More Things:
1) With the midterms over, Axios looks at the MAGA Caucus: the 80 candidates who questioned the 2020 election results and won election to Congress.
2) If you want to understand how Arizona went from backing Biden in 2020 to pushing out almost all non-MAGA-aligned GOP candidates in the midterms, look no further than Charlie Kirk, Tyler Bowyers, and Turning Point USA. The Washington Post traces how Bowyers, in particular, worked in Arizona to push out all GOP candidates who did not hold to TPUSA's purity test of denying the 2020 elections.
3) Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead, sociology professors who wrote Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, are back with another piece. This time the duo is writing for the Dallas Morning News about how Christian Nationalism is becoming a brand identity. For a quick takeaway, this stat will do: "Roughly 25% of American adults (representing more than 50 million people) said the label described them either 'very well' (11%) or somewhat well (14%). Among Republicans, that number rose to 45%, with more than 20% saying it described them 'very well.'" However, the whole picture Perry and Whitehead paint leaves room for ambiguity as they note that what White Americans and Black Americans call Christian Nationalism differs. And they are not yet sure that Christian Nationalism is growing as a whole in America.