My favorite comment of the week was when someone said the following to me expressing his frustration with talking to conservatives:
The question I always ask people at this point is, “Why do you keep doing it then?”
People don’t tend to like this question. I’ve heard all kinds of different justifications and this is usually follow by a frustration rant about how the other side is impossible and won’t listen. It’s always something about the “other side.”
The best answer I’ve personally found to this question is that liberals tend to come from academic backgrounds. We tend to believe in what’s called the Enlightenment narrative. We tend to believe that truth convinces people. So we must keep pushing “truth.” And when it doesn’t work, we tend to take this for a sign of stupidity.
After all, it can’t possibly be us. When we call people stupid, they should just realize how stupid they are and agree with us, dammit!
Anyway, the piece of advice I tend to give to folks like my friend above is, “If you know it doesn’t work, stop arguing with them and focus your energies on something more productive.” Find people who share your interests. Raise up allies. Phone folks in Congress. Contribute to a worthy cause. Get out and do something positive.
We often like to think that we’re not animals, but we’re animals.
Chimpanzee in cage at Suncoast Primate Sanctuary.
Emotions drive us and emotions tend to be more powerful than logic. This is the reason that the two tactics we discussed earlier—logic, and/or fighting with people (by calling them names or otherwise)—don’t work. In fact, both of these often come off as attacks and only feed the instinctual emotion in the person who you’re fighting with, making them want to fight you more.
This is why giving up the above tactics is actually a smart move. It’s the first thing I always recommend to people. Especially if they’ve hit the point where, like my friend above, they’re saying, “These things don’t work.”
The problem is that it is hard to even give up these tactics. Why? Because of our instincts and emotions, of course. When we feel fear, we want to fight back head-to-head. There’s also a great deal of cultural pressure. We’re so often told that the right thing to do is to “stand up” to these racist conservatives. I’ve frequently had people tell me, “You can’t be nice to these people.”
Once again, this isn’t about being nice. This is about fighting. It’s about fighting with tactics that are more powerful and work at an emotional level.
1. Desensitization
There’s a great test you can take that predicts how conservative you are based on one emotion only: Disgust.
At birth, we don’t see differences in conservatives and liberals when it comes to disgust. Yet we see differences later in life. This means that disgust and what we’re disgusted by is learned behavior.
From an evolutionary point of view, it is often associated with that which is strange. Strangeness triggers our fight or flight instincts and has allowed us to survive. The idea behind desensitization is to simply make the strange familiar.
In the simplest terms possible, here’s a good way to approach this. You want to meet people and get to know them and find things in common with them. You want them to see you as normal. Then, all you have to do is find a way to let them know you’re liberal.
This way you let them know you’re liberal shouldn’t be to start an argument. Remember, this doesn’t work. The goal here is to merely to get people to see you as a person, someone just like them, and then to reveal that you’re a liberal (without getting into a fight).
The way I often do this is to simply tell them at a point when they’ve somehow brought up politics. I’ll say, “I noticed you brought up ___________. Just to let you know, I’m a liberal. I’m not trying to pick a fight. We seem to have a lot in common. I just wanted you to know.”
This is tremendously powerful. They are coming in contact with “the other” without having to run or fight. This is a sign of “friend.”
If you’re gay, or a person of color, or a feminist, or an atheist, or any of the “others” that are often associated with being a liberal, if you can do this it’s very powerful. As an atheist, I’ve done this frequently with Christians. Especially ones who I find share the same values as me (which are many).
But I’ve also found that it’s a powerful tactic as a white man. Often other white men are curious why I’m a liberal and if they ask, it’s a good conversation.
When approaching conservatives, I like to think of them as wounded animals. Most of them have been wound up by right-wing pundits to hate liberals and everything they stand for. These are people who are carrying around guns 24/7 because they’re so scared. If you can find ways to let them come to you or to meet them in none threatening situations, it tends to be much more powerful.
This is tough, however, because right-wing pundits train conservatives to attack first and then blame the “other” for any retaliation. So you may have to weather a few attacks.
My advice is to keep calm and find something that you like about them that has nothing to do with politics. Find a common interest like music or sports.
Then, all you have to do is at an appropriate time, let them know you’re a liberal. And remember, the goal of desensitization is to make the strange familiar. We know the tactic they’re using against us is hate. Desensitization allows us to bring down the hatred levels. When someone wants to fight you less, this is a win.
2. Establishing trust
How much easier is it to ask people you know at work for help?
The reason for this is that with people you know you’ve typically established a trusted relationship and you can cut through all the BS and simply ask them. If you don’t have a trusted relationship with someone, it may take much longer. If you don’t know the person, they may not want to work with you and/or they may worry that you have some kind of hidden agenda. Or they simply may not see you as a priority.
One of the challenges I face with people at work is that, when I’m designing training, I often have to work with subject matter experts. People who are experts in their field.
People who are experts in their field are often terrible at training others. Why? Because they want to simply dump information on people with the expectation that they will absorb it. Only this isn’t how people learn.
So my challenge is getting experts to trust that I know how to help people learn. To do this, there are a number of tactics I’ll use to gain trust. I’ll talk about other things we’ve done that have been successful. I’ll talk about the science of learning. I’ll show them something cool to gain their interest. And I’ll let them be the experts that they want to be.
Establishing this trust is the key to the success of the project. If we’re both comfortable with our roles and understand the goal, we can work together. On a recent project, it worked so well that we were able to accomplish almost all of the work through email and quick chat messages. And we were able to incorporate some branding elements into the training that we often don’t because we were able to have good conversations about how one of their goals was matching the brand for their product.
The point is that once someone trusts you a little, you can often build on this relationship. So how do you establish trust?
The first thing is to be honest with people. Don’t try to message them into something. One of the best ways I’ve found to do this is to talk about what I believe. Literally, think about starting your sentences with the phrase “I believe …”
Talking about what you believe puts the choice and freedom in the hands of the other person. It says, in effect, I trust you. I’m going to be honest about what I believe and let’s let the chips fall where they may. One of the things I found that people said they didn’t like about Hillary Clinton during the past election was that they didn’t feel a connection. They didn’t feel she was being honest. They felt that her campaign was trying to manipulate them by releasing dirt on Donald Trump.
Now forget for a second that the Trump campaign was doing the same thing. Many many people I know said they felt like Trump was more honest by at least admitting he was a corrupt narcissist. And I know, I know. But forget logic. What they were saying is that somewhere they didn’t feel there was a core where she was being straight with them. They didn’t know who she was. They felt that what she was saying was incongruous with what she believed. They didn’t see a reason illustrating why she believed what she believed.
Here is a great example of Al Franken talking about why he believes what he believes.
When you know your beliefs and can talk about them honestly, it ups the level of conversation from talking about policy details (which are easy to disagree on) to talking about values and beliefs (where we tend to believe many of the same thing).
If you can let people know that you believe the same things they do, discussions about how to get there are often easier.
Now once again, trust doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily going to “win” an argument. This isn’t the goal of either of these two tactics. The goal is to 1) fight fear with the familiar, 2) reduce the opposition’s willingness to fight, and 3) to start building connections that may pay off in the future.
Original copy of the Keep Calm And Carry On poster.
To be continued
While the first two tactics are advanced in-person tactics, there are other tactics that are much more effective in mass media. I’ll discuss these in a future post.
If you do nothing else, stop engaging in tactics that don’t work. You’re much better off ignoring those you have no chance of winning over and spending your time and energy working with people who believe similar things.
However, I know that most of us tend to engage with conservatives whether we want to or not. The above are a couple of tactics that I’ve found tend to work much better. As always, keep calm, and remember … You. Are Never. Not powerful.
David Akadjian is the author of The Little Book of Revolution: A Distributive Strategy for Democracy (also available as an ebook).
