How to Talk Politics With Family Without a Fight | Rachel Wahl

Interview with Rachel Wahl

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Rachel Wahl on Curiosity, Persuasion and Dialogue Across Divides

Bruce Anthony: [00:00:01] What happens when the goal of a conversation isn’t to win, but to understand why somebody believes what they believe? We gonna get into it. Let’s get it.

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Bruce Anthony: [00:00:21] Welcome. First of all, welcome. This is Unsolicited Perspectives. I am your host, Bruce Anthony, here to lead the conversation in important events and topics that are shaping today’s society. Join the conversation and follow us wherever you get your audio podcasts. Subscribe to our YouTube channel for our video podcast, YouTube exclusive content, and our YouTube membership.

[00:00:41] Rate, review, like, comment, share. Share with your friends, share with your family. Hell, even share with your enemies. On today’s episode

[00:00:51] I’m sitting down with Rachel Wahl, the author of Keeping Our Enemies Closer: Political Dialogue in Polarized Democracies. We’re gonna be exploring political disagreement, the difference between persuasion and curiosity, and what happens when people who are deeply distrusting of each other choose to have a conversation anyway.

[00:01:09] But that’s enough of the intro. Let’s get to the show I was thinking the other day about how strange it is that we expect complete strangers to understand us, but we struggle to understand the people sitting across from us from, let’s say, the Thanksgiving room table. Not agree with them, understand them. There’s a difference. And with the election behind us, that Thanksgiving is coming up fast. Some of y’all are relieved, some of y’all are not, and either way, a lot of us have already started bracing for it because everybody has that one person, and y’all know what I’m talking about. That one person, that uncle who can never let things go, that coworker you quietly stop eating lunch with sometime around October.

[00:02:00] Because somewhere along the way, a lot of us started treating every disagreement like a final exam. Somebody brings up a headline or a candidate, and before they’ve even finished a sentence, we’ve already started building up our response. I know y’all have done it. Hell, I’ve done it, and nobody walks away from that meal or that

Being Right and Being Correct Are Not the Same, Meet Rachel Wahl

Bruce Anthony: [00:02:22] conversation saying, “You know what?

[00:02:25] You changed my whole worldview.” ‘Cause that’s just not how people work. I’ve talked on this show before about how being right and being correct aren’t the same thing. Being right is usually about defending your position. Being correct means following the evidence, even when it takes you somewhere you didn’t expect.

[00:02:45] My sister and I disagree almost every week on the show, and what keeps us coming back is that neither of us is in it to win. But staying open like that is hard when you’ve already decided who the other person is. It gets even harder when that person has real power over your life. Arguing with your sister, or in my case, arguing with my sister, about a headline is one thing.

[00:03:08] Sitting across from someone who carries a badge is something else. In that room, what does an honest conversation even look like? I’ve been turning that over all week, and I don’t have a clean answer. My guest, Rachel Wahl, has spent years watching people try. She’s an associate professor at the University of Virginia. She directs the Good Life Political Project at UVA’s Karsh Institute of Democracy, and she’s the author of “Keeping Our Enemies Closer: Political Dialogue in Polarized Democracies.”

[00:03:39] From college campuses to forums between police and communities they serve, she studies what actually happens when people with fundamentally different worldviews sit down and actually talk, including some of the hardest conversations that are imaginable. So today, we’re going to get into curiosity, conflict, persuasion, and whether we’re asking the wrong questions when we sit down with people who disagree with us.

[00:04:05] So without further ado, Rachel Wahl

[00:04:09] As I said at the top, I’m here with Rachel

A Childhood Question About Good Guys and Bad Guys Started It All

Bruce Anthony: [00:04:12] Wahl, author of “Keeping Our Enemies Closer: Political Dialogue in Polarized Democracies.” We’re gonna be talking whether we can still talk to people we disagree with, and what that talk can and can’t fix. So Rachel, I am really excited to have you on the show because we just had an election, and boy, is there some polarization that’s going on in this country, and actually even outside of the country talking about this country, and I feel like this conversation is important and needed, so I’m really, really thankful to have you on the show today

Rachel Wahl: [00:04:46] I’m so happy to be here. Thank you

Bruce Anthony: [00:04:48] Of course.

[00:04:49] And I start every interview with the same question. Let’s go back. Let’s go to the beginning. Tell me what it was like growing up. Tell me what it was like growing up in your household and, and how did you get started on the path that you are on right now?

Rachel Wahl: [00:05:05] Sure. So my parents were both in medicine, so they had a lot of conversations about medical questions they were interested in. And they did talk about politics, but they mostly agreed, and there wasn’t a lot of fighting about politics. So it wasn’t a long family history of trying to navigate between those fights.

[00:05:28] But what I was always very interested in was how somebody could believe something or feel something that felt alien to me. And so I remember watching movies and trying to ask my parents, “So who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy?” And my parents saying like, “Neither. It’s more complicated. Just watch the movie.”

[00:05:53] You know? And I was like, “But, but…” So I was, I, I was always curious about how people could live lives that just felt unimaginable to me, and curious about what life felt like and looked like from other people’s perspectives. And I think that’s w- the, the childhood root of being interested in conversation across divides.

[00:06:15] Like, can we actually understand anything through talking? What can it do? What can’t it do? Do you really just have to live it?

Bruce Anthony: [00:06:23] Mm-hmm. Um, so with that being the basis, the, the young foundation, what was your interactions like as you’re growing up and you’re in middle school and you’re in high school? And I, I’m going to assume that, uh, if you weren’t in a diverse area, you would search out diverse personalities because that curiosity would say What is it— Why are we not in the same group?

[00:06:58] Why are you there and I here? Is there some commonality? Are there some differences? W-w-would, would you say that that’s kind of how you were growing up

Rachel Wahl: [00:07:10] Yeah. So I

From New York to Tucson, and Anthropology Discovered on a Stage

Rachel Wahl: [00:07:11] grew up first in New York. Uh, my family is all from New York. And then when I was a kid, I moved to Tucson, Arizona, which is just north of the border with Mexico. So in that sense, it was very diverse. My high school was very diverse ethnically. I really don’t know how diverse it was politically.

[00:07:32] We weren’t really thinking of ourselves in political terms in high school back, back in the ’90s so much. We weren’t so sophisticated. But, um, I was an actor before I was an academic, and I was always doing theater in high school. And I remember theater as a chance where I got to try to try on what it might feel like to be other people.

[00:07:57] And I remember one time I got to be in a play, uh, called Uncommon Women and Others, in which I got to play an anthropologist, and it was the first time I’d ever heard of anthropology. And I got to pretend I was someone who got to study what the world— how the world appeared to people living in a different place.

[00:08:18] And I was like, “Oh, that’s what I want to do.”

Bruce Anthony: [00:08:22] So you figured it out early. You figured out, what is this, high school?

Rachel Wahl: [00:08:26] This was high school, yeah, because I got to play an anthropologist on stage.

Bruce Anthony: [00:08:30] So when you enter into college, you automatically knew, okay, this is the direction that I wanna go

Rachel Wahl: [00:08:36] Well, I was still an acting major in college, so I wasn’t really that sure. I still, I still was doing theater for a long time. It wasn’t until I got to graduate school that I started focusing more directly on other ways, off-stage ways, to figure out what it might, what the, how the world might seem to other people

Bruce Anthony: [00:08:55] Well, going from New York to Arizona’s gotta be a shock because, uh, diverse, yes, diverse differently. And in entering in theater opens your world up to another diverse crowd. I learned this in high school when I did one play that I didn’t wanna do that my English teacher forced me to do. And it opens you up to a different, uh, group of people that might not normally, for me, wasn’t in my circle.

[00:09:23] Kinda similar to when I worked in the restaurant industry for years, that you have all these different people from all these different walks of life, and you’re kinda immersed in it, and you get to learn from people. So you’re in acting, you’re an acting major in college. When was it that you said to yourself, “I like being around and learning about different people.

[00:09:45] W- w- what was that thing that I did in, in high school with anthropology? Let me, let me see what this is about.” W- was there a moment

Rachel Wahl: [00:09:54] It was—

Teaching Abroad Revealed the Values Nonprofits Quietly Displace

Rachel Wahl: [00:09:55] I ended up teaching English in other countries. So I lived in China for a while teaching English, really just because a friend of mine was doing it, and I went with her initially. And then I did the same thing in Peru, and I started to become really interested in the… I was working for these nonprofits who were in various ways trying to spread a sense of what’s valuable in life to the populations they were working with.

[00:10:24] Partly it was teaching English, but it wasn’t just teaching English, right? They were really trying to, uh, convince families to prioritize their children’s education, and these were often families for whom it was very difficult to afford an education, even a public education, because you have to buy uniforms and books and so forth for a public education in many countries.

[00:10:44] And so these nonprofits were really trying to persuade people to have a particular order of priorities for their children. And working for these organizations, I became really fascinated by what people already value. People who were the targets of NGOs’ efforts to convince them to prioritize a certain kind of life for their kids.

[00:11:10] I became really curious about what values were tacitly being replaced, what mattered to these families already. You know, I, I assumed that nobody is walking into a moral vacuum when they try to persuade somebody of something. And so I— the more I traveled and worked for different nonprofits around the world, the more I became curious about what were the values that people already held that were potentially being displaced by this work, and how did the people who were the targets of these efforts experience NGOs’ efforts to influence them?

[00:11:46] And so I decided I wanted to go to graduate school to try to understand that better. And my thinking at the time was, “Then I’ll go back and work for these international NGOs with a better understanding.” But then I fell in love with getting to read and write and think and talk to people, and I stayed in academia

Bruce Anthony: [00:12:03] Mm-hmm. When did your focus become about disagreements and trying to understand the complexities of disagreements and talking to and past each other?

From Police Research in India to the Forums of Charlottesville, VA

Rachel Wahl: [00:12:22] So my first book was looking at how police and army officers who were serving in law enforcement roles in India responded to human rights activism and education. So I was trying to understand… My, my larger question was, how do people who are targets of international activism perceive it and respond to it?

[00:12:48] And then I was looking in particular at these law enforcement officers. And I could see how there was— there were unintended consequences to human rights activism, the way in which it can be very alienating to the people whom it’s trying to shape, who it’s trying to change, in this case, law enforcement.

[00:13:09] And I could also see how human rights educators, in a sense, had to be a little bit too conciliatory because they were in a student-teacher relationship, and so weren’t really able to challenge the law enforcement officers directly. And so I came off of that book wondering, is there a way in which communities might be able to influence public officials in ways that are less necessarily antagonistic and alienating, but still provide the space for contestation, for challenge.

[00:13:37] And around that time, I moved to Charlottesville, and there were public forums that the city was beginning to hold between police and communities. So I started attending these public forums and observing them, and I became curious about these forums as a place in which there was room for contestation, rooms for communities to directly challenge law enforcement, but they weren’t set up to be as antagonistic because it was face-to-face communication rather than very distant naming and shaming.

[00:14:06] So I started studying these conversations, um, observing them, and then conducting interviews with the people who participated in the weeks afterward, and then again years later. And then, um, in twenty seventeen in Charlottesville, the Unite the Right rally happened, um, which, in which James Field murdered the activist Heather Heyer, and many, many people were injured.

[00:14:31] Um, and I Among many other feelings about that experience, noticed that in the weeks and the months and the years following August 12th, the debate locally in Charlottesville was not really between liberals and neo-Nazis, because for the most part, the neo-Nazis left after that rally. They had come in for the rally and left.

[00:14:57] The debate locally was for the most part between people who fundamentally agree with each other, probably even vote the same way, but disagreed on whether and how we should talk to people we disagree with, whether and how we should communicate with people we disagree with. So for example, there were a lot of fights about how people should behave at city council meetings, whether there should be rules of civility or whether protest was an appropriate form of communication at city council meetings.

[00:15:26] So that made me interested in a broader way beyond just efforts to influence public officials at what talk can and can’t do.

After Unite the Right: Civility Rules Versus Protest as a Voice

Bruce Anthony: [00:15:36] Ooh, okay. So you opened up some really interesting things. I’m curious, um, after the Unite the Right, and I’m right up the road, and like I said, um, I’ve, I’ve been to UVA several times, friends graduated from UVA. I grew up in not that far away from there in Lynchburg, Virginia, so that area is very familiar to me.

[00:16:03] Those conversations about how you talk about that, what was some of the ways in which people wanted to speak about it, whether it be very vocal, whether it be try to understand, and what were some of the ways where people were like, “You know what? This is making me uncomfortable. I don’t wanna talk about this at all”?

Rachel Wahl: [00:16:28] Yeah, that’s a great question. So what was really at stake was, is communication that prioritizes a certain kind of respect, curiosity, civility, the only way that people should be allowed to communicate in official spaces? Or is it important for protest, righteous anger to play a role in how we communicate in those public official spaces?

[00:17:06] And what I saw was a deep division between people who felt that rules of civility are actually oppressive and actually silence because they pretend that it’s a level playing field, pretend that everybody has an equal right to speak, but really only people who have markers of status in the way they speak are going to be listened to and respected.

[00:17:35] And therefore, it’s important to speak in rhetorical, dramatic, galvanizing communication such that protest can do in order to make things clear, in order to make the moral lines clear, the moral stakes clear, um, versus those who think that protest is divisive, only alienates people, and the only way in which all voices can actually be heard equally is if we follow these rules of order in which everybody gets a chance to speak, everybody’s listened to, and so forth.

[00:18:17] So I was really curiou- I mean, I really did the research for this book not because I thought dialogue’s the answer and dialogue’s what we should do. I still don’t think that dialogue is the answer, um, to every situation by any means. But I really wrote this book because I was curious. I thought it was a vexing problem whether when and how people should be asked to have a certain kind of conversation with each other, and what good, if any, it could do and for whom, is really the curiosity that drove me to write the book, to do the research for the book.

Bruce Anthony: [00:18:52] I, I’m curious, did you find, and I’m not even speaking about racial lines, uh, did you find something as far as age gaps, whereas maybe younger people were a little bit more boisterous protesting and older people w- wanted to have things a little bit more calm and civil, or vice versa?

Rachel Wahl: [00:19:19] You know, I, i- in a way, yes, but not necessarily. You know, I, when I think back to the police forums, you know, the, the two, you know, the, the two men who were the most committed to a certain form of, you know, righteous anger as a means of political communication were, were, you know, I would say our grandparents’ generation.

[00:19:49] You know, they, they came, they were veterans of the civil rights sc- uh, uh, civil rights struggle. One was African American, one was white, but really committed to a long history of a certain kind of struggle. And there were others of their generation who felt very differently, who I would interview after the police forum, and they would say, “I’m worried that these two guys are gonna create tension that is gonna hurt us more than it helps us, and I’m worried that this is going to make the situation more volatile.”

[00:20:26] Um, and, and that was also true with people in the younger generation. So it may be that on a macro scale, that’s true. But in this in-depth study where I was really looking at individuals, there were younger and older people who were on, either wanted to have these kinds of conversations or who really wanted to be directly challenging people.

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Bruce Anthony: [00:20:59] I wanna get back later to the police forums and the work that you did in your first book, because that’s really, really interesting to me, those conversations. But, but coming after this is airing a week after we just had the elections, and, and what you’re talking about is how to speak to one another when there are disagreements, and the holidays are coming up.

[00:21:26] Thanksgiving is, is right around the corner. What’s the number one reason conversations across the divide go off the rails?

Rachel Wahl: [00:21:36] Boy, number one reason, I would say it’s because people really care. You know, I remember when I was younger, there was a lot of concern about apathy, right? That everyone was worried that young people were too apathetic, that people were checked out. No one’s really worried about that anymore , you know?

[00:21:59] Probably in a couple

We Care So Much That We Assume the Other Side Must Be Bad People

Rachel Wahl: [00:22:00] of decades we’ll swing back to apathy, and everyone’s going to be, you know, writing think pieces and op-eds about how to get people to be less apathetic. But now we’re in the opposite situation, where people tend to be pretty engaged and pretty impassioned about public problems, which has, like everything, its good side and its bad side in the sense that people care.

[00:22:23] And so when you’re sitting down at a Thanksgiving table with people who also care but who see a problem very, very differently, and your heart is in it, it’s going to be hard to not assume that the person who seems to be standing in the way of what you see as the moral outcome is not a bad person. It appears that way.

[00:22:47] I think we’re, we’ve evolved to see people who do bad things as bad people, and it’s hard to reframe that

Bruce Anthony: [00:22:56] It— I used to tell my father, and he’s gonna get a kick out of this, I used to tell my father all the time, “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.” It- c- could that be an, an issue as well where there’s a divide where people are so passionate, so emotional, especially when you’re emotional, that you say things and it can just come…

[00:23:16] The, the message behind it is strong and it’s good, but it’s the way it comes out that just rubs people the wrong way

Rachel Wahl: [00:23:24] Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that it’s also, if we’re talking specifically about a Thanksgiving dinner, it’s also, also the fact that these political divides are layered on top of familial relationships that are emotional in themselves, you know? And so I think when you combine our political identities, which I think are really our moral identities, what we think makes us a good person, with family, you know, emotional family dynamics, it’s, it’s no wonder that that can be emotionally explosive and that we might, as you say, speak in a manner that provokes somebody

Bruce Anthony: [00:24:05] So you said something

Is Gen Z Apathetic? Judging the Young, From the 2000 Election to Now

Bruce Anthony: [00:24:06] earlier about apathetic, and, and I’m not doing a strong pushback, but a slight pushback because I think we’re— we both grew up in the ’90s, and, uh, my first presidential election that I could vote in was 2000, which was a crazy election. I’m at the University of Maryland, and a person who became my friend later in life went to, uh, George Washington University.

[00:24:31] We were on different sides of the political spectrum, but we often talk about what we were doing during that 2000 election, and we were both outside of the White House protesting on different sides during that exact same time. And I, and I hear what a lot of people are saying about Gen Z and eventually Gen Alpha.

[00:24:51] Um, that’s the reason why I bring this up, because the knock on them is that everybody says that they’re apathetic. And, and, and I— and you’re saying that they said that same thing about us, and I was in it, and I was like, “No, that was the furthest thing from the truth.” Like, I was engaged. I don’t know if everybody was engaged, but I know definitely around 2000, that’s when I was in college, and we had these discussions, especially in our government class and in our communication speech class, about what was going on.

[00:25:24] Do you think that generations just don’t see younger generations in the proper setting or, or, or judging how they handle their, I don’t know, emotions? I guess that’s what it would be, ‘cause it could come off as they’re really nonchalant. But no, they are passionate, just differently than the previous generation.

[00:25:50] And then because of that, when you have these holiday meals and they’re across different generations, that they’re speaking from their own emotional place and point and just the way they grew up emotionally and the way they express it is differently. You think that’s a possibility as well?

Rachel Wahl: [00:26:13] I think so. I do think that older people always have a tendency to judge harshly the younger generation. Maybe it’s a little bit of jealousy of youth. But, um, I agree. I don’t, I don’t think that we were actually apathetic. I also remember caring a lot. Maybe a better way to put it is that we are so obviously in the midst of history right now, and we were then, too.

[00:26:40] We always are. But it wasn’t quite as obvious, you know, in, in 2000. Of course, September of 2001 was right around the corner, and that made it very obvious that history was still moving.

Bruce Anthony: [00:26:53] Yes.

Rachel Wahl: [00:26:54] But I think there was a, a space in which it didn’t seem obvious that there was this constant churn that we were implicated in, whereas now the churn is so obvious, so overt, if that makes

Bruce Anthony: [00:27:09] No, that makes perfect sense. Yeah, we are really aware now, and even the younger generation are very aware now that we’re living in history. I, I hear the younger generation, um, that are in college and high school saying, “Wow, the history books is really gonna be crazy when we, when we read back at this time.”

[00:27:29] Why

Feeling Obligated to Talk Politics Turns People Into Means to an End

Bruce Anthony: [00:27:30] do people who feel obligated to talk about politics have worse conversations? And why does trying to change minds make people dig in even further? ‘Cause this is also going to those conversations that’s gonna be happening in a couple of weeks at the Thanksgiving table

Rachel Wahl: [00:27:47] Yeah, that’s a great question. I think it’s because when we feel obligated to talk about politics, we are using somebody as a means to an end, and nobody likes to feel that they’re being used as a means to an end. So when we feel obligated to talk about politics, usually that means that we feel a responsibility to try to convince somebody to see something differently and do something differently, to change the way they vote, essentially.

[00:28:18] And so we’re trying to manipulate them. We’re trying to change their minds, and people sense that, sense that they are objects of our goal, and that usually generates some defensiveness. When we don’t feel that hooked feeling, like we have to get something done, when we are curious about why a person thinks that they— or even what they actually really think, because we often don’t really know what someone actually thinks.

[00:28:55] Maybe we know how they vote, but we don’t really know why they vote that way, what their actual beliefs are, what their actually views are, how they came to those views, what life experiences persuaded them that this is what’s true about the world or possible about the world or good in the world or bad in the world.

[00:29:11] We often don’t really know. And if we can exhale enough to be curious, people tend to then become curious about themselves. They tend to drop their defenses. They tend to let go of their scripts a little bit that they use to try to persuade you back. And they tend to ask themselves questions. Like when they’re not under attack, they might ask themselves, “Why do I think this?

[00:29:40] When did I start caring about this? Why do I…” Why— And so I think that creates a sense of spaciousness in which actual questions can be posed

Bruce Anthony: [00:29:53] You said something earlier that I was like, “I never thought of it that way,” and it actually makes perfect sense that when people are aligned with a political party, they feel that what that party stands for represents their moral, their moral code. And since they are so opposed to each other that when people see somebody from a different political party, that they’re trying to say, “Well, no, morally, I’m better than you, and then you need to join me morally.”

[00:30:24] How

Politics as Ethics, and Why Persuasion Needs a Shared Identity First

Bruce Anthony: [00:30:25] do, how do we convince people who are going to say, “If I’m not trying to change your mind, why have the conversation at all?”

Rachel Wahl: [00:30:35] Yeah. So first of all, I think that it’s not inaccurate to see our politics as our ethics. Our politics, in many cases, do represent our deepest moral commitments, and that’s not an inaccurate interpretation of our political views. They are, I think, very frequently reflective of our moral commitments. And so I don’t think that’s inaccurate, and I don’t think that that’s illegitimate, right?

[00:31:11] Um, what I think is— And I also don’t think it’s always bad to try to persuade somebody. What I’ve seen in my research, and this isn’t a claim about what’s good or bad, but just what I’ve seen in my research, is that people are most likely to be persuaded when they share a political identity with someone.

[00:31:34] So if you consider yourself a leftist and you’re talking to someone else who considers themselves a leftist, you tend to be pretty open when they have a different take on something. And that’s true for conservatives, true for liberals, true for progressives. If somebody shares a political identity with you but views a specific issue or how to advance a specific goal differently, people tend to be pretty open.

[00:31:59] Persuasion is very, very difficult when someone does not share a political identity because f- for— because we assume they don’t share our moral values, and therefore we assume they don’t share our goals for the country. And so why would we, we be persuaded by someone who doesn’t share our values and goals?

[00:32:21] So I think if we do want to persuade someone, the first thing we need to persuade them of is that we share their moral commitments and their goals, because why else would they listen to us?

Bruce Anthony: [00:32:34] Yeah. So, uh, uh, and I c- completely agree, it’s easier when, uh, people find commonality, uh, to get them to, to listen. So I’m gonna come back to that, but something else that you said. Sorry I’m bouncing around. Something else that you said, we have to have that curiosity to find out why they’re thinking the way they do.

[00:32:59] What does that

Ask About Life Experiences, Not Facts, to Open Up Real Conversation

Bruce Anthony: [00:33:00] curiosity look like in like the first two lines of a conversation that you know might be a little contentious, but you don’t want to— you don’t want it to be contentious?

Rachel Wahl: [00:33:12] Um, I think any question that is communicating curiosity and asks them to talk about their experiences rather than marshal facts that you probably won’t see as legitimate anyway. So for example, um, when— I can see you really care about that issue. When did you first start caring about it? Did you have any personal experiences that made that real for you?

[00:33:41] Or, um, what do you most hope for in our country in regard to that? What scares you the most? You know? So getting— giving them a chance to talk from what is true for them can move us away from, “Well, you’re not reading the right sources of information, so your facts are wrong, so you’re an idiot,” into, “What are the life experiences that will help make sense of how you experience the world, how you view the world?”

[00:34:17] And I didn’t really answer the question you asked a moment ago of why would it still be worthwhile to talk to someone when we don’t persuade them. The reason I think it’s worthwhile is because what can happen, the thing that can happen other than persuasion, is that we might come to see that a person, even though we don’t agree with them, even though we’re still going to vote differently from them, has a coherent, well-intentioned view that I can acknowledge as not evil.

[00:34:52] And maybe I think they’re voting in a way that’s going to be do more harm than good, but I can still see why it would make sense to them given the life that they’ve led, given w- the beliefs that they hold, given the commitments that they have. I can still see why that would make sense to them. What that can do, I think, is make it less likely that we support politicians who stoke violence against the other side, less likely that we support politicians who would effectively disenfranchise the other side, and, um, more likely that we support policies that take others into account, which I think will lead to a, a more egalitarian society.

Bruce Anthony: [00:35:45] Hmm.

Why the Godfather Line Became the Title of Her Book on Our Enemies

Bruce Anthony: [00:35:46] So the title of your book was really interesting to me. I’m a huge, huge fan of The Godfather, and I feel like there are some life lessons, maybe even a little toxic masculinity, but there are some life lessons that can be learned, and Vito Corleone says, “Keep your enemies closer.”

Rachel Wahl: [00:36:08] That’s

Bruce Anthony: [00:36:09] the title of your book.

[00:36:11] What made you come up with that, and why enemies? Because I know where you got the line from. I understand the context a- around it, but the framing of enemies, why?

Rachel Wahl: [00:36:28] So I was partly trying to be a little playful,

[00:36:31] but partly it’s because I was trying to be provocative about who are our enemies. The idea is that we think we know, and sometimes we’re right. I don’t— I’m not saying that no one’s our enemy, everyone means well. You know, I, I think that would be naive. But we don’t always know who our enemies are, and so when we keep the people who we assume are our enemies closer, we might find out that they really are our enemies and we wanna stay away.

Bruce Anthony: [00:37:03] Mm-hmm.

Rachel Wahl: [00:37:04] But we also might find out that they’re not in fact our enemies

Bruce Anthony: [00:37:09] So

A Gay Student, a Conservative Classmate and a Hug She Really Needed

Bruce Anthony: [00:37:10] do you have any instances during your research where people adopted this type of philosophy and then realized, “Oh, you’re not my enemy”?

Rachel Wahl: [00:37:21] Yeah. You know, and it, in the book I go into these cases in a lot of detail, so I’m gonna try to think about how to make it quicker here. But there was, there were a lot… So I have two chapters in the book about where I go in depth into conversations between students whose rights were in jeopardy and people who were voting for the politicians that put their rights in jeopardy

Bruce Anthony: [00:37:51] Mm-hmm.

Rachel Wahl: [00:37:53] And these conversations, it was never a case of, “Oh, we all love each other.

[00:37:56] We’re fine. It was all a big misunderstanding. Now that we’ve talked, we can all be happy.” You know, that’s not what dialogue does. It was always more ambivalent, um, and more complicated. So for example, there was a conversation between, um, an evangelical Christian student and a— and who was a conservative, a political conservative, and a liberal woman who was gay.

[00:38:28] These were both college students at the time. And the conversation was very painful for the woman. She said afterward, “I felt red and shaky. Like, I felt I’d never really talked to someone who could look in my eyes and not want me to be happy.” And yet she said, at the same time, she felt seen. She felt recognized as a human.

Bruce Anthony: [00:39:00] Hmm

Rachel Wahl: [00:39:01] respectful of her, deeply curious about her life. She said at the end of the conversation they hugged, and she said, “I really needed that hug.” So she walked away from this conversation kind of reeling. Like, on one hand, I needed him to see me as a person, and I felt seen. I felt like he saw me as a person.

[00:39:26] And on the other hand, he’s voting in a way that seems just dismissive of who I am. So then I interviewed him. I interviewed him i- initially and then a few years later. And first of all, when I interviewed him years later, he had never stopped thinking about that conversation. Um, and when I interviewed him right afterward, in the weeks afterward, um, I learned that he is also gay, something that he did not share in his conversation with her, and had been engaged in this deep struggle with himself and his faith for many years that he was in the process of trying to work out in a way that felt right to him and that his conversation with her was in many ways a, a struggle with himself.

[00:40:18] And, and so it really showed me the, the ambivalence of these conversations and the complexity of people, you know. Because, you know, my question is really what, what can talk do and what can’t talk do? And in a way, talk has its limits. He wasn’t able to convey this to her in the conversation. In a way, it can convey a lot.

[00:40:42] He was able to tell me in the interview, you know. And so I think What this shows more than anything is that there’s often more complexity, more nuance, more depth to people than we expect, and that even sometimes that then conversation can reveal

Bruce Anthony: [00:41:04] I— That’s amazing. Th-that, that follow-up was amazing ‘cause I was literally getting ready to ask you, like, for those people who are just like, “I don’t care if they see or hear me,” or like, “That doesn’t bother me that they don’t,” uh, how could we convince those people to have, still have those conversations?

[00:41:23] And, and there you go right there, because you never know what a conversation with your, quote-unquote, “enemy” could lead for them and their life and for you and your life as well. You don’t know that you may think that you don’t wanna be seen or heard, but deep down, subconsciously, you might want to. So that, that is really, really dope.

[00:41:44]

Bruce Anthony: [00:41:51] You’ve done all these different type of forums with students and the police. I wanna get into a little bit more with the police, um, about those forums. But w-what do you think is— What was harder, the forums with the students or the forums with the police?

Rachel Wahl: [00:42:10] The forums with the police,

Bruce Anthony: [00:42:11] Okay. Why?

Rachel Wahl: [00:42:12] people just had so much to lose. I mean, students talking to each other have, emotions are running high, and they’re difficult, but nobody has direct authority over anyone else in those conversations. The student— The conversations between police and communities, first of all, felt like picking up in the middle of a 400-year conversation.

[00:42:39] There was hundreds of years of history behind them that almost everyone in the room had on their minds. And so it was, it was like picking up in the middle of centuries,

Why Police Forums Were Harder: 400 Years of History in the Room

Rachel Wahl: [00:42:52] and people had so much riding on them. People didn’t come to that conversation just to understand each other. They really came because they wanted concrete, specific changes, and those are difficult to achieve from conversation.

[00:43:09] And so I think those forums were harder

Bruce Anthony: [00:43:12] In those forums with the police and the community, who walks in with more mistrust?

Rachel Wahl: [00:43:18] You know, it’s so funny because I interviewed a police officer and a community member within 24 hours of each other coincidentally, and coincidentally they both said the same exact thing. So I remember, um, you know, I interviewed one community member, and I asked him, you know, first general question, like, “What do you remember about the forum?

[00:43:39] What, what sticks out to you?” And I remember him saying, you know, “I remember I parked my car, and I got out of my car, and this police officer was walking over, and he looked right through me. It’s like he didn’t even see me. Even though we were there for this forum, it was like he didn’t even acknowledge me as a person.”

[00:44:00] And I thought to myself, “This isn’t gonna go well.” And then I interviewed this police officer, not necessarily the one he had in- you know, interacted with or not interacted with in that moment, but a police officer. And he said, “I walked into the room on that, on that first morning, and I just looked into the room.

[00:44:18] I walked over to the group, and I sat down. I was the only police officer in the group at first, and everyone was talk- no one even looked at me. It was like I wasn’t even a person. It was like knowing that I was a cop made me not a person.” So and it’s like I, I don’t know who had the most mistrust, but I think it was the, the mistrust was pretty— uh, there was a l- enough to go around.

Bruce Anthony: [00:44:44] What does an officer mistrust look like?

Rachel Wahl: [00:44:48] Mm. Like to, uh, someone else or?

Bruce Anthony: [00:44:51] like to w- uh, uh, an officer’s mistrust of somebody in the community

Rachel Wahl: [00:44:56] Oh, yeah. Um, they all hate me and they’re all angry at me, and I don’t wanna be here

Facilitation, Real Goals and Making Those With Authority Feel Heard

Bruce Anthony: [00:45:03] Hmm. So if that’s— If an officer is walking in like that, I’m not gonna put this all on the officer. Also, let’s put it on the community as well. If they’re both walking in like that, how can any real work get done?

Rachel Wahl: [00:45:20] So I think that’s where facilitation comes in. It’s really hard. I think a couple of things need to happen. First of all, I think people’s real goals need to be addressed consistently throughout the process. The real goals people have in these kinds of situations are concrete change, and I think there needs to be a lot of very clear communication about what specific kinds of changes could possibly come out of these meetings, when they could possibly happen, and how people will find out about them so it doesn’t feel like a waste of time.

[00:45:56] Second of all, I think there needs to be a lot of space provided for people to tell their personal stories before we jump into what’s wrong and how do we fix it, so that people can explain, have a— have space to voice their anger and mistrust, and for us to acknowledge that it’s not the only thing we want to do together, that we, we also want to get work done, and that’s why we’re here.

[00:46:23] One thing that I find tricky is that many people would like it to be the case that those in positions of authority listen silently while those who are not in positions of the same level of authority are able to speak, and that feels more ethical. The problem is that those in positions of authority, I find, are less likely to listen when they are not also being listened to.

[00:46:53] So when we get people together, asking people to share their experiences regardless of what hat they wear, regardless of the level of authority they carry, so that even essentially the law enforcement officers feel that they are also being listened to so that they are more likely to listen, I think is helpful

Bruce Anthony: [00:47:19] I think that’s a human thing as well, right? If somebody doesn’t feel like they’re being heard, then of course they’re going to shut down.

Rachel Wahl: [00:47:26] Exactly.

Bruce Anthony: [00:47:27] is

Mutual Mistrust Is Not Equal Mistrust Between Police and Community

Bruce Anthony: [00:47:28] mutual mistrust the same as equal mistrust?

Rachel Wahl: [00:47:32] No, I don’t think we can… You know, we don’t wanna see equal mistrust because, oh my God, these things are so complicated, you know?

Bruce Anthony: [00:47:42] Now what I mean by that is both the, the police officers and the community have a mistrust of each other. It’s a mutual mistrust of each other. But is that mistrust of each other equal?

Rachel Wahl: [00:47:57] Well, it’s interesting because it varies so much by individual, you know? Uh, you know, and, and I think this is the, the result of my work is in-depth ethnographic qualitative. I have, like, many, many, many hours-long conversations with a smaller number of people. So maybe if you were to do a survey of, like, 500 people, you would see on the whole equal degrees of mistrust, right?

[00:48:25] But when you’re interviewing people and you’re, you know, you spend over the course of however many days, like eight hours talking to each person, it varies so much. You know? There were plenty of officers who were intensely mistrustful because they feel hated, and there were officers who said, “I understand why people wearing this uniform are hated.

[00:48:55] I get it, and I don’t take it personally.”

Bruce Anthony: [00:48:58] Ooh. How do some see that and some don’t? Do you think that has anything to do with, uh, background, where they came from?

Rachel Wahl: [00:49:11] I do think it does, and I don’t— I was really curious about that at the time, and I wasn’t able to really figure it out. Like why, how? Um, and I, I don’t know. But I do think it has to do with background, with degree of familiarity, with both with history and with communities, and partially perhaps with personality,

Bruce Anthony: [00:49:40] Hmm.

Rachel Wahl: [00:49:41] capacity to put oneself in another’s shoes.

Bruce Anthony: [00:49:44] Yeah.

Rachel Wahl: [00:49:45] I don’t know. I

[00:49:46] don’t know.

Bruce Anthony: [00:49:47] empathy.

Rachel Wahl: [00:49:48] Empathy, yeah

Bruce Anthony: [00:49:50] Um, you had some forums, we talked a little bit about it, after the Unite the Right. Um, were police involved with those forums as well, or was that just community?

Rachel Wahl: [00:50:05] So those— And just, uh, just to be clear, the forums that I have studied in my… that were in the book, “Keeping Our Enemies Closer,” I didn’t have any part in organizing them or facilitating them. I was just a researcher. I just don’t wanna take credit for the hard work that many other people did to make all those forums happen.

[00:50:25] But, um, so the forums that I studied directly following the Unite the Right rally did not include law enforcement officers as m- well as I can remember. They were, uh, community members talking to each other

Bruce Anthony: [00:50:44] And some

Why Charlottesville Boycotted an Outside Group’s Healing Dialogue

Bruce Anthony: [00:50:45] boycott it, didn’t they? What were some of the reasons why they boycott it?

Rachel Wahl: [00:50:49] So this was a very complicated situation, and it was, as a researcher, a great example of how dialogue can go badly, um, and how it can not always be the right answer for every problem. So this was an organization that was not from Charlottesville. It was not local to Charlottesville. They wanted to come in and have a series of public forums to promote healing and unity in the aftermath of the Unite the Right rally.

[00:51:23] People in the community in Charlottesville were s- traumatized. Many people had been very badly injured and were still recovering from their injuries. Many people had known Heather Heyer, the woman who was murdered, and were in mourning. And even people who weren’t that directly connected to that violence were deeply shaken and said, “We’re not ready to talk.

[00:51:54] And when we are ready to talk, we want this to be a local— a locally organized conversation, not something that is organized by a national organization coming in and doing it.” So when local community organizers were contacted saying, “Would you like to participate?” They said, “No, please don’t do this. Not now.

[00:52:19] We’re not ready.” And this organization did it anyway. And so people boycotted it. There was a lot of really nasty back and forth of, you know, posts online by the organizers of the dialogue and posts online by local community organizers being— You know, it’s just— There’s, there’s no space in which the, the human tendencies to

Bruce Anthony: [00:52:47] Yeah

Rachel Wahl: [00:52:48] don’t creep in.

[00:52:49] But, um… And so, so I interviewed s- for that— In that situation, I, I interviewed the organizers of that dialogue, people who had participated in that dialogue, and I also interviewed many of the community organizers who boycotted the dialogue. And when I interviewed the community organizers, it really wasn’t that they were anti-dialogue.

[00:53:14] It was that they were distrustful of the motives of an outside group that was coming in to do something that they had said they weren’t ready for

Bruce Anthony: [00:53:26] W-

Officers Who Admitted Torture and What Listening Really Taught Her

Bruce Anthony: [00:53:27] the theme of this has been changing minds, and in your first book, you, you talk to some other type of police officers out there in, in India, and they absolutely admitted to torturing people. I’ve got two questions, right? One, what was that like from y- for you personally hearing these stories of torture and seeing how they saw themselves as defending of the innocent, and what did that teach you about changing people’s minds?

Rachel Wahl: [00:54:05] Yeah, that was difficult. I worried a lot that I might be legitimizing their views by not challenging them. You know, in order to get these officers to be honest with me as a researcher, I just had to ask a lot of questions. I knew that as an American who was coming in, who had contacted them through the human rights organization, if I started saying, “You shouldn’t do that,” you know, “Torture is bad,” that they would just shut down and say, “Oh, yeah, okay,” you know, “Thanks, lady.”

[00:54:43] Um, and so I didn’t do that. I just asked them a lot of questions. But I worried that I had— that that was an, a moral failure, but I really did want to understand, and so I prioritized trying to understand. Um, I think what it taught me about persuasion is that so often what we think is right and how we live and what we do is really a tightly interwoven combination of what’s in our interest and what we think is good.

[00:55:19] Because these law enforcement officers, I mean, even those defending something like torture, they, they weren’t amoral people who were just going around living terrible lives and not caring. They actually cared a lot. They want to be people who defend justice. They want to be people who stand up for the underdog.

[00:55:42] They want to be heroes. And so they were really trying to figure out a way to think about their lives and a way to live their lives that integrated what they had to do in order to keep their jobs and who they want to be.

Bruce Anthony: [00:56:02] Mm-hmm. Oh, goodness. Look, this conversation is so important, and I’ve been trying to give everybody a complete view of the overall thing, and that’s, and that’s about having these tough conversations when you’re on the other side. So I kinda wanna go back, ‘cause once again, this is about teaching and learning.

[00:56:26] People are going

What to Say at Thanksgiving: Questions That Invite Self-Reflection

Bruce Anthony: [00:56:27] to be going into Thanksgiving this post-election, and their Aunt Sue or Uncle Ronnie thinks differently than them. What should we actually say when politics comes up at the dinner table, and where does talk end and action start?

Rachel Wahl: [00:56:49] Sure. Okay. So in response to the first question, what should we actually do at the table? The talk part.

Bruce Anthony: [00:56:57] Mm-hmm.

Rachel Wahl: [00:56:59] I think questions that might invite their own self-reflection are going to be the most useful.

Bruce Anthony: [00:57:09] Hmm.

Rachel Wahl: [00:57:10] are unlikely to persuade them that your side is right, but you do stand a chance of getting them to ask themselves questions that they might sit with in the months and years to come.

[00:57:26] So questions like, “Why do you think that? Tell me more about that. Has there been a moment that really brought that home for you? Has there ever been a moment in which you felt less sure about that?” Trying to invite their own curiosity about their own views. So I interviewed people three to four years after they participated in dialogue sessions, and nobody had changed their view because of the conversation.

[00:58:03] Nobody was persuaded because of the conversation. But what did happen is students would say things like, “I remember this person asked me, ‘If you say you believe in this, then why did you vote for that?’ And I’ve been asking myself that question ever since.” So that, I think, is the kind of result you want.

[00:58:24] You want them to start— You want people to start asking themselves questions And to the extent that you can establish that you do actually share moral commitments and goals for the country, that is the extent to which you might be persuasive. Because we are only persuaded by people who we believe share our values and our goals.

[00:58:50] So I think that’s the groundwork that you need to put down if you’re going to persuade someone that the policy that you favor is a better expression of the values they already hold and the goals they already have. You’re not going to change someone’s values or goals. And then what we actually do is, I think, everything.

[00:59:12] I mean, democracy still requires all the, all the things, right? Dialogue is not meant to replace organizing and protests and boycotts and voting and lawsuits and all the things. All the, all the tools of the, of democracy are still necessary. Dialogue does something different than those things. It can’t replace them.

Bruce Anthony: [00:59:35] Do you

Family or Strangers: Which Political Conversations Cut the Deepest?

Bruce Anthony: [00:59:36] think that it’s harder to, to have these difficult conversations with strangers or family?

Rachel Wahl: [00:59:43] Family.

Bruce Anthony: [00:59:44] Family. A- and, and why do you think that’s the case? Because you have this personal or emotional bond? Because I was literally talking to somebody earlier today, and they couldn’t understand why people would stop talking to people that they’ve known all their lives over disagreements.

[01:00:05] And what I said was, sometimes people believe that the morals of the other person, as you’ve been describing, that they believe that their morals are so strong and right and that the others are so strong and wrong, that they just decided that that person doesn’t need to be in their life anymore But I’ve also encountered strangers that I’m just like, I’ll let my family slide on things way quicker than I would with a stranger, and then I’ll cut a stranger off a lot quicker than I would my family because there is that familial bond.

[01:00:47] So I’m just curious why you say it’s definitely family

Rachel Wahl: [01:00:52] So I, I shouldn’t be so quick to say that. I, I think it is true that there can be family relationships that we care about enough to sustain, and therefore we’re willing to listen in a way that we aren’t willing to in a stranger. I think the reason I said that is because when, uh, with a stranger, stakes tend to be lower, and so sometimes it can be easier to do things like listen with curiosity.

[01:01:24] When it’s somebody we love who is trespassing on our deepest moral sense, that can be more painful than if this, you know, random guy is doing it, then we can be like, “Well, I’m at least gonna find out how you came to that.”

Bruce Anthony: [01:01:46] That makes sense, yeah

Rachel Wahl: [01:01:48] but it can also be the, the opposite as you’ve described

Bruce Anthony: [01:01:52] What is your advice for these people who love, and I’m not gonna throw her under the bus, but I have a family member who loves to do this, who loves to get into these type of conversations on social media

Rachel Wahl: [01:02:07] So, you know, it’s interesting. I’m always asked about social media, and I’ve never done research on what happens online, so I don’t have anything brilliant to say about it. But I do, I do think that technology is a tool, and like any tool, it is used for all human purposes, good and bad. I’ve actually seen really interesting discussions on me- message boards and social media posts in which people are really thinking together and disagreeing, and it’s great.

[01:02:42] It’s like a public sphere. And of course, we’ve all seen a million interactions that are the opposite of that. So I think same advice. If you can ask someone a question so that they don’t feel that their dignity is called into question, so that there’s a chance that they might actually ask the question of themselves and respond with some sincerity rather than defensiveness, then you might actually get through

Bruce Anthony: [01:03:13] well, Rachel, I, it has been my honor and privilege to have you on the show. Ladies and gentlemen, Rachel Wahl, author of Keep Our Enemies Closer: Political Dialogue in Polarized Democracies. This was a very great and interesting conversation that I think is gonna help a lot of people who are out there dreading the holidays.

[01:03:34] So thank you so much coming onto the show. I really appreciate it

Rachel Wahl: [01:03:38] Thank you so much

Bruce Anthony: [01:03:40] before we end, I wanna

Closing: Watch the Whole Movie Before You Decide Who Someone Is

Bruce Anthony: [01:03:41] leave you with one last thought. When Rachel was a kid, she would ask her parents who the good guy and who the bad guy was in a movie, and they would tell her, “Neither. It’s more complicated. Just watch the movie.” And I think this is what this conversation was really about.

[01:03:55] Are we willing to watch the whole movie on somebody’s life before we decide who they are? Rachel told us that nobody she followed up with years later had changed their political views because of one of these conversations, but some of them were still wrestling with questions somebody had asked of them years earlier.

[01:04:12] A conversation can matter without producing a result that you ever get to see. That’s worth remembering when you join your family for these upcoming holidays. Some of y’all already know what your uncle’s going to say before he finishes his sentence. But when was the last time you actually asked him why he believes what he believes?

[01:04:34] And if that conversation starts going somewhere it shouldn’t, you are allowed to say, “We’re not doing this today.” If you wanna go deeper, pick up Rachel’s book, Keep Our Enemies Closer: Political Dialogue in Polarized Democracies. It’ll challenge you to think about how much more there is to people than what we sometimes give them credit for.

[01:04:55] But here’s the uncomfortable part people don’t want to talk about. Understanding somebody doesn’t mean tolerating harm. After Unite the Right, some people in Charlottesville wanted dialogue, others wanted protests, and some simply needed to heal. You can’t force somebody into a conversation and then congratulate yourself for bringing people together.

[01:05:16] And Rachel made it clear that dialogue doesn’t replace the rest of democracy. We still have to vote, organize, protest, and hold people accountable. Talking is one tool. It’s not the whole toolbox. You don’t have to change somebody’s mind for a conversation to be worth having. Sometimes I would rather take the time to understand why somebody believes what they believe than rush to decide who they are.

[01:05:45] Ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank you for listening. I want to thank you for watching, and until next time, as always, I’ll holla.

[01:05:55] Woo! That was one hell of a show. Thank you for rocking with us here on Unsolicited Perspectives. If you enjoyed the show, follow, subscribe, like, comment, and share. Catch the video podcast and YouTube exclusives on YouTube, but the real party is on our Patreon and YouTube membership with after-hours uncensored with my sister.

[01:06:13] Hit up unsolicitedperspectives.com for merch, blogs, and donation. Every donation goes to improving our equipment, and I wanna say thank you, thank you, thank you, and I’ll catch you next time. Audi 5,000. Peace.