How to Not Fight With Your Family About Politics
7 min read
My family includes a farmer and a fiber artist in rural Kentucky, who rarely miss a Sunday service at their local Baptist church; a retired Jewish banker on the Upper West Side of Manhattan; a theater director in Florida; a contractor in Louisville; a lawyer in Boston; and a gay Republican.
Talking about politics at our family gatherings can be like smoking a cigarette at a gas station—there’s a good chance it will make the whole place explode. What’s always impressed me about our big, mixed-up family is not just that we survive Christmas dinner, but also that the family includes several couples who disagree politically with the people they live with every day: their own spouses. They haven’t voted for the same candidate, much less for the same party, in years.
For a long time, those differences were mostly an annoyance that flared around elections, but over the past few years they’ve become far more stressful for those couples to navigate. Especially now, when the country is so divided and angry, when we have pulled so far into our own corners that it feels like the seams holding us together are finally about to snap. Yet all those couples are still together. I wondered how they did it.
That question turned into a novel in part about a Democrat and his husband, a Republican who’s running for office. The book is not about politics or campaigns; it’s about marriage and ambition and what happens when who we are in the world doesn’t match how we see ourselves. But in order to write it, I needed to do some research. I could have watched hundreds of hours of Fox News and MSNBC and talked with dozens of strangers in the grocery store. Instead, I decided to talk with the people in my family—about guns, abortion, immigration, and climate change—whose politics I found baffling.
These are the conversations most of us spend the holidays desperately trying to avoid. I wasn’t particularly excited about having them either. But I figured it would at least be efficient, and I hoped that maybe I’d learn something.
I’ve been a reporter at The New York Times for 15 years, so I have spent many hours of my life asking personal questions about sensitive issues. When I’m working on a story, my job is to figure out what the facts are and what they mean, and then I present the information so readers can decide for themselves. I’ve stopped countless people on the street or in parking lots over the years to ask about politicians or schools, how much they pay in rent, and what they think about ice-skating when it’s 78 degrees in February.
The people I interview don’t generally ask me what I think about climate change, or whom I’m voting for, and if they did, I wouldn’t be able to tell them. My role as a reporter is to dig up information, not to convince anybody. (I can’t say what I think about those issues here, either; Times guidelines require that reporters keep their political views to themselves.) I’ve had hundreds of these conversations over the years, and I can’t think of a single interview that got combative, even when I personally disagreed with every word.
So I decided to approach my family like a reporter. I wasn’t looking to have a back-and-forth; I was looking for information. I wanted to know what they thought and why.
I started with my brother. He lives in Tampa, and sometimes we talk on the phone while he walks around the neighborhood with his dog, a Schnauzer-ish rescue who had a difficult puppyhood and sometimes wears a weighted vest when she gets anxious.
We’ve always gotten along, but it had been a few years since we talked about politics in any real way. The last time had been at my parents’ dining-room table, where my mother tried desperately to change the subject while my brother and I shouted over our Chinese takeout. I don’t remember what we were arguing about, but I remember what that anger felt like, as though an animal was trying to claw its way out of my chest. I wanted to reach across the table and shake him. I could stay perfectly calm talking with strangers about their views; not everyone is going to agree with me, and that’s fine. But how could my own brother believe these things?
When I called my brother to explain that I was working on a book and wanted to talk with him about politics, I told him I wasn’t interested in a debate: This was research, and I just needed to understand.
“Okay,” he said. I pictured him walking under a palm tree with his little gray dog. “Shoot.”
I began with some basics. If you were talking to a 5-year-old, I asked him, how would you explain what it means to be progressive? How would you explain being conservative to that same kid?
I didn’t agree with his answers, but that didn’t matter. Some of my characters would. I asked him to keep going.
Tell me about immigration, I said. What do you think is fair for kids who were brought here illegally when they were young?
What do you think about affirmative action?
What should be done about climate change?
What about abortion?
As he explained his views, I could feel myself getting to know my characters better. I could see their faces more clearly in my mind. And it was a good excuse to talk with my brother. We both have kids and jobs and marriages to attend to, and we don’t keep in touch as much as I wish we did. But suddenly we were calling more often, and I was enjoying it. Cautiously, I took another step. I would talk to my in-laws.
On paper, my father-in-law and I could not be more different. I’m a gay, Jewish New Yorker, and he’s a pickup-driving farmer who lives in rural Kentucky. But we both love to read and we like to kid around, and over the 15 years since I met my wife, her father and I have become close. There have always been topics, however, we’ve had a hard time discussing. I remember one conversation years ago, when we spent nearly an hour late at night taking turns making “just one last point” about the accessibility of guns around the country. He was mystified by my perspective, and it took every drop of my willpower not to shout at him in his own house. My wife lasted only a few minutes before she got up from the table and left the room.
His politics aren’t predictable, though. He does not, for example, own a gun. Instead, he likes to say that he keeps giant aerosol cans of wasp spray around the house in case of an intruder. And because there are wasps in the barn.
A few months into writing my novel, my wife and I took our kids to Kentucky for a spring visit. As we sat in rocking chairs around the woodstove, I talked to my father-in-law about electric cars and renewable energy. I used the same approach I did with my brother. I listened. It was research. We didn’t worry about who was right. And the conversation was … perfectly pleasant! Really, it was a great success. It gave me more material for my book, and no one said anything they came to regret.
So I tried two more members of the family. Sitting around a backyard bonfire in Louisville one evening, I talked with one of my sisters and her husband about how they vote. (Later, I would call this husband to ask about golf and what he would do if he found out his wife cheated on him with a woman.)
On another visit to Kentucky, I stood with my mother-in-law in her kitchen, as a cluster of white and brown sheep milled around in the pasture out back. I asked her how it felt to be married to someone who voted differently than she did.
She sighed, shook her head, and said she didn’t understand it. “But he’s such a kind person,” she said.
When I tell people about my family, or about my novel, one thing I hear a lot is: If my spouse voted differently than I did, I’d get a divorce.
Maybe you would. But maybe you wouldn’t. Not all of these couples started out so far apart. But slowly, over time, their views shifted, like a shadow tilting in the afternoon sun, until there was almost no overlap remaining. But they continue to share the day-to-day stuff of their actual lives—kids, mortgages, jobs. They take care of each other. And if those things work, if you’re good to each other, would you really blow it all up?
None of my family members was so persuaded by our conversations that they switched their party affiliation. But the more of these discussions we had, the easier they became. And for everyone involved, it got harder to dismiss the people on the other side, whose views we often see in caricature. My book is finished, but the way my family and I learned to talk with each other has stuck. We try to remember that, even when we despise each other’s leaders, we are all just people doing our best.
