How to talk (or not talk) politics at family holidays

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3:55Okay. This is Search Engine and PJVote. I have a theory. It's definitely not bulletproof, but let me just try it out on you anyway. If you really wanted to know how things were going in America year to year, you could try just bugging the turkeys. Like, you'd go to the Butterball Factory the week before Thanksgiving, you'd stick a bunch of recording devices up the turkey's butts before they got shipped out. And then you would just measure the average annual decibel levels in American homes. I don't have to explain Thanksgiving to you, but I will anyway. Thanksgiving is the one time a year most people get crammed in a room with their extended families.

4:28Not just siblings and parents, who can be challenging in their own ways. Uncles, aunts, in-laws. People you have to love, but might not always like. People you have genuine differences with and can't abandon or cut off. There are no presents to distract you. Everybody's fried from travel. It's often right around elections. And people are drunk. Thanksgiving in my lifetime, I feel like I've watched it get harder. After Trump was first elected, it was the place I could most feel internet polarization invade real life. There was this idea that I remember started kicking around after 2016, which is that all good liberals should go home over the holidays and go nuclear on their macro-relatives.

5:09Like, it was a moral imperative. I think that moment has passed, but Thanksgiving has stayed hot. The one or two days every year where we remember how far apart we all are. Where someone repeats something they remember reading on Blue Sky, to someone who mainly half-watches Fox News, where everything devolves into a bunch of articles people barely remember, and statistics that feel pretty made up. I am a Thanksgiving pacifist, a noncombatant, been to a lot of holidays with a lot of families, with a lot of views, and have mostly avoided the landmines. But I think we're in a moment both where everybody wants the country to get better.

5:44Everybody wants to figure out how to talk through our differences. And I believe if we're going to fix the country even a little bit, it might happen in late November. So in honor of the holiday, I wanted to talk to a person who is often trying to have conversations with people he disagrees with politically, often with great success, occasionally in a way that makes everybody yell at him online. Ezra Klein, welcome back to Search Engine. PJ, good to see you, man. Okay, so to start, I was hoping you could just give me, like, a speedy montage of your family Thanksgivings from teenagerdom to now.

6:14Like, in your time on Earth, in your family, have you experienced emotional climate change? No, I love Thanksgiving. Really? Yeah, I find this whole discourse bizarre. You don't have tense family Thanksgiving? No. Never? I don't think so. Well, once the fire alarm went off, freaking everybody out, leading to like a chaotic trying to figure out if there was a fire situation. And then another time, like smoke began pouring out of the oven. But I feel like we have more humorous Thanksgiving mishaps than we do political meltdowns. And that isn't because I've not had growing political polarization in my own family.

6:56I have. And, you know, there's a MAGA dimension to it. And I am very political myself. It has never really occurred to me, despite being near a lot of internet content, telling me this is what Thanksgiving is for, that you should use the precious time you have home with your family to try to persuade them of your political views. And nobody in your family, like, three hours into Thanksgiving starts baiting somebody else with something. Oh, no, people definitely get baited. I think this whole discourse is very telling because what I think you're seeing is that most of the time, particularly for highly educated, highly mobile, probably liberal-leaning people, they are in chosen community.

7:52Chosen community. They're hanging out with people they agree with on purpose. If they have moved to a place, if they have moved or stayed in a place where they find their surroundings relatively politically congenial. They maybe are around friends or around coworkers in an industry that now leans very much towards them. And so over time, we ended up in much less politically mixed communities than we once had. And that means we are not naturally around as much political difference. So then you get Thanksgiving, which is a time when we have not chosen the people we're around. It is a time when we are in a place that might include difference.

8:34And that difference is non-elective. and I think what you see with the rise of all of this, how to debate with your family at Thanksgiving, is maybe a signal that we have gotten worse at living in an ideologically diverse and vast country. Yeah, and it's funny, like, I really am, one of the things that I struggle with as a person is that, like, where you're, you have traits you notice in yourself and you can't tell if they are flaws or qualities. Like, I will often say that I'm very portable. Like, I can go to different places with different values and just, like, hang. But part of the reason I can hang is I just don't argue with people.

9:19Like, I think I get exposed to more American opinions than a lot of people I know because my ability to just not smile and nod, but ask questions or make jokes and not really persuade or convince is, I mean, ability. Just, like, my proclivity for that. And it's funny. I want to talk about both. I feel like in the first Trump term and in the second Trump term, there's a different idea about political differences, particularly among, like, the center to the left. But, like, term one, it was very much like, we must annihilate these people with reason and logic. And, like, everyone has to, like, John Oliver-style destroy everybody else.

9:56And I remember feeling like, as somebody who wants to be a good citizen or wants the approval of people on the internet, even if they're not actually paying attention, that moment gave me a real stomachache. And I remember like genuinely having more fights with my family members and having fights that I think they were confused by. Like they were like, why are you yelling at me? I think the point you make about term one and term two is sharp. And I think in term one, there was, I don't think the idea was you needed to annihilate your family members. I think that the idea was that this was an aberration.

10:32Trumpism, the wrenching of the Republican Party into this much more cruel and ethno-nationalist form was an aberration, a sort of unholy freak event in which a reality television star with a long history as a public face in America was able to use the coin of attention and convert it into currency. in the political realm to take over the Republican Party and then win in an unusual election decided by James Comey. Yes. And maybe if you just beat it, it just goes away. Yes. And then next time, it's Marco Rubio or someone normal, and we can go back to the much more comfortable form of political division we had in 2012.

11:24And I think in Trump, too, I will speak for myself, I have moved beyond that you cannot beat this in the sense of making it disappear you should actually understand it as having always been here which I think many of us did understand that but thought it was weaker at other points right maybe it could be put back into its locked back in the basement and right now you're going to have to for a period live with it but I would maybe go further in my own politics and say I have come to the view that part of beating it is going to be understanding how to live with it. What does that mean? Part of beating it is going to be understanding how to live with it.

12:06We are perfectly good at talking. We are not very good at listening. And so my view, if you want to treat Thanksgiving as some sort of political testing ground, as opposed to a holiday with a meal where you get to see your family, political testing, normal person, it's a great moment to try to test the other and in some ways i think more important set of political skills which is how do you listen and absorb views you disagree with almost the weakest position in politics is to be arguing views you have no sympathy for that you can't even conceptually or empathically spin up a version that compels you in any way because when you can't do that, when you can't cross that empathic gap at all, that gap of intellectual empathy, then you're probably not going to be able to make an effective argument to somebody who holds any dimension of those views.

13:04Because the thing people can track before they can track whether or not they agree with your wonderful, beautifully constructed argument about immigration, before people are going to track that, they're going to track, do you fundamentally seem to respect them? Yeah. And if they feel you don't, and they feel that your response to their views is you idiot, you racist, you bigot, you dummy, you authoritarian, you fascist, if what you have is a political project here, and you're trying in any way to build a bridge on which you can walk over to them and then get them to walk back with you, they're going to first have to feel that you're listening to them and hearing them on some level.

13:43But so the thing you're talking about, it's like, I feel like what you're saying comes before the level of compromise or not compromise. It's just like, literally, can you listen well enough to show people that you respect them, to show people that, well, you might have different preferences for how the world would be, you can fundamentally understand their values and you can understand their values as coming from someplace other than they are bad. I also think, to be honest, this is one thing I've learned, not from Thanksgiving specifically, but from intrafamily political arguments. There are people in my family who disagree with me profoundly on politics.

14:23And even so, I am maybe the person they trust most in the world. They love me. They think I'm a brilliant political pundit. I happen to be the member of the family who became a professional political communicator. They read everything I do. They listen. And I cannot convince them. So what does it look like? Like, what does it look like if you have, like, a family member where you have this bridge of love and respect and the fact that you have vast political differences doesn't create, like, horrible fights all the time? Do you explicitly talk about the things you disagree about? Yeah. What does it look like?

15:00I'm not saying nobody ever gets annoyed. I actually find it much easier to, like, talk about politics with Ben Shapiro. in some ways, and with them, because I'm really not trying to persuade Ben Shapiro of anything. I don't go into a podcast with him and think, on the other side of this, if I make my arguments well enough, Shapiro's voting for the Democrats. Like, I just have no illusions about that. My entire interest in that show is to understand him better, to hear the way it looks to him. With my family member on some level, I actually do want to persuade them. And one of the best things I've ever done is give up on that.

15:37Why? Because it's not my job. I mean, it's your job to persuade politically. It's not your job to persuade politically. That is not the nature of a familial relationship. And it is not the level on which people's politics operates. People's politics is, for most human beings, right? It's about their values. It's intuitions. It is what people like them think. It is a media they consume. It is a feeling this country is not what it once was for them. And it is so much more valuable for me to understand their perspective and to be able to feel it inside of me and make some intellectual concession to it, some emotional concession to it, to believe it as real and valid and willing to lead a person I find to be moral and wonderful into a politics I find to be more complicated.

16:35The idea that what I'd be doing is, you know, at all costs trying to convert them, that's not what a real relationship is. One thing that I think is worth saying is that it's hard to realize how much most voters, because their ideologies are more mixed and all over the place, are constantly voting for people who they mostly are cynical about. and recognize they don't agree with on lots of things. So there are a lot of voters who have very hardline restriction issues on immigration, but say, want legal cannabis. Or there are a lot of voters who want economic populism, Medicare for all, but are very Christian and have very traditional views on social issues.

17:26And it's just so people all over the place, it's actually unusual to agree so heavily with one side or the other. And so most people are making compromises all the time. And part of the way they make them is this fundamental feeling of, do these people like me? Do I like them? A lot of people don't tune in on the policy that much anyway. So those of us who feel like, how can you ever vote for somebody you disagree with on things, you know, most Americans' experience of politics is endlessly voting for people they don't like. And they're doing it. They're figuring it out. Yeah. What I don't understand is, if you have an idea about which direction the country should go in, just as a citizen, not as a professional political persuader.

18:16Like, for somebody who's like, I genuinely feel like this country's in a moment of a liberal crisis. And let's say that half their family members are like, we're enjoying the liberal crisis. We like more of it. Obviously, like one day a year, you're not going to sit down with a bunch of printed out articles or a book or strongly worded statements and change their minds. But if what you're saying is that these have to start as conversations, they have to start as trying to understand other people, where do they go from there? Like if somebody was like, no, no, no, legitimately, there's someone I'm close to who I think that our values are the same or our values are close enough, but their preferences are misinformed, malformed, wrong.

18:59What does it look like? I think this is really hard. Let me be honest about this. And I don't have an answer that is some plan for how to save the country at Thanksgiving. But I think the first work to do is to get better at politics yourself. And that means trying to figure out how to cultivate maybe skills you don't have. And I guess my thesis on myself and on many people I know, and on a lot of people who are in this kind of argument and debate, is actually we're perfectly good at arguing with other people. There was an Onion article once. It was just, it was like one of these headlines. It just said, smattering of half-remembered facts from the Ezra Klein show fails to change family members' entire worldview.

19:43And it's like, yeah, that's fair. That is fair. If what you're saying is, what can I do? And any one of us in this country of 300 million plus people, it's not that much. Is, you know, you can yourself get better at politics. You can ask questions. You can try to understand how somebody who in many other ways you love and have commonality with could end up so far from you. It could end up so incomprehensible. to you. The project of being able to hold how they got there in a place of not agreement, but where you can look at it and understand it. I think that is worthwhile work if what you're trying to do is do political work, which of course, by the way, is on some level, obviously, when we talk about immigration now, there is a widespread understanding in the Democratic Party, at least, that, oh, it turns out you cannot abandon the idea that you're going to have a secure orderly border.

20:41But you had that whole thing around 2020 of most of the Democratic politicians saying we should decriminalize illegal border crossing. And Biden didn't say we should do that, but kind of allowed an unfathomable mess around the asylum system at the border. And that ended up, for the people who, you know, don't feel comfortable with immigration, they just completely lost faith in the Democratic Party, like completely lost faith. And they embraced the other thing, which is masked men ripping parents away from their children, like doing raids on preschools. You don't want that to happen, right? You don't – if you care about immigrants, you don't want that to happen.

21:22So you need to start reweaving something that has some of their views. Not the – like maybe we need mass deportations view, but we need a secure orderly border. Let's start there. My version of this that I remember was like during, I don't know if it was like first Trump term or Biden, but like I have a family member. Sometimes we're at Thanksgiving together. They're conservative. They like Trump. And I was doing this exercise, which was a slightly strange exercise that I do sometimes where they're all Facebook posters. And I'll just like sit and read their Facebook wall and I'll read everything they post.

21:56Like I'll just like read it like a book. And I'll challenge myself where I'm like, find the thing you agree with here. Because a lot of times I'll read things that to me feel wrongheaded or make me mad. I'll just be like, read until you can find something that you can just see clearly. And so I was reading through this relatives thing. And they're in the South. And they're very much like the borders are unsecure, the borders are unsecure. And there was this post where they were talking about how in the place where they lived, there was a lot of just like people literally, it wasn't asylum claims, it was people actually just like crossing.

22:30And people there were finding corpses. Like they were finding dead bodies in their backyard and people died. And this wasn't like a made up thing. There's like photos, not like super gruesome ones. And the person wasn't saying, I hate non-Americans. They weren't saying, I hate immigrants. They were saying like, this is bad. I don't like this. And I was like, yeah, that is bad. I would not argue for a system where people are dying in your backyard. And it was confusing for me because it was a time where I found myself listening in a digital way. It didn't give me ammunition for an argument to have.

23:07Weirdly, it just made me—it just made things feel complicated. I mean, a lot of these things are complicated. And there is this question of what problems your media diet helps you see and which problems you completely miss. Yeah. But I get, like, I think what I still feel confused by is like, like, I understand that like, the idea, the idea that like, the brief encounters we have with our family members is the time to shift them is like a sort of, like a relic of a dumber era. But in an era where, like, many more people are trying to, on a micro level, do politics, and most people are practicing these weird online anti-politics, I think my question about Thanksgiving is really, like, how do you be a citizen in a democracy in a way that is even useful in a small way?

24:02I think that my first advice on this is that if you want to use either Thanksgiving Day itself or the kind of unchosen interaction we're using Thanksgiving here to represent. Yes. As a venue for politics, which I'm not saying you have to do. I just want to keep, you could just be normal and watch the game and, you know, eat food. But what if you want to be abnormal? But if you want to do this, then probably doing politics for you, the most effective way you can do it is not talking but listening. And so I just think our conception of what doing politics, the thing you are saying here, means is just wrong.

24:50To use a more maybe podcast-appropriate example here, two men podcasting in a room. if you go to the gym and you are always pushing and always doing bench and always doing exercises that express your force outward you will become very imbalanced and you will get injured and you will not be a good weightlifter or athlete or whatever you're trying to do you have to push and pull that's how you weightlift you work out both sides of that and we've been doing too much pushing and not enough pulling too much talking and not enough listening and the point listening is not to just sit there passively.

25:25You are trying to expand your sense of the positions you can hold respectfully within yourself so you can have a more complex view of this country, of the other people in it, and live with more ease around them. And I'm not saying that your Thanksgiving will ladder up to some political change that will lead to the end of illiberalism in this country. It probably won't. It's just going to be Thanksgiving. But always politics in this country is the aggregation of individual acts that on their own functionally don't matter. No one person's vote typically decides anything. But laddered up to the mass actually do matter.

26:03Politics, elections, all of it. It's a phenomenon emergent from all of these millions of individual acts. And I think like my thing I'm trying to do here is just get people to have a different definition in their head of what it means to do politics. It does not just mean trying to persuade people you're right. It means trying to be good at listening to people about why they think they are right. Not so you can deliver an amazing counterpunch, but because then you just need to sit with that for a while. But I understand why sometimes people get freaked out. we were like, I know this is really scary.

26:43I know you're worried about literally like the fall of the Republic. You got to go home and listen. Like it feels like a scary time demands stridency instead of just trying to hear. I didn't tell anybody that they have to do that. Right, I guess that's me. In response, right? That's you. But I'm saying that if what you want to do is politics, then you have to do politics. Yeah. And you have to ask yourself, what is the political project you're trying to achieve here? And if a political project you're trying to achieve is that you believe the MAGA side has become really dangerous and you want to win power back, then yeah.

27:18I mean, if you think you can win over people who don't like you and disagree with you with stridency, I mean, then give it a shot. But I think we tried.