We are a divided country. The people – or, at any rate, the voters – seem to be about evenly divided between liberal and conservative. (I’m using the word liberal in its modern meaning, not in its classic libertarian-leaning sense.) Our elections are almost evenly divided between blue/red, left/right, Democrat/Republican, with only a single-digit percentage separating the two camps.
Using the now-accepted color coding, it’s easy to visualize our population as distributed, politically, as shown below. (And when I say politically, I’m speaking broadly of the range of things – economic, social, legal, cultural, etc. – that we lump together when we discuss politics.)
Illustration: Two peoples, divided
If you’ve ever debated a political issue with a hard-left opponent, you’ve likely experienced the frustration that comes from vastly incompatible worldviews colliding with no apparent effect beyond the elevation of stress, vocal volume, and blood pressure. Looking again at that blue/red division, the futility of trying to change enough minds to make a meaningful difference is discouraging.
But this is a misleading picture. Despite the closeness of our elections, as individuals we actually differ quite a lot in the intensity of our political views. Die-hard liberals and die-hard conservatives make up, thankfully, a minority of the population; most people lean one way or the other, but are both less obsessed with, and less committed to, politics than the extremists on either end of the spectrum.
(This relative disinterest on the part of so many is probably why we’re all able to get along as well as we do – and also why those of us who are strongly interested in politics are so often bores and irritants to everyone else.)
So rather than being solidly blue or solidly red, most people are a paler shade of one or the other, or even too faded – disinterested in politics – to identify as one or the other. As a people, and even a voters, we look more like this:
Illustration: Many peoples, blended together
The people closer to the middle, the ones who aren’t so deeply entrenched in their political views as to be unreachable, are not generally the people with whom you’re likely to argue. They’re the ones who read the social media posts but say nothing, the silent listeners at the party, the ones who don’t want to cause stress, and so keep their own counsel.
Both common sense and my own experience tells me that those people can be reached by political argument – though usually as observers of it, and not parties to it. So the cause is not hopeless: there is a point to political argument, as long as you remain mindful of the people you’re really trying to reach.
But it gets better! One of the great truths about human nature is that most of our traits are approximately distributed in what’s called a normal distribution – better known as the bell curve. There aren’t as many hard-left and hard-right people as there are somewhere-in-the-middle people. That’s good for us, because it means that there are even more people who can be reached than the illustration above suggests.
This is more what we really look like, politically.
Illustration: Opportunity
If you’re like me, you’re somewhere way over on the right, in the thin red portion of the curve. Most of the people with whom you discuss politics and ideas are probably over there as well. When you get into an argument, particularly a heated one, it’s probably with someone way over in the thin blue area on the left. And, most likely, when the argument is over, you’re still red and they’re still blue.
What can be productive is making your case in front of an audience – in front of those people in the fat middle of the curve. Argue for the audience, for all those persuadable people in the middle. Talk to the person deep in the blue, engage that person’s argument, but never forget that your real goal is to sway the audience.
Most people don’t really care very much about politics, except perhaps during election season – if then. Most people are busy living their lives, making ends meet, providing for their families, dealing with their quotidian joys and crises. They don’t have the time or the inclination to obsess about politics, and they don’t invest a lot of effort in learning more than they pick up from the daily news and hear from their friends.
Most people aren’t prepared to debate and don’t want to participate in a debate. Those people often don’t hold views they’ve developed themselves and in which they’re heavily invested, but have simply adopted what they’ve heard as their default positions. If you can let them hear something else, some of them will quietly change their minds.
People enjoy drama, but they usually want it on television, not in their living rooms. They’re more persuaded by a calm, thoughtful argument than by fireworks and vulgarity. And Americans feel a reflexive sympathy for the underdog, and are repelled by brow-beating and heavy-handedness. Respecting your adversary and showing just a little bit of humility will go a long way with most audiences.
We don’t have to convert people, per se. What we have to do is shift the curve a bit to the right, to change the blue to a paler blue, the pale blue to white, and a few of the white to a hint of red. We have the advantage that most of the people in the middle rarely hear a conservative message – and even more rarely hear it delivered with any kind of graciousness. All many of them know of conservatism is the caricature they see in the popular culture. That makes them easy targets for thoughtful persuasion, whether they’re lurking silently on social media or standing at the periphery of a real-world discussion.
Don’t think that talk is useless. Don’t assume that everyone has heard the conservative case. And don’t be frustrated when you fail to convince your hard-left brother-in-law that the minimum wage destroys entry-level jobs. Just make your case thoughtfully and graciously, so that those around you can hear the sense in what you’re saying. And don’t waste time arguing with your brother-in-law if there’s no one around to benefit from it.