Do you have friends who don’t share your political views?

[Angrboda]

I don't know that people are going to change their minds if you talk to them but I'm pretty sure of what is not going to happen if you don't talk to them. People think that changing people only counts if the other person makes a sea change. An individual may be more inclined to take their empty candy wrapper and seek out a trash receptacle simply because someone talked to them about the horrible conditions in our cities and the things we can do to make them better. It's not big change, but it is change, and small change adds up. And one assumes that it is the other who should be doing the changing in such discussions. A discussion about politics and government may lead to us changing our views on those subjects. If anything, that kind of change is more valuable than that of the other changing to meet our way of viewing things. It's true that political discussions can be difficult and are known to escalate quickly. When it comes to delicate relationships where there are other priorities which take precedence, sure, avoidance may be one way of managing those aspects of political discussion. But where such things are not operative, it becomes merely a matter of convenience and avoidance merely on account of the unpleasantness that might result as a consequence of doing so. But here's the thing. It is the importance of political views and beliefs which makes them fraught with difficulty. But that means it is also important that we have such discussions so that collectively we can move forward in our politics. The one doesn't come without the other. So while it may be prudent to avoid politics with family or co-workers, I think as a general strategy it is misguided. And seeing that we are on a forum where mechanisms, both implicit and explicit, for handling and managing the inevitable conflicts exists, I think avoiding political discussions because of the potential for conflict alone is silly.

I'll simply tell a couple stories because everybody likes a story. Someone recently related an event to me which I hope I won't be betraying any confidence by retelling. This person was in a shop and she remembered that she had an uber driver who was imminently due. She showed the picture of the uber driver to those she was with, and they reacted with shock and prejudice because the driver was obviously of middle eastern descent. Now, I don't know where the conversation went from there, but it was pointed out that people naturally just assume that you are like them, and so if they are racist, you are naturally gonna assume that everyone else in their sphere is racist too. Now if this person had simply made the other person aware that not everyone was racist like them, that alone would have accomplished something, as it would encourage them to be more limited in their displays of racism and also less likely to simply project their racist values onto others in the future. Who knows, that might prompt one of them to talk about such things with someone close to them leading them to discover that even family doesn't necessarily share their racist views. If we don't talk about these things, none of that is going to happen and people are going to continue to live in ideological bubbles created by their own imagination.

The other story relates to a discussion that I had with alpha male. In a discussion about tariffs, I pointed out that the U.S. had recently passed a massive tax cut which effectively subsidized U.S. businesses and provided an unfair advantage to U.S. corporations in trade. He pointed out that the corporate tax rate in the U.S. had been much higher than that in other countries, so it's possible that rather than providing an unfair advantage to U.S. businesses, it simply leveled the playing field. Now I don't know that he succeeded in completely changing my mind on the matter. Liberals can be just as stubborn as conservatives. But he at least provided me with new ideas that I can use to shape my views of trade and the tax cut in a direction that is both more realistic, as well as likely to result in more consensus on such things with people from across the aisle. So while I wasn't greatly changed, at least in that one small area, change did occur.

One final point which just occurred to me. It may just be this morning or it may be a general trend, but this morning I have spent a good bit of time calling out people for things I am sympathetic with and normally would simply ignore among those who actually share my views on most things. Our discussions with people who view things radically differently than we do may not result in immediate change of their views, but it quite possibly can have a ripple effect, such as my challenging the sloppy arguments and assertions of those whose views I might otherwise be inclined to simply rubber-stamp in the name of group cohesion. This effect is smaller and less obvious, but nonetheless important.