When we walk in grace, recognizing the inherent value in others, we come to understand that we don’t engage in dialogue or participate civically to change other people but rather to better understand them, ourselves, and the ideas we are discussing. It is not possible or desirable to bring everyone to our point of view on every topic. In political conversations, we have to meet people where they are and assume they’ll stay there. Once we’re clear on that fact, we can go about the work of better understanding them and the issues impacting all of us.
It all comes down to personal growth. How can we stretch our capacity for empathy and understanding through our conversations? What can we learn about ourselves and each other? How much better are we for examining and reexamining others’ theories and our own?
Sarah often quotes the television show Sister Wives (trust us; it’s relevant). For those without TLC in their television lineup, Sister Wives follows the polygamous Brown family. The family believes that polygamy is a spiritual practice because, as one of the wives said, confronting jealousy and different priorities rubs their rough edges off. Engaging with each other and facing our own insecurities can do that in all manner of scenarios outside polygamy! In that process, we evolve individually, which helps us evolve collectively.
Transformative conversation—the kind of conversation that can break open Washington’s gridlock and open up a world of political possibility—requires personal humility in the form of genuine curiosity. Seeking out facts, valuing data and expertise, and relentlessly asking questions—all questions: questions about one another’s lives, questions about our perspectives both shared and unique, questions about our philosophies, why-are-we-here kinds of questions—these are pursuits that will help us examine ideas, issues, people, and our own beliefs clearly.
When we take a step back from our stories and assumptions, we can see ourselves and each other more clearly. This takes some brain training! It is easy to hear a casual remark from someone and to build an entire story in our minds about everything that person believes and how it relates to what we believe. Maybe you’ve heard someone say something like, “What really needs to happen is to bring God back into our schools,” and you assumed this person is Republican. Or perhaps you’ve heard someone say, “While I was at the women’s march . . . ,” and you assumed this person is a Democrat. From those assumptions about political parties (which don’t necessarily follow!), we build stories about positions on everything from guns to education to oil. We are so busy layering each other with baggage that we often don’t think about the actual issues we’re discussing.
In this way, we’ve made political tribalism a substitute for curiosity and learning about the issues themselves. A 2013 poll conducted by Hart Research/Public Opinion Strategies for CNBC showed that Americans had stronger opinions about “Obamacare” than the “Affordable Care Act”—the official legislative name of Obamacare.1 Jimmy Kimmel took to the streets, polling people about whether they prefer one or the other before revealing to the bewildered subjects that these two laws are the same.2 We’re forming hardened opinions on subjects without understanding them. It’s not that we are too busy to understand the ins and outs of complex legislation—it’s that we are more curious about our party’s talking points than about the laws or issues. We’re not getting to why someone would oppose the Affordable Care Act. We stopped listening when they derisively described it as Obamacare.
There are countless examples of people rendering opinions about each other and political issues with incomplete information, not bothering to ask questions to truly understand the situation. President Obama negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a complex set of standards on Iranian nuclear proliferation reached after years of negotiations among the United States, other P5+1 members,3 the European Union, and Iran. Most Americans have a deeply entrenched opinion on “the Iran deal” that became a talking point in the 2016 presidential campaign, but few of us can begin to describe the deal and its impacts. More dishearteningly, it seems we don’t care to. We’re just interested in who negotiated it and whether they are on our team or not. This tribalism isn’t a uniquely American phenomenon. After the United Kingdom’s historic Brexit referendum, polls showed that more than a million people who voted to leave the European Union regretted that choice once they fully understood its consequences. The Brexit vote, for those million people, didn’t represent a considered choice after curious examination. Both at home and abroad, we are making decisions with lasting consequences without enough information.
We are not engaging with one another. How much better would the polling have been on these issues if every American engaged someone who disagreed with them on the Iran nuclear deal with curiosity, or if every British citizen engaged someone who disagreed with them on Brexit with curiosity? When we engage with curiosity, we better understand the issue from both perspectives. We better understand our opponents’ concerns. We better understand ourselves.
Instead of getting curious about each other, we take cheap shots. During the summer of 2002, Sarah spent a week in Washington, DC, attending the American Association of University Women’s conference. It was an exciting time spent engaging politically with women from all over the country. While riding the Metro, another young female intern heard Sarah and her friends debating the war on terror. Without so much as learning her name, this woman looked at Sarah after Sarah expressed her opposition to the war on terror and responded sincerely, “Well, that’s because you hate America.” It’s an exchange Sarah has never forgotten because it is so indicative of our instinct to insult instead of understand. Because we fail to fully investigate what’s in front of us, our politics have devolved from a contest of ideas to an arena that is dominated by emotions and reactions.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, patriotism was rebranded by half of the country as unquestioning support of American aggression in the world. Meanwhile, the other half of the country mocked President Bush’s intellect and impugned vice president Dick Cheney’s motivations. We bought one side or the other, leading us to miss the consequences of a massive intelligence failure that led our country into a long, traumatic conflict. We never looked at our reactions with curiosity and a desire to understand why someone could see the post-9/11 world so differently than we did. We just insulted and degraded each other and moved on.
Getting curious allows us to take a moment to listen to what the other person is saying without reacting only to what we are hearing. We saw a great example of this when we discussed a book titled Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters by Erica Komisar, a psychoanalyst. The book is based on neurological research showing that babies rely on their mothers to essentially function as their central nervous systems for the first three years of life. Komisar encourages mothers to spend as much time as possible with their children during that period. A Google search of her book shows what a Wall Street Journal editorial by James Taranto described well: People on the right love her theory, people on the left hate it, and everyone seems to be missing key aspects of her message.4 In the Rorschach of Komisar’s research, conservatives have latched on to support for traditional family values and gender roles. Liberals have reacted to a perceived threat to feminism and themes that could create a sense of guilt for women. Meanwhile, everyone seems to be missing Komisar’s call to action: greater public support for families in the form of longer paid-leave policies and more generous maternity benefits.
We shared our perspective that her research made sense and that it’s good to know what the ideal situation is for a baby so that mothers can make fully informed choices. We heard from several listeners that they reacted angrily to our discussion the first time they heard it. But, rather than stay in that initial reaction, these listeners played the podcast again and got curious about our discussion. When they did that, they realized that we were just acknowledging the legitimacy of the research, not personally criticizing any mother’s decisions.
It’s hard to discuss motherhood because it is such an identity. However, when we get curious, we can shift from the focus on our own perspectives (and our own defensiveness) and think about the other person’s. The decisions mothers make about birth, breastfeeding, and whether to work beyond child-raising are intensely personal and are made against a backdrop of cultural messages that seem designed to make all of us feel selfish and inadequate. Our listeners’ ability to pause, recognize how their experiences were causing them to hear from a defensive posture, and come back to the discussion is extraordinary and instructive. We can’t get to the substance of Komisar’s research without first recognizing our stakes in our personal choices and how those stakes color our perspective.
That’s the beauty of curiosity. In trying to understand another person’s perspective, it often gives us the space to understand our own more deeply as well.
We also can’t have productive dialogue with others without getting curious about what stakes color the other person’s perspective. Our stakes aren’t always logical, coherent, or rational, and that’s okay. The same holds true for other people. We don’t need to discount a person’s position because of what’s influencing it; we just need to acknowledge what’s influencing it.
During the 2016 Democratic National Convention, we spent time walking through the convention halls in Philadelphia, visiting tables and exhibit booths. We saw the usual suspects—Planned Parenthood, union representatives, civil rights activists—and then stumbled upon Democrats for Life. We couldn’t resist a conversation.
Two twentysomething-year-old men were handing out flyers and awkwardly avoiding the free condoms that Planned Parenthood representatives were distributing. We walked over to take the materials the young men were offering. We asked them to tell us about the organization, and they did. In detail.
“Life begins at conception and is sacred, and we think that Democrats should value life.” Their voices attracted attention from other women roaming the convention hall, and a small group started to form around the table. One woman started arguing with the men, who seemed taken aback. Sarah jumped in to explain why the conversation was rapidly becoming so heated: “What I need you to understand is that it is very, very hard as a woman to listen to a man explain what pregnancy means to me. It is very hard to hear a man say that my life is not as important as the life of the person I’m carrying. I cannot hear that from a man.”5
The looks on their faces made it clear that these two well-intentioned young men had never considered this perspective. We could tell that it seemed entirely unfair to them that their gender entered the conversation at all, and we understand that. Abortion has become one of the most contentious issues in US politics, and the discussion is stuck. We walked away from the Democrats for Life table talking about how both sides of the abortion debate feel that any openness to hearing the other side out will send us down a slippery slope. If we believe that ending a pregnancy is a private family matter, then we worry that any intrusion on that private matter will end all abortion access. If we believe that ending a pregnancy is a public matter similar to protecting lives of children and adults, then we worry that any access to abortion becomes a crime.
We are not interested in each other, because we’re too busy safeguarding our positions. We seem to have forgotten that the slippery slope is a logical fallacy. People’s views on abortion (and all other policy issues) consist of layers of life experiences, belief systems, and group affiliation. Peeling back those layers is revelatory. Perhaps we can find common ground that we otherwise thought did not exist. Even when we don’t, we can better navigate social issues when we put our defensiveness down and become more interested in each other.
When we started Pantsuit Politics, we wanted to talk about issues with curiosity. As we started developing subjects that interested us, we realized how shallow our understanding of many issues was. How could we participate in a nuanced conversation on trade if we knew little about NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)? How could we honestly discuss the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians without understanding the history of the region? We developed a concept we started referring to as “primers” to help us and our listeners prepare for discussion, and that concept opened our eyes to how little most of us know about the topics on which we claim to feel the most passion. This practice revealed for us the power of curiosity.
• • •
The hard truth is, too often we engage with issues only in a search for information that will prove our point. We have been as guilty of that as anyone else. In the early days of our podcast, this was quite evident. Sarah was a Democrat, so she knew she supported the social safety net, free trade, war when Democrats thought it was a good idea, and peace when they didn’t. Beth was a Republican, so she knew she supported supply-side economics, deregulation, and a hawkish foreign policy.
We toed the party line without doing the research, or at least not well-rounded, deep research. We often engaged with issues as we had our whole lives. We would do research before each episode. However, that research often looked less like research and more like a hunt for information confirming what we already knew. We would read articles from sources we knew would support our points of view. We would read authors and politicians with whom we already agreed. Even if our initial conscious approach wasn’t merely to confirm our beliefs, something as simple as a Google search revealed unconscious bias:
“Why we need welfare”
“Supply-side economic successes”
“Benefits of free trade”
However, rehashing what we already believed and ignoring the holes in our own arguments did not lead to a better understanding of a topic. It didn’t even lead to particularly interesting conversations. And our wonderful community of listeners was always inspiring us to do more . . . to go deeper.
We realized we needed to engage with policy—not as debaters but as students. We wanted to get curious and understand the history of an issue and how the debate surrounding it had or hadn’t changed over time.
The first issue we decided to tackle was trade policy. It was in the spring of 2016, and the Democratic primary candidates secretary Hillary Clinton and senator Bernie Sanders were locked in a heated battle for the nomination, with the Trans-Pacific Partnership quickly becoming a flashpoint of debate. The Republican primary was also seeing the issue of trade increase in importance as Donald Trump insisted Americans had gotten a raw deal.
We had to acknowledge that we both felt drawn into the debate, but didn’t really know much about the TPP or other international trade deals. We knew the party lines, but we didn’t know the history or the shifting economic landscape. We decided there was value in engaging with this issue as if there were a blank sheet of paper in front of us: How did these deals begin? How were they received by both parties at the time? What has changed since the debate first began? We wanted to look hard at how things were—not only how we wanted them to be.
By resetting and looking at the issue with fresh eyes, we were hoping to see the issue more clearly—not through the lens of partisan politics. Both of us had engaged with this issue for the first time decades earlier as young women with a desire to prove our partisan devotion. We wanted to leave all that aside and find out if we could see the issue differently with an older (and hopefully wiser) perspective. As we began to open ourselves up and get curious, we recognized that impermanence is not a bad thing. Our support for any particular issue is not signed in blood and need not feel like a permanent commitment.
Most importantly, in order to get curious about each other, we had to have a baseline agreement on the reality of the situation. Reaching that agreement is the first step of the primers. So, in our primer on trade, Beth defined imports, exports, trade deficits, and other types of trade restrictions. With this primer and other primers in the beginning of this series, we realized just how little we knew. Sometimes adding a level of knowledge confirmed how we felt about an issue. Other times it helped us see how little our opinions were based on and how we needed to look again at what we thought.
With the issue of trade, the primer helped us and our listeners see that reality was much more complex than we were acknowledging. Global trade policy and its impact on America’s economy and foreign policy cannot be easily broken down into one side or another. In fact, the most interesting piece of the 2016 election is how extreme wings of both parties became anti-trade. The mainstream wings of both the Democratic and Republican parties had agreed on a free-trade approach for decades. Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were able to exploit frustrations among huge swaths of the electorate who did not believe free trade had been a boon for every American.
We had to get curious about those voices as well. Getting curious doesn’t mean you support a stance. Empathy does not equal endorsement. We both fundamentally disagree with much of the anti-trade rhetoric. We hear in that rhetoric that the world economy is a zero-sum game with winners and losers. We hear those arguing against free trade blaming immigration and China for all of America’s problems. We cannot agree. Still, even in the face of disagreement, we began to see the value in understanding the emotion behind that view of the world. For better or worse, getting curious about trade helped us better understand the history of trade and the undercurrent of fear motivating so much of the anti-trade populace. That fear is real. Refusing to see it or empathize with it does not move the conversation forward.
Using primers to get curious allowed us to see the opposition more clearly. It also exposed the flaws in our reasoning. We realized that the idea of free trade and globalization as an economic engine was more controversial than we thought. Experts on both sides of the aisle do not agree on the long-term (or short-term) benefits of NAFTA or the TPP. It also called into question some of our assumptions about the pragmatism and wisdom of chasing constant economic growth.
When we got curious, free trade stopped being something we barely understood but fully supported. It became one more example of our flawed and dated approach to politics that left so many of us frustrated and disconnected.
• • •
Learning about something from the ground up. Approaching a subject as a curious explorer and not a dedicated disciple. It was a completely new way to engage with subjects. It was a completely new way to see the world. It was freeing to shake off partisan ideologies and old understandings. Suddenly every subject became an opportunity to pull out a fresh piece of paper and get curious. We have produced primers on subjects ranging from Cuba to the Affordable Care Act, from immigration to Israel. Every time, we learn history we didn’t know. Every time, we understand the emotions fueling both sides of the debate on a deeper level. Every time, we realize the flaws in our own opinions and the ways in which the debate is premised on a dated understanding of the world.
Getting curious allows us to stay connected. We don’t have to disconnect for fear of encountering something that might challenge us or illuminate our errors, because winning is no longer the name of the game. Curiosity is an inherently connecting motivator. By getting curious, you are stretching. You are reaching out for information and understanding. It no longer matters if the foundation you were standing on gets rocked, because you’ve moved forward toward learning, toward others, toward a deeper understanding of yourself and the world.
CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
It’s not only interesting and enjoyable to spend time diving into issues; it’s also a spiritual exercise. We think about 2 Timothy 2:15, encouraging us to study, presenting ourselves to God as people who have worked hard to discern truth. Learning is much more righteous than being righteous with an empty opinion!
Primers have been an essential part of our own attempt to get curious. Now it is time for you to get in on the fun. Write your own primer. Start with a blank sheet of paper and learn all you can. This can be as easy or as hard as you want it to be. You could start with an issue or country about which you know very little and are unhindered by strong opinions. Or—if you’re further along in your practice—you could try something a bit more advanced. Pick an issue you are passionate about. Pick an issue that feels connected to your identity. Pick an issue fueled by your spirituality. Now write a primer for someone who knows almost nothing about it. Pretend an alien race has landed, and you have to start from the beginning to explain this issue to them. Explain the history, the different stakeholders, and how the issue has changed over time. See where your curiosity takes you.
1. What is a perspective you struggle to understand? Where can you find a little corner of curiosity to explore in this issue or point of view?
2. Think back to a time someone seemed sincerely curious about your point of view. What questions did they ask you? How much time did they spend talking? How much time did they spend listening? How did their curiosity make you feel?
3. This one is a little bit selfish, and we appreciate your indulgence. Make a list of subjects or countries or issues that you would like to see primers on and send them to beth@pantsuitpoliticsshow.com.