Add a little politics to your holiday meals

How did Thanksgiving dinner go? Did the unspoken agreement to avoid politics hold? Or did someone let loose with a provocation while passing the potatoes? Did you join the fray or stare at the bean casserole until the moment passed? If you avoided the topic of politics, you’re not alone. A recent CBS News poll found little appetite for political discussions at Thanksgiving. Only 15 percent were “looking forward” to talking politics and the remainder didn’t care one way or another.

Does it have to be that way? Has the divisive tone on social media and among elected officials and pundits rendered political discussion off limits for normal people? Let’s hope not. People should discuss public policy and other sensitive topics like religion because these subjects matter more than vacation highlights, football scores, or whether pumpkin pie is better than pecan. And frankly the latter is settled science: pumpkin.

With the right mindset anyone can talk about anything with anybody and be better off for it (see caveat below). We’re exactly four weeks out from the next big family get together so there’s time to practice the art of discussion.

So what is the right mindset for political discussion? It’s the one we generally don’t have when a contentious subject arises. “Our brains are wired in so many ways for tribalism and for picking sides so when the conversations start there they’re going to go to a bad place,” Martin Carcasson, Ph.D., told me. He’s the director of the Center for Public Deliberation at Colorado State University and an expert in helping people wrestle with “wicked problems” together.

Wicked problems, as the name suggests, are problems that don’t have simple solutions because they entail competing values and interests. The vast majority of Americans revere justice, safety, freedom, individual responsibility, tradition, compassion, equality, the present and the future, but each of us prioritizes those values differently. These competing values create tensions in the shared space of public policy. For example, if a homeowner has the freedom to do whatever he wants with his front yard, his neighbor’s property value may become less secure. If sportsmen have the freedom to fish the Colorado River midday when the fish are stressed from heat, there will be fewer fish for sportsmen in the future. Governing bodies, in this case an HOA and state wildlife officials, respectively, must negotiate these tensions as they create policy.

Consider how competing values and interests make easy solutions impossible for even harder questions such as: Who should come into the country and how? How should we care for the poor? How do we maintain Social Security benefits long term? How do we rectify the injustices of bigotry? How do we care for the environment? Addressing these issues isn’t as simple as weighing costs and benefits because underlying values tip the scale for each person.

If we believe most people value the same things albeit in different ways, we can enter holiday discussions with a sense of curiosity and humility. We can discuss values, worries, priorities, experiences, and underlying beliefs with the intent of ex- changing views and developing greater understanding.

For those of us who like to debate, it takes a measure of selfcontrol. Let’s be honest though; when have we ever convinced anyone of anything during a debate over a single meal? Persuasion is a journey, not a battle, taken together over time.

One caveat: There are people who have difficulty getting into the right mindset for a dinner discussion. Attempts to engage such persons in fruitful discussion will end in frustration because they like to fight. In such cases, turn the discussion toward pie and win one for the pumpkin team.