My family includes a farmer and a fiber artist in rural Kentucky, who rarely missed Sunday services at the local Baptist church; A retired Jewish banker on the Upper West Side of Manhattan; Theater director in Florida. contractor in louisville; Boston lawyer; And a gay Republican.
Talking about politics at our family gatherings can be like smoking a cigarette at a gas station – there’s every chance it will cause the whole place to explode. What always impresses me about our large, blended family is not only that we survive Christmas dinner, but also that the family includes many couples who disagree politically with the people they live with every day: their spouses. They haven’t voted for the same candidate, let alone the same party, in years.
For a long time, these differences were mostly a nuisance that flared up during elections, but over the past few years they have become much more stressful for these couples. Especially now, when the country is so divided and angry, when we have retreated into our own corners that we feel as if the bonds that hold us together are finally about to break. And yet all these couples are still together. I wondered how they did it.
This question turned into a novel partly about a Democrat and his Republican husband who is running for president. The book is not about politics or campaigns; It’s about marriage, ambition, and what happens when who we are in the world doesn’t fit the way we see ourselves. But in order to write it, I needed to do some research. I could watch Fox News and MSNBC for hundreds of hours and talk to dozens of strangers at the grocery store. Instead, I decided to talk to family members — about guns, abortion, immigration, climate change — whose politics I found confusing.
These are the conversations most of us spend the holidays desperately trying to avoid. I wasn’t particularly excited about their presence either. But I thought it would at least be effective, and I hoped I’d learn something.
I was a reporter at New York Times For 15 years, I have spent many hours of my life asking personal questions about sensitive issues. When I’m working on a story, my job is to figure out what the facts are and what they mean, and then present the information so readers can make up their own minds. I’ve stopped countless people on the streets or in parking lots over the years to ask about politicians or schools, how much they pay for rent, and what they think about Ice skating when the temperature reaches 78 degrees In February.
The people I meet don’t generally ask me what I think about climate change, or who I’ll vote for, and if they do, I won’t be able to tell them. My role as a reporter is to seek information, not to persuade anyone. (I can’t say what I think about these issues here either; times The guidelines require that reporters keep their political opinions to themselves.) I’ve had hundreds of these conversations over the years, and I can’t think of a single interview that became combative, even when I personally disagreed with every word.
So I decided to approach my family as a correspondent. I wasn’t looking forward to the comings and goings. I was looking for information. I wanted to know what they thought and why.
I started with my brother. He lives in Tampa, and sometimes we talk on the phone as he walks around the neighborhood with his dog, a schnauzer, who struggled as a puppy, and sometimes wears a weighted vest when she’s anxious.
We’ve always gotten along, but it’s been a few years since we’ve talked about politics in any real way. The last time was at my parents’ dining room table, where my mother desperately tried to change the subject while my brother and I screamed for our Chinese food. I don’t remember what we were arguing about, but I remember how angry it felt, like an animal trying to claw its way out of my chest. I wanted to reach across the table and shake him. I can remain completely calm when talking to strangers about their opinions; Not everyone will agree with me, and that’s okay. But how could my brother believe these things?
When I called my brother to explain that I was working on a book and wanted to talk to him about politics, I told him I wasn’t interested in debate: this was research, and I just needed to understand.
“Okay,” he said. I photographed him walking under a palm tree with his little gray dog. “Shoot.”
I started with some basics. If you were talking to a 5-year-old, you asked him how would you explain what it means to be progressive? How do you explain being conservative to the same child?
I didn’t agree with his answers, but that didn’t matter. Some of my characters will. I asked him to continue.
I said: Tell me about immigration. What do you think is fair for children who were brought here illegally when they were young?
What do you think about affirmative action?
What to do about climate change?
What about miscarriage?
As he explained his points, I felt like I got to know my characters better. I can see their faces more clearly in my mind. It was a good excuse to talk to my brother. We both have kids, jobs, and marriages to take care of, and we don’t stay in touch as much as I wish we did. But suddenly we were communicating a lot, and I was enjoying it. Cautiously, I took another step. I would like to talk to my in-laws.
On paper, my father-in-law and I couldn’t be more different. I’m a gay, Jewish New Yorker, a farmer who drives a pickup truck and lives in rural Kentucky. But we both love to read and we love to joke around, and in the 15 years since I met my wife, her father and I have become close. There were always topics, however, that we had difficulty discussing. I remember one conversation years ago, when we spent nearly an hour late at night taking turns bringing up “just one last point” about gun access across the country. He was baffled in my opinion, and it took every drop of my willpower not to yell at him at his house. My wife only lasted a few minutes before she got up from the table and left the room.
But his policies are unpredictable. He does not have a weapon, for example. Instead, he likes to say he keeps giant spray cans of wasp spray around the house in case there’s an intruder. And because there are wasps in the barn.
A few months after writing my novel, my wife and I took our kids to Kentucky for a spring visit. As we sat in rocking chairs around the wood stove, my father-in-law and I talked about electric cars and renewable energy. I used the same method I did with my brother. I listened. It was research. We didn’t worry about who was right. And the conversation was…totally interesting! Really, it was a great success. It gave me more material for my book, and no one said anything they regretted.
So I tried two other family members. Sitting around a bonfire in a backyard in Louisville one evening, I talked to one of my sisters and her husband about how they vote. (Later, I called this husband to ask him about golf and what he would do if he found out his wife was cheating on him with a woman.)
On another visit to Kentucky, I stood with my mother-in-law in her kitchen, while a group of white and brown sheep roamed the pasture outside. I asked her how it felt to be married to someone who voted differently than she did.
She sighed and shook her head and said she didn’t understand. “But he’s a nice person,” she said.
When I tell people about my family, or my novel, one thing I often hear is: If my husband voted differently than I did, I would get a divorce.
Maybe you want that. But you probably won’t. Not all of these couples started out far apart from each other. But slowly, over time, their views changed, like a slanting shadow in the afternoon sun, until there was almost no overlap left. But they continue to share the everyday things of their actual lives — kids, mortgages, jobs. They take care of each other. And if these things work, if you’re good to each other, will you really ruin everything?
None of my family members were so convinced by our conversations that they changed their party affiliation. But the more of these discussions we have, the easier they become. And for everyone involved, it has become harder to dismiss the people on the other side, whose views we often see as caricatures. My book was finished, but the way my family and I learned to talk to each other stuck. We try to remember that even when we despise each other’s leaders, we are all just people doing the best we can.
