Why Political Conversations Feel Impossible Today

When Conversation Suddenly Changes

I have been thinking about how strange it is that we can talk with strangers about almost anything. The weather, a dog, a painting, a place we have both visited, where to find a good cup of coffee. Sometimes a stranger will tell me something surprisingly personal within minutes of meeting me. But bring up politics and the atmosphere can change almost immediately.

A word is said. A political name comes up. Someone mentions an election, a president, a policy, or something they saw online, and suddenly the conversation seems to acquire a weight that wasn't there a moment before.

I noticed this long before I began asking people political questions as part of Triptych Dialogue. In fact, I think it was one of the reasons I wanted to ask them. I wasn't sure what I was looking for. I was interested in that moment when an ordinary conversation becomes difficult, and I wondered what was actually happening between two people when they could no longer seem to talk about something that affects both of them.

I began with three questions:

How would you describe the political system of the United States of America?

Describe your feelings or reactions to the current state of US politics.

And:

Politics in the United States . . .

Then I asked each person for one word that summarized their answers. I called these Word-Titles.

I expected disagreement. What surprised me was how often people were willing to talk. The difficulty wasn't necessarily getting someone to express an opinion. The more interesting difficulty was what happened after the opinion appeared.

When the Stranger Becomes a Category

Maybe that is where the problem begins.

We have become remarkably good at recognizing someone's position before they have finished expressing it. A sentence begins and we hear a familiar phrase. We recognize the vocabulary. We recognize the argument. We may even recognize the kind of person we imagine would say something like that. Before the person has finished speaking, we think we already know what comes next.

At that point, the stranger sitting in front of us can disappear behind a category.

Republican. Democrat. Liberal. Conservative. Left. Right.

Whatever category comes to mind, it can become more familiar to us than the person himself or herself.

That distinction has stayed with me because I am interested in perception. As an artist, I tend to notice things that are difficult to measure: a pause before an answer, a hesitation, a change in someone's expression, the way a person emphasizes a particular word, or the difference between an answer that arrives immediately and one that takes twenty seconds to form.

Those things are easy to overlook when we think of conversation as simply the transfer of information. What did the person say? Was it true? Was it false? Did I agree with it? Did I disagree?

But there is another layer to conversation.

What happened between us while the words were being spoken?

The Space Between Hearing and Listening

I think that question has become increasingly interesting to me.

We hear constantly. Podcasts, television, YouTube, Instagram, news, comments, notifications. There is no shortage of people speaking. If anything, there may be more voices competing for our attention than at any other time.

And yet I wonder whether we have become less comfortable with the silence that allows listening to happen.

I don't mean silence as simply the absence of sound. I mean the small internal space in which I don't immediately have to respond. The moment in which I can say to myself, I don't know, or I hadn't thought about it that way, or perhaps I should ask this person another question before deciding what I think about what they just said.

That seems increasingly difficult.

Part of the difficulty may be that disagreement has become connected to identity. If a political opinion is closely connected to my sense of who I am, then questioning the opinion can feel like questioning me. If I believe my position is morally necessary, your disagreement can begin to look like a moral failure rather than a difference of opinion.

The conversation becomes about much more than the subject we originally started discussing.

It becomes about who we are, who they are, who belongs, who doesn't, and what kind of person would hold a particular opinion.

I don't think any of this is entirely new. People have always argued about politics. People have always formed groups, misunderstood one another, and assumed things about people on the other side.

But something about the current environment feels different to me.

What We Carry Into a Conversation

Our political conversations are no longer confined to the people physically around us. When I sit across from someone and talk about politics, I may also be carrying into that conversation something I watched yesterday, something I read this morning, a comment from someone I have never met, or an argument I encountered on social media.

The other person is doing the same thing.

So perhaps when we talk to each other, we aren't simply talking to each other. We are carrying invisible audiences and previous conversations into the room. We are carrying people we don't know, arguments we haven't examined very carefully, and assumptions formed by encounters that may have nothing to do with the person sitting in front of us.

I find myself wondering what that does to our ability to listen.

We may think we are having a conversation with one person, but we may actually be having several conversations at once. There is the person in front of us, the person we imagine that person to be, the people we have encountered online, and the political group we think the person represents.

No wonder the conversation can become difficult.

What Art Might Change

This is one of the reasons I keep coming back to art.

An artwork doesn't necessarily ask me to agree with it. It can place something in front of me that I don't immediately understand and give me permission to stay with it for a while. I can look at it again. I can change my mind about what I am seeing. I can remain uncertain.

That possibility interests me.

Perhaps one thing art can offer political conversation is not an answer but a different kind of attention.

Triptych Dialogue grew out of that curiosity. Could an artwork create a situation in which people might listen to one another differently? I wasn't interested in making an artwork that told people what they should think about politics. I was more interested in creating a situation in which people could speak and someone else could listen.

It sounds almost too simple.

One person. Another person. Three questions. A word.

But when you actually sit with someone and listen to their answer, simplicity can become complicated very quickly.

The word someone chooses at the end can be surprising. Sometimes it is angry. Sometimes hopeful. Sometimes contradictory. Sometimes it seems to contain an entire argument in a single word. Sometimes I don't understand why they chose it.

I am learning that I don't necessarily have to understand everything immediately.

Maybe that is part of listening too: allowing another person's words to remain partly theirs. Not immediately translating them into my own vocabulary. Not correcting them. Not finishing their thought for them. Not deciding what kind of person they are because of one thing they said.

Just staying with what they said.

A Smaller Question

I have begun to wonder whether political conversation feels impossible partly because we expect conversation to accomplish too much. We want it to persuade, prove, defeat, confirm, clarify, and sometimes even change the other person's mind.

Perhaps we could begin with something smaller.

Can I understand you without becoming you?

Can I disagree with you without needing to eliminate your position?

Can I listen without preparing my response?

Can I allow myself to remain uncertain for a few minutes?

I don't know.

I'm still experimenting with this.

That may be the important part. An experiment doesn't begin with certainty. It begins with a question and a willingness to see what happens.

So I keep returning to a question that is probably much simpler than the one I started with.

Maybe the question isn't how we fix political conversation.

Maybe it is simply this:

What would happen if, for a moment, we stopped trying to win the conversation and tried to actually have one?

That's what my art journey with Triptych Dialogue is navigating.