Plain talk works best.

These are my notes for a future, more fleshed-out blog post. Sorry; at work on other things!

Nut graf: In one-on-one conversation, you can poke at your discussion partner’s emotions or you can logically discuss the issues, but you cannot do both. Go ahead and use judgment-laden words when you want the adrenal stimulation of a mudfight. But when you want a logical discussion, choose to say and hear the most plainly descriptive words you can.

Characterize and describe your ideas using words that everyone could agree on, even if they don’t agree with your point. For example, if you want to talk about US military actions overseas, use those words. If you call it “protecting freedom abroad,” you’re loading it with positive judgment. If you call it “military adventurism,” you’re loading it up with negative judgement. Words that contain judgments trip emotional switches that turn logical discussions into personal fights.

When you want to communicate that you don’t believe that cutting taxes and expenditures will help the economy, say something like “I’ve seen no evidence that reducing public expenditures can increase a nation’s overall economic activity.” If you say “No serious economist supports your fantasy that austerity creates prosperity…,” your listener will likely hear only the insult to his own intelligence.

That’s hard enough. What’s even harder but just as valuable is to hear the non-judgmental point behind your discussion partner’s lazy use of value-laden labels. When you hear, ”Soaking the rich doesn’t create jobs,” it will help the quality of your discussion if you can pretend you heard

• “Increasing taxes on wealthy people won’t encourage them to use their wealth productively.”

Focus Positive

(This is not a fully written blog post. I’m making notes here for a more well-developed blog post later.)

Nut graf: Stay positive. Defend what you believe in rather than criticizing what you don’t. Describe the benefits of the idea that you are promoting, not the shortcomings of the idea that you oppose. A positive focus keeps the discussion more pleasant; helps you think more clearly; is more effective in opening minds because it is less likely to trigger defensiveness; makes you seem more sympathetic and easier to agree with; is more likely to evoke shared values; and avoids reinforcing negative messages about your own ideas.

When Lakoff tells us “Don’t say ‘Don’t think of an elephant,” he is violating his own instruction. He intended to teach us to say “Think of a donkey.“

Instead of asking your listener to remove an idea from his or her mind with nothing to replace it, these statements give the listener something to take its place.  Compare a “Obama is not a Muslim,” to “Obama attends a Christian church and is raising his daughters in the Christian faith.“ The first statement creates a sort of intellectual vacuum: What is Obama? And nature abhors a vacuum. The best way to get a toddler to behave well is to distract him with something good and interesting. And the best way to displace a false or dysfunctional idea is to provide a true or productive idea that replaces it.

Use as example Adam and Andrew’s energetic opposition to the Green Party tonight at the WGN meeting: “They’re out to destroy the Democratic Party. All they do is attack the Democratic Party. Did you see Jill Stein’s table at the festival–it was all “Democrats and Republicans are exactly the same!” “Democrats are corporate puppets!” (etc. etc.) I had to admit he was right. I’m as sympathetic to the Green Party as I am to any political party. But I know what Adam and Andrew were talking about. I know what the Green Party was trying to do: they beleive they have no chance of attracting support from Repubican voters; they don’t even try to talk them out of their party affiliation, so they don’t bother attacking the GOP. They want to peel Democratic voters away from that party, so they attack it.

What if, when Adam and Andrew had passed Jill Stein’s table and seen nothing but positive messages: The Green Party will protect the environment better than any other party! Protect the working class better than any other party!

Staying positive sets off fewer alarms, less amygdala reaction from the person you’re contradicting.

The Practically Magical Third Thing

(This is not a fully written blog post. I’m making notes here for a more well-developed blog post later.)

Nut graf: Nothing of any consequence in our civic  life can be usefully framed as a choice between two mutually exclusive options.  Identifying a third thing–or even a fourth, fifth, and sixth thing–is a powerful technique for turning a two-sided, win-lose battle into a collaborative effort to explore the relative merits of different approaches.

Also: Turn an either/or choice into a both/and.

Two things into three things:

• Pharmaceutical vs. placebo (versus doing nothing at all)
• Regulating guns vs. concealed carry (versus a combination of both, plus mental health, compassion training in public schools, etc.)

In the civic discussions necessary for self-government, there are two sides to absolutely nothing.

Referents

(This is not yet a fully written blog post; I’m just making notes here for a more well-developed post later.)

Nut graf: Pay attention to the referent, not the word, and you will often find a divining rod that will point directly to areas of shared beliefs within an argument.

Imagine a dispute between shaman who says “Disease is caused by invisible spirits that reside in the sick person and travel through the air to enter your body and make you sick, too.” and the scientist who says “Disease is caused by invisible pathogens that reside in the sick person and travel through the air to enter your body and make you sick, too.” They are actually in agreement about the referent (although they conceptualize it differently), and about one of the most important things to do about it–to stay away from sick people.

Promoting dialogue across party lines

Last night, I attended the monthly Reach Out Wisconsin meeting, where I was approached by a reporter from Wisconsin’s statewide public radio network. This morning, I was on the radio! Take a listen; it’s less than two minutes.

(I did not realize how much I talk in italics. I need to work on that.)

Stitching up democracy

I have been reading, studying, practicing, and blogging about interpersonal political conversation techniques for going on a year now. Talking politics: If we don’t learn how, our American civic discourse will consist of nothing but political messages crafted on Madison Avenue to promote the interests of those who are wealthy enough to purchase them.

After he spoke tonight at the Economic Democracy Conference in Madison, I asked John Nichols a question, based on an assumption that he shared my sense of the value of talking politics with our friends and neighbors.

His answer was unequivocal: “Each political conversation is a failure. Every one. It doesn’t work. It’s not enough. It’s insufficient. The person may walk away from us. They may not hear us.”

With that, I knew that Nichols knew what he was talking about. I’ve posted before about the futility of expecting that one conversation will change anyone’s mind about anything.

It just doesn’t happen. So what is the point?

Nichols likened our efforts at person-to-person political conversation to his grandmother’s quilting.

“We have to recognize that each of these conversations is part of a fabric,” he said. When his grandmother starts a quilt, he said, “You know it’s going to be something like eight feet square when she’s done. That’s a daunting task.” Not one of those squares is going to have made a quilt when she puts down her needle each evening.

“But day after day, she brings in little pieces of fabric, thread. And someday—weeks, months after she begins—there is an exquisite quilt.”

That is a great way to think of our political conversations. We’re not going win a convert with every conversation, but we are going to add something of value to the overall dialogue. We’re not going to plant our beliefs in someone else’s mind, but we are going to build relationships with fellow citizens—relationships that are essential to sharing responsibility for self-government.

Some of our political conversations will be small patches in a quilt. Others might be more like seeds. When you walk away from the garden on planting day, it’s just as much of a plain old dirt patch as when you started. No visible difference at all. But a few months later…

Yesterday in a Facebook group about election integrity, we were discussing some good/bad news from Palm Beach County, Florida.   The bad news is that a computer miscounted votes, causing election officials to certify the loser as the winner in a city council election. The good news is that the county’s Supervisor of Elections, Susan Bucher, and her team discovered the mistake and corrected the error a few days after the election. Most elections in most counties with computer-counted votes never audit the results and never know whether the machine counted correctly. Bucher and Palm Beach County are the exception, not the rule.

One of my Facebook friends noted that he had been at a meeting with Bucher in May 2011 and had talked with her about voting machines’ unreliability.  He wrote that Bucher at that time “objected strongly and took great offense, saying her system was foolproof, and was very condescending and dismissive of my solution as to how the problem could be fixed if election officials wanted to.”

Of course, none of us know for sure, but it’s quite possible my Facebook friend’s chat with the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections—as badly as it went at the time—got her thinking, maybe paying a little more attention to information about voting machines’ vulnerabilities. Maybe that conversation helped to pique her curiosity to do more audits than required—and maybe saved democracy in one election in one county.

“Keep working at it, and not just at election time,” was Nichols’ message. We and our fellow citizens are “marinated in political propaganda” from the mass media. However frustrating it might be from day to day, we need to engage in person-to-person politics—political conversation—if we are to defend and save democracy.

Are we debaters, salesmen, or citizens?

Members of my local grassroots club have better-than-average political conversation skills. That’s not surprising: Anyone who willingly attends  weekly political meetings gets more practice than the average person. And yet last week’s meeting was derailed by an all-too-common pitfall. When faced with a differing political view, people immediately fell into a debate–a two-sided contest in which the goal is to ‘win’–rather than using their substantial conversational skills  to create a dialogue in which the goal is shared understanding.

Most members of the group are Obama supporters, so the agenda included a training billed as “Having Effective Conversations,” given by the chair of the local Obama campaign. I participated because of my interest in political conversation, not because I plan to campaign for Obama.

The training consisted of simple instructions on how use a prescribed but flexible script when knocking on strangers’ doors. Campaign volunteers are to ask whether the voter has made up his or her mind and, if the voter is not planning to vote for Obama, ask why not. The training material anticipates about six or seven reasons that voters might give, and provides a response for each that volunteers are to use in communicating the President’s message to the naive voter.

I sincerely did not intend to derail the training, but here’s what happened: Because I do not plan to go door-to-door for Obama, I volunteered to play the potential voter in the role-playing exercise.  A fellow member, Jan, pretended to knock on my door. She asked if I was planning to vote for Obama; I said no; she asked why; and I told her I cannot bring myself to vote for the first president in American history who has claimed legal authority to detain or assassinate American citizens without judicial due process of law.

Although the written training material contained no prepared answer for that concern, Jan gamely kept going.  She tried briefly to steer me toward something covered in the training material. “Is it the drones in Afghanistan…?”

“No, but now that you mention it, that’s another problem.” In less than two minutes, everyone else was listening to our conversation. They quickly agreed  that they should say ‘thank you’ and move on if they met anyone like me while going door-to-door, and then just as quickly joined Jan in a very real effort to convince me I was wrong.

The fact that Obama has claimed and exercised this power was news to one person, who began with flat-out denial. When others backed me up on the facts, we quickly got past that. They then began to take stabs at my opinion and as I parried each, came up with another.

• Thrust: “You’re falling for Republican scare tactics and hysteria.”
  Parry: “The Republicans support extrajudicial executive power to detain or assassinate citizens. They have no interest in spreading even awareness of the practice, never mind hysteria.”
• Thrust: “Obama hasn’t assassinated anyone within the US yet. At home, we are safe.”
  Parry: “We cannot know. The Administration has insisted that no one outside the President and the staff who report to him is entitled to know who has been detained or executed, where, or why. And American rights against the unlimited power of kings or presidents to take our lives, liberty or property have, before now, traveled with us wherever we go.”
• Thrust: “Most Americans believe we are safer with al-Awlaki gone, and are glad that Obama ordered his murder.”
  Parry: We would have been safer still had al-Awlaki been tried before he was executed, so that our our centuries-old right to due process would not have died along with him.

And so on. About five minutes into the debate, Jan asked: “Do you think our Fifth Amendment rights would be safer if Romney were elected?

With my response, I gave every Obama supporter in the room an opening to transform the debate into a collaborative problem-solving dialogue: “Unfortunately, yes, but not because of what Romney would do. Because of what people like us would do.  I remember our unanimous outrage at lesser violations by the Bush Administration. But when Obama negates a civil right we’ve cherished since the 13th Century’s Magna Carta, few object. If Romney becomes president, we will fight to restore our civil rights, but if Obama is re-elected, our rights will continue to die silently and unmourned.”

At home later, I wondered what would have transpired if one of them had responded: “I agree we need to restore our sacred Fifth-Amendment rights. I don’t think there’s a chance of that with Romney in the White House. Let’s talk about how we can do that with Obama.”  Had any one been willing to acknowledge that common ground and explore it with me, they would have discovered that I might be convinced to vote for Obama.

Why didn’t they?

First, when I surprised them with a point of view at odds with theirs, their reflex was to  jump into the role of debater. Two-sided, pro/con, win/lose, point/counterpoint  debate is so ingrained in our competitive American civic habits that we mindlessly fall into it whenever we encounter a difference of political opinion. Often, we don’t even attempt to create a “conversation with a center, not sides,” to use William Isaacs’ term from Dialogue and the Art of Thinking Together. When playing the role of debater, they had to listen to my concerns only for the purpose of refuting or minimizing them, not for understanding them.

Second, I sense they perceived themselves–primed by the training we had just received–in the role of salesperson. But salespeople are limited in the extent to which they can allow themselves freely to hear and express ideas and information. When playing the role of Obama salespeople, they had to pretend they could defend the policy, even though the Administration itself has described it only in sketchy, unofficial leaks, and has defended it in only a brief, ambiguous speech at Northwestern University. They were not free to engage with me in dialogue about what we, as citizens, might try to do to protect our Fifth Amendment rights.

Citizens–unlike debaters or salespeople–collaborate with each other to solve problems facing them as a group. It is through that collaboration–not through debate–that we truly strengthen our ability to govern ourselves. When we play the role of citizen, we are free to engage in deep listening, responding to each other, collaboration, and discovering or creating the whole from the many. We’ve got to learn how to cut down the debate and crank up the dialogue.