No, You Can’t Convince Your Relatives to Become Democrats
8 August 2024
I am reposting this essay by Chris Bowers that I find helpful (I bolded some parts):
One of the more common types of replies I receive to my activism emails on Bowers News Media are requests for help from people who want to persuade their relatives to become Democrats, or at least to help them stop being Trump-supporting Republicans. I can tell that these relatives mean a lot to the people who write to me, and that it is distressing to many folks that people they care about are supporting the very causes which you and I are actively marshaling our resources to fight.
While I totally get why having relatives with antithetical political opinions can be distressing for anyone who is politically engaged, I have to be honest with you: Don't expect to change their minds—ever. Here are the two reasons why it won't happen:
People’s political opinions evolve from hundreds, thousands, and sometimes over tens of thousands of hours of engagement with the news, social media, religion, work, social events, school, and more. No short conversation, long conversation, or even several conversations can ever trump all of that (pun intended). No one is smart enough, or original enough, or persuasive enough where they can convince someone in an instant to change political values that were brewing and steeping for thousands of hours. It just isn't possible.
In many cases political beliefs have a deep, non-rational root that simply cannot be altered even by thousands of hours of discussion. It is entirely possible that someone holds their political beliefs because they had bad experiences with people on the other side of the partisan or ideological aisle. They may be tied to their ideological or partisan grouping for cultural reasons, or because their ideological or partisan grouping is deeply tied to their own self-image.
This is not a hypothetical issue in my life. There are people very close to me who vote the opposite way I do. Would I prefer it if they held the same political views as I do? Sure! However, I also know better than to try and change them.
I know this because there is no way any of them could ever convince me to stop being a Democrat through a few hours of discussion. That's just not going to happen. I have spent roughly 25,000 hours of my life working to elect and support Democrats, and no series of conversations could ever match up against the weight of this experience. At this point in my life, I know that any attempt to persuade me to change would fail, and the effort would quite unenjoyable—for me and whoever attempted it.
I have seen people change their ideological and political teams, but not because someone convinced them to do it. From my own experience, I know that I shifted to the left in college because I wanted to hang around with the lefty kids. Then, toward the end of my 20s, I shifted back toward being a Democrat because I didn't want to live my life on the fringes anymore. Now, after two decades in the field, being a Democrat is so deeply tied to my career, my self-image, and so many of the accomplishments I am proud of that the idea of ever switching just seems like madness. While most folks are not political professionals like me, I still expect that they have similarly strong, only semi-rational (at best) roots to their beliefs.
So, you may ask, what even is the point of political activism if persuading most people is virtually impossible? Well, the truth is that the resources we marshal as political activists are overwhelmingly spent trying to persuade two small-ish groups of people:
Relatively low-information, low political engagement folks who are inclined to agree with you but who legitimately hover between voting and not voting; and
A narrow segment of the population who is legitimately on the fence between the two major parties, or between one of the two major parties and a small third party.
When it comes to electoral politics, those are the folks who your resources can move. When it comes to your family, here is what I suggest you do instead of trying to convince them to change teams:
First, if you have to discuss politics at all, find topics that you do still agree on. There are a number of issues that are reasonably bipartisan and/or nonpartisan, such as support for Ukraine and other allies, improving our infrastructure, trade agreements, protecting Medicare and Social Security, and other topics that might be of particular concern to your relatives. From personal experience, I have in the past bonded with some conservative relatives who, like me, were very opposed to the war in Iraq.
Second, always be kind and respectful. You will never convince anyone to change their political beliefs if they find people with your political beliefs to be unpleasant jerks. If you are going to have persuasive power over the long run, then you have to be someone that people want to actually be around. Even if you are able to browbeat someone into submission in public, they will come to resent not only you, but your political beliefs, in private. Highly argumentative people just are not playing the long game very well.
While I can't imagine this will be a satisfying post for many of you, it is the best advice I have on offer after spending over 20 years in professional politics. You almost certainly cannot convince the relatives you love so dearly to stop holding political opinions that you find abhorrent, but I do believe that you can still have a good time around them. In fact, once you come to accept that changing them isn't possible, the times that you spend together may actually improve. Source
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