Want to Win the Culture War? Be Kind

We are all brand ambassadors for the causes we care about.

Author’s note: this is a republished piece; it originally appeared on my friend Alexandra Hudson’s excellent newsletter Civic Renaissance (Want to Win the Culture War? Be Kind). I very rarely republish pieces to Heal the West (this is my first since the site really began) but this one felt important.

I was at dinner with a C-level executive of a major liberal media company. "All conservatives are assholes," the executive said.

I was a little taken aback, but recovered. I asked the executive if there was a specific event in his past that made him think this way.

"Absolutely," the executive said. "My dad was an asshole, and he's a conservative."

It's not just this one executive. I've heard from people across the political spectrum who express anger and distrust towards the other side. Almost every one of them, when asked about the root of their anger, tells a story of how a member of the other side badly hurt them.

The reason for this is something psychologists call generalization. What is generalization? It's how we have contact with a member of a group and then assume that the entire group resembles our one point of contact. If a conservative is unkind to us, then we're prone to see all conservatives as equally unkind.

This tendency shows up in other areas besides politics too. We often see the world through the lens of our wounds. If you’re black and you’ve experienced discrimination, you might be more inclined to see all bad things that happen to you through the lens of racial discrimination. If you're disabled and one person at school bullies you explicitly because of your disability, then you might be more inclined to attribute future bad treatment to a similar prejudice.

So what can we do about this? As recipients, we can work to stop mind reading. Just because someone shares superficial traits with someone who has bullied or mistreated us does not mean that they will do so as well. Or, if they do, it doesn't mean that they have the same motive. Some people might be bigoted towards black people or disabled people. Others might just be indiscriminate jerks. Still others might have noble intentions and may just be having a bad day. The person who looks at you coldly as you pass on the street might harbor negative thoughts about you based on your gender, ethnicity, etc. Or they might be going through a messy divorce and simply have a hard time smiling that day.

When we refuse to generalize, we give the other person the gift of seeing their humanity. We also deal the original bigot who hurt us a blow, by refusing to let them color our perspective of the world.

But the real power behind the idea of generalization comes when we consider our impact on other people.

Whether we realize it or not, every one of us is a walking brand ambassador for our political group. When we're rude to a member of the other tribe, it's like showing them a negative advertisement for our group. It’s as if Nike were to market its shoes by showing how well they help people kick puppies. Who would be more likely to buy their shoes after seeing that?

Of course, it's tempting to think that even if we're turning a few people away from our tribe, we're doing even more damage to the other tribe. After all, aren't our insults and clapbacks cutting them down? But social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that this isn't how it works. In a real war, he points out, we can kill our enemies. But in a war of words, the worst that our insults can do is mobilize our opponents. "The harder you attack them [your political opponents]," Haidt says, "the stronger they get."

But if we have the power to energize the other tribe, we also have the power to poach their members and so weaken them. If we have the power to hurt our group's reputation and turn people away from our tribe, we also have the power to bring them in; through deliberate acts of kindness and shared humanity, we can move those same people towards our group.

Take Dave Fleischer, founder of the Leadership LAB at the Los Angeles LGBT Center. He’s been extraordinarily successful at changing people's minds on fraught political issues of the day, including gay marriage and trans rights. In David McRaney's book How Minds Change, McRaney documents a conversation that Fleischer—a gay man—had with a committed homophobe about gay marriage. Instead of wagging his finger or lecturing the man, Fleischer joked around with him. "He could see that he and I could have a good time talking, even if we didn’t agree," Fleischer said. Remarkably, this simple conversation—which put aside facts and logical arguments in order to emphasize their shared humanity—proved powerful. "Over the course of the conversation, he did begin to change his mind [on gay marriage]," Fleischer reported.

As Mónica Guzmán, senior fellow of the nonprofit Braver Angels and author of I Never Thought of It That Way, told me in an interview, "People can hear best when they're heard."

"The kindness of receiving people's ideas openly, of listening to them and trying to understand them before jumping in to judge them or react to them," she says, "tends to unlock people…Research into intellectual humility and receptiveness in conversation shows this over and over." The bottom line: when we show people the kindness of truly listening to them, we stand a much better chance of moving them to our side.

One common retort is that this may work for people near the middle, but our political opponents are too far gone. Their walls are too strong, their minds are too closed, and they cannot be persuaded. But this isn't true. In fact, showing kindness to our political opponents can be so powerful that it can even help them to escape from a cult.

Megan Phelps-Roper is probably the most famous person to ever leave Westboro Baptist Church. How did she escape such an insular and self-reinforcing environment? She started talking to people who not only disagreed with her worldview, but were actively targets of it. And yet, they were kind to her. As Phelps-Roper stood at a protest holding a sign that read, “God Hates Jews,” a Jewish man began joking and laughing with her—even bringing her a gift of halvah. As she was actively attacking his identity, “he recognized my humanity,” Phelps-Roper said.

This is why it's so important to treat our opponents with civility and respect. We never know what kind of positive impact we can have. By offering Phelps-Roper an olive branch instead of a raised fist, the Jewish man was able to reach someone who most of us would have written off as too far gone.

As humans, we're drawn to characters much more than we're drawn to ideas. Describing how cult members from Phelps-Roper to 9/11 Truthers changed their minds, McRaney says that a central ingredient was "people on the outside who listened and showed them counterarguments wrapped in kindness." "An engaged, curious, and compassionate listener," McRaney notes, "is far more persuasive than any fact or figure."

One reason that it's so important to be kind to members of the political out-group has to do with group psychology. As McRaney documents, a person doesn't leave their in-group because they change their mind. First they leave their in-group, and then—freed from the stultifying effects of echo chambers and endless reinforcement of dogma—they start to change their beliefs.

But in order to leave their group behind, they need two things. One, their group has to act in a way that's inconsistent with their core values. And two, there has to be another group nearby that they believe will see their humanity and welcome them with open arms.

We can't control the first condition (though it's fairly common in 2024, with extremists on the left and right both engaging in immoral behavior). But we can control the second condition. And when we treat a person with kindness, we plant seeds that it's okay for them to leave their in-group and come join ours. As McRaney puts it, when talking about people who had left Westboro Baptist Church, "they couldn’t leave their worldviews behind until they felt like there was a community on the outside that would welcome them into theirs."

It's common to talk about the culture war as an actual war. In war, being ruthless and even immoral can help you win. But perhaps a better metaphor for the culture war is that it’s a popularity contest—we're trying to make as many friends as possible. This is more or less what our tribe is actually doing. On a grand scale, we're trying to recruit as many new people into our in-group as possible. And in a friend-making competition, the person with integrity, who truly cares about the person he's talking to and treats them with deep kindness and respect for their humanity, will almost always win in the long term.

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