How to Handle Our Political Differences

Ten ideas to ponder to decrease conflict with friends and family.

Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer Ph.D.

We live in a time of intense conflict where many people experience conversations about politics. Unfortunately, we often see friendships and family relationships disintegrate very quickly. People tell me that friends have dropped them because they supported a candidate or simply because a friend was a friend of someone with a different political view. Whatever your political beliefs, it's probably true that half the people in the country disagree with you about every single central point that you hold dear. That's the nature of a democracy. How can we live with these differences without getting into fights that lead to nothing but further resentment? How can we learn to get along?

Here are some ideas to ponder—and put into practice.

1. Is what you're doing working? You may think that arguing and labeling people is going to change things, convince them, or give you a sense that you're standing up for what you believe. Yes, it's possible for you to stand up for what you believe, but it may create intense friction and put your relationships in jeopardy. You may be right, but you may not be effective. It is usually the style of your communication that creates the problem. For example, if you say, “I guess you and I may disagree about that,” there probably won’t be a problem. But if you say, “I can’t believe that you supported that person. What is wrong with you?”— then you are likely to lose a friend.

2. What is your goal? If your goal is to change people's minds, ask yourself if this has been effective. Are people saying to you, “Thank you for telling me that I'm wrong, and now I have changed my mind and I completely agree with you”? If you give up persuasion, you may find that your time with friends and family is more rewarding. What if your goal was simply to listen, state respectively that we might not agree, and then move on to something else?

3. Are you labeling people who disagree with you? Are you telling people that they are naïve, racist, homophobic, fascist, communist, authoritarian, stupid, deplorable or sexist? How do people feel when you label them? How would you feel if someone labeled you? Do they feel insulted, humiliated, despised, and marginalized? Is that what you want?

4. You can decide to disagree and accept the difference as something you can live with. There is probably no topic that everyone agrees on and you already accept differences. Why is it a problem for you that someone has a different political view? Why do you need them to agree with you? You might think, “How can I have this person as a friend if they believe this or support this candidate.” You will lose friends if you cannot accept differences. One way of thinking about a friend is to think, “I accept the whole person—even the differences.”

5. Are you reducing the entire person to a political belief? We often generalize about people—“That is the kind of person that you are.” But imagine if you accepted that people have different beliefs about politics, religion, conventions, and sports teams. We can live with these differences. What are the things that you have valued in the past in this relationship? If a family member disagrees with you, does this cancel out everything about them? Should people cancel you out because you have a different point of view? People are more than one set of beliefs. Embrace complexity—even contradiction—and then you live in the real world. As Walt Whitman once said, "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

6. Think about learning about others rather than changing them. As a psychologist I am curious about why people believe a lot of things. Why are some people superstitious, why are others taking too many risks, and why do some people view life in a depressing way? What if you thought of yourself as an anthropologist and you wanted to learn more about why some people have views that differ from yours? Why are some people in favor of immigration while others fear it? Why are some people in favor of social welfare while others oppose it? Learning about people is different from judging them and marginalizing them.

7. Don’t take it personally. Sometimes we feel insulted that someone has a different view of something. But do you think that they developed this view to make you uncomfortable? Even if you think that they are misled, was it aimed at you? If you observe, suspend judgment, and accept differences, you may be able to see what you have in common and come to understand how complex these issues are. Did you develop your beliefs to make others feel worse? I doubt it. You had your reasons, your experiences, and your values. Let others have the same. It’s not about you, it’s about the complexity and differences that people experience.

8. It’s not awful that someone thinks something that you disagree with. We often respond to differences as if they are catastrophic. We may think that we cannot imagine tolerating the difference. If your friend disagrees with you on politics, what can you still do in your life independently of their beliefs? Can you still spend time together, talk about other things in your life, enjoy sharing your experiences? Or do you get hyper-focused on the difference and ignore the fact that you have a lot in common. Perhaps you can do almost everything that is important to do even if a difference exists.

9. Make room for differences. What if you thought of a person in your life as a collection of 100 qualities including their behavior, their personal qualities that you have in common with them, and their many interests. Of these 100 qualities, what if 10 are things that you don't agree on, but you decided to make room for them? You can decide to rise above the differences and focus on the other qualities. Making room for the differences doesn't mean you like them, but it means that you're big enough to include them and to accept them. Let's take living in New York City where I live. There are a lot of things that you can dislike about New York including the noise, the crowds and the expense. But if you're a New Yorker you try to make room for that and recognize that some things come with the territory. Differences of opinion come with the territory.

10. Make others feel respected and valued. What is true in a good intimate relationship is also true for all relationships. We all want to feel respected. We all want to think our friends value us. We all want to feel heard. I often counsel my patients to imagine that they are a diplomat and they can approach people with a sense of decorum and respect. We can do that by avoiding personal attacks—or threats. We can do this by pointing out what we have in common—not just our differences. We can summarize what others say, rather than tell them they shouldn’t say it. We can be open to the idea that we are not always right, but that we are willing to extend to others the same courtesy and consideration that we would want for ourselves.

Keeping our relationships requires work, flexibility, humility, acceptance and openness to differences. We are not clones of one another. I value all my friends across the political spectrum and care enough about them to know that our differences will not cancel our commonality. After all, that is what friends and family are all about.