Washingtonians work to bridge the political divide with loved ones

“I was having doubts about the Republican Party prior to that,” he said, “but didn’t really want to admit it. And that kind of also ties into, you know, evangelicalism. I was a pretty hardcore evangelical at that time as well. They kind of go hand in hand. … Once 2016 hit, once Trump got elected, discourse, I think, had been kind of nasty for a while, but I thought it started getting especially nasty then.”

Nevertheless, most of Son’s friends are still Republicans. Son holds to the ideal that most people want the same thing politically: “They want the country to do what’s best for its citizens.”

One example Son gave of trying to break a “buddy” out of his media bubble in order to defuse some of the rhetoric driving his friend’s hardline political views involved the 2020 protests in Seattle after George Floyd was murdered.

The Capitol Hill Occupied Protest in 2020 created an “autonomous zone” in the middle of that dense Seattle neighborhood. Protestors clashed with police, leading at one point to Seattle police abandoning its East Precinct station. The situation was covered by media far and wide, and some of that coverage was more myth than reality. 

Son’s friend was getting his information from sources like Fox News and Newsmax, Son said.

“They’re telling him that Seattle is just blowing up and everything’s on fire,” he said.

So Son went to the area around Cal Anderson Park to see for himself. He took photos and video to share with his friend to bring some perspective to what the friend was hearing and seeing on television and the internet.

“He and I still disagree on those things, but he took [those images] and said, ‘You know, I appreciate that. You’ve given me pause to think about what I’m seeing on the news.’ I took that as a positive interaction,” Son said.

But he couldn’t find common ground with all of his friends. One told him that Christians were going to be persecuted out of the country and he would be blamed for his “unfounded hatred of Trump.” He had to let that relationship go, at least for the moment.

Then came the amped-up racism.

“I’m Korean. I’m a minority,” Son said. And while he grew up experiencing some racism that was mostly “under the radar” and “insidious,” in 2016, especially on social media, he felt that racism broke out into the open.

“To me, it just seems like any guardrails came off at that point,” he said.

Son persists in his efforts to keep his friends.

“I feel like it really comes down to a mindset, and it’s one that you have to actively reinforce day by day,” he said. “For the people I care about, not to forget that what I value is not what they believe politically. What I value is who they are as a person.”

Staying curious

Modeling a similar approach, Seattleite Eric Fisk said his experience on a community council taught him to “understand where everybody’s coming from, what their underlying issues are, and then you look for common ground.”

Fisk, 53, is a retired software engineer and describes himself as “a good government liberal” who has voted for independents in primaries. He said he was raised an atheist who had no familiarity with religion.

“But of course most people are religious, so I’ve spent a lot of time just trying to understand why people would believe [in a religion], which I still think is still a fundamentally irrational point of view that I don’t really understand.”

He finds it fascinating, however, to hear a religious person’s story of how they came to believe what they believe. That practice, he said, helps during these contentious times.

“I mean, if you’re talking to someone and you feel like they’re coming from a separate planet, then that’s very helpful for today’s political discussions,” he said.

However, one tactic Fisk has found that no longer works is humor. He said he has lost friends over his joking around. He is quick to point out that the jokes he has tried to use to lighten the mood are “thought-provoking humor” and not attacks on people or lifestyles.

“I’m not a both-sides-er as a rule,” he said. “But you definitely see it on both sides — just a lack of humor and a lack of tolerance for the other side.”

One of Fisk’s tactics for keeping sane, one he recommends to others, is to monitor your media intake. He said he likes to read Seattle Met magazine precisely because it covers “happy things you can do,” like restaurant reviews and community-building ideas.

“If you visit a news source … and you come away from it less happy, then that’s probably not a good place for you to go visit,” he said.

What’s really driving our political attitudes?

My older brother and I share a father, but we were raised in two different states in two different homes. I lived with our father and my mother. He lived with his mom, our father’s first wife. We occasionally spent summers together on the small farm my mother and our dad owned, but there were often six other kids around. We were a raucous, blended family of his, hers and theirs. For a couple of years, my brother and I worked construction together.

Then we left our father’s construction company to go to separate universities and didn’t see each other much over the next nearly 30 years. He became an engineer working and living in Billings, Montana, and I studied philosophy and writing working mostly in Seattle.

A couple of summers ago, he invited me to go fishing on a river with him for a week. We got along great and took two long river trips over the next couple years, and on those trips we recognized that we had nearly identical political alignment and attitudes.

Professor Pete Hatami from Penn State said it’s likely genetics played a role in our similarity. After all, we share genes from our father and lived with his choices, even when apart.

Hatami has published widely on “psychiatric genetics,” a complex discipline exploring the genetic roots of political and other behaviors and attitudes. While my brother and I have common views with different backgrounds, Hatami said he is interested in “understanding why people differ even when faced with the same exact experiences, the same environmental pressures, same social economic class in the same family.”

First, though, Hatami points out in conversation and in his published works, there is no single gene or collection of genes that will prescribe whom you will vote for. Genes and environment are a complex interactive system that altogether motivates one’s ability to decide moment by moment what you’ll do, who you’ll trust and what tribe you will feel comfortable belonging to.

In one of his review articles published in the Annual Review of Political Science, he and a colleague wrote: “We argue that although attitudes constitute some function of social forces, they also represent neurological systems and biological processes, which, once instantiated, take on a life of their own and update the cognitive, emotive, psychological and neurobiological processes humans use to select into environments, and perceive, view and evaluate their social world.”

He explained in an interview that while there’s a piece of us we’re born with, those genes are expressed or not within one’s environment because of the environment, especially during childhood. 

In a more open environment, one’s genetically influenced attitudes can arise early and you become your own genetically influenced person more freely.

But even in very constrained environments, like having domineering parents or strict social rules and customs in the society you’re raised in, “Once those kids leave home, they start to self-select into their friends, environment, experiences, [economic] classes and everything that they’re going to do anyway.”

The lesson he suggests we take from this research for communicating across political divides is that one cannot change another person’s attitudes.

“You can’t even ask them or try to find some of them to agree with you. That’s just not productive,” he said. “The data show that trying to change somebody’s politics is like trying to change their religion. It’s like trying to change their personality. Once you go down that road, nothing good comes out of it.”

Instead, he said, we should try to focus on the things that we do share, that affect our day-to-day lives.