When political arguments aren’t really about politics

As the midterm elections approach, political arguments will become harder to avoid. They will happen at dinner tables, in offices, in group texts and between friends who have known each other for years. Some will be brief and forgettable. Others will damage relationships long after the election is over.

That is already happening. A recent UC Irvine study found that 37% of Americans reported having lost a relationship with a friend, family member, coworker or romantic partner over political differences. The researchers call it a “political breakup.”

As a professional mediator, I look at this number and wonder how many of those relationships actually ended over politics. Not because the issues were unimportant, but because people may have cared about them deeply. In my experience, what people are arguing about is often not what’s driving the conflict.

A couple can appear to be fighting about money when the deeper dispute is about trust. Business partners can argue over who has authority to make a decision when what one of them really wants is recognition for what he or she has contributed. Siblings can spend thousands of dollars fighting over an inheritance when the real wound goes back decades and has very little to do with the estate.

Political arguments work the same way.

A disagreement about immigration, taxes, abortion, crime, education or the economy can quickly become personal. One person hears a policy position and concludes: You do not understand people like me. You do not respect what I value. You do not care about what I am afraid of. You must think I am ignorant, selfish or immoral.

At that point, the argument is no longer primarily about policy anymore. It is about identity, respect, fear, belonging and whether the person across the table from us sees us as someone worthy of being heard instead of being judged.

Yet, most of us keep arguing as though the problem is still the policy question. We produce another statistic. We send another article. We point out another contradiction. We raise our voices because the other person somehow still does not see something that seems perfectly obvious to us.

The problem is that while facts can address a factual disagreement, they are ineffective at answering what could be the unspoken question such as: Do you respect me?

One of the most useful things I learned during three decades of negotiating in the music industry, and later in formal mediation, was to distinguish between a person’s stated position and the need underneath it.

Someone may say, “I want this amount of money.” That is a position. The reason the money matters might be security, fairness or recognition. Beneath even that may be an unspoken need: I need to know that you care about my project and are committed to its success.

Until that deeper issue becomes visible, people can negotiate the number all day, leaving the real issues untouched and ending without resolving the dispute.

The same thing happens in political conversations. Before responding to someone’s position, ask yourself a different question: Why might a reasonable person care this much about this issue?

That does not mean deciding that the person is right. Understanding and agreeing are not the same thing. It means becoming curious about what their position represents or indicates about their personal value system.

Someone intensely worried about crime may really be talking about safety. If someone is passionate about immigration, perhaps the issue touches family history, economic security, fairness or national identity. If someone becomes angry over a candidate or political party, the anger may be carrying fear about what that person believes could happen to the country, the community or the people they love.

You can disagree completely with someone’s conclusion while understanding why the subject matters to them. That distinction matters because once people feel that they have actually been heard, the nature of the conversation often changes. They no longer have to keep increasing the volume just to prove that the issue matters.

One practical tactic is to ask the other person to state their position in one sentence and then why it matters to them. You’ll usually learn more from the second answer than the first.

There’s another complication. We don’t just have disagreements. We tell ourselves stories about them. Someone says something that hurts or offends us, and almost immediately we start explaining why they said it. “They don’t respect who I am.” “They just don’t understand.” Or, worse yet, “They think I’m stupid.” Any of those may hold some truth. But told often enough, the story stops being about one comment and becomes our whole picture of the person, usually a harsher picture than the facts support.

The UC Irvine researchers found that people who had experienced political breakups also tended to perceive political opponents as holding more extreme views. The researchers are careful to say they cannot tell which came first, the breakup or the distorted view. Either way, it’s a reason to be cautious about treating the version of another person we built during an argument is the whole person.

None of this means every political conversation has to continue or every relationship can be saved. But before ending a relationship over politics, it may be worth asking one more question: What are we actually fighting about?

Maybe it really is the political issue.

Or maybe the political issue has become the place where something deeper finally surfaced.

The goal is not to stop disagreeing. In a democracy, disagreement is not only unavoidable, it is encouraged and often necessary. The goal is to make sure we are arguing about the thing we actually disagree about, rather than destroying a relationship over everything we have silently attached to it.