‘Inside UVA’: Does Talking Through Political Disagreement Help? Yes

Rachel Wahl, associate professor in the School of Education and Human Development: To see that somebody whom they thought was motivated by either ignorance, malice or insanity – or maybe some combination of the three – actually has good intentions, you need to understand something of the hopes and fears and stories that people have grown by to understand the way they see the political world and to see that their intentions are good.

Jim Ryan, president of the University of Virginia: Although I could see that working between Yankee and Red Sox fans.

Wahl: That’s true. That’s true. I think you’re right; you know.

Ryan: Hello, everyone. I’m Jim Ryan, president of the University of Virginia, and I’d like to welcome all of you to the fourth season of “Inside UVA.” This podcast is a chance for me to speak with some of the amazing people at the University and to learn more about what they do and who they are. My hope is that listeners will ultimately have a better understanding of how UVA works and a deeper appreciation of the remarkably talented and dedicated people who make UVA the institution it is.

Today, I’m joined by Dr. Rachel Wahl, an associate professor in the School of Education and Human Development at UVA, where she specializes in the social foundations program within the Department of Leadership, Foundations, and Policy. Rachel also directs the Good Life Political Project at the Karsh Institute of Democracy and is a faculty fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies and Culture. 

Her work focuses on the power of dialogue, with a particular emphasis on talking across differences. She’s received numerous accolades, including the National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Shannon Center Mid-Career Fellowship at UVA. Currently, Rachel is working on a book titled “Keeping Our Enemies Closer: Political Dialogue in Polarized Democracies.” 

Today, we’ll dive into her career, explore her insights on the intersection of education and democracy, and learn about the impact of her research. Rachel, thank you so much for joining us.

Wahl: So, we often think about polarization in terms of divides over the issues, like “Are you pro-life or pro-choice?” or divides in our identities. And I think all of that is real, but I also think there are other things driving polarization that are not as often attended to. I think one of those is the extent to which we trust mainstream public institutions such as mainstream media outlets, the courts, public health agencies, and I think there’s distrust and trust on both the left and the right of those institutions. 

And I think the second driver of polarization that we attend to, but not very often, is the extent to which politics has become a national preoccupation, as opposed to a local practice. So, when politics becomes national, it’s much easier for it to be an abstract, expressive act – expressing something about my politics, my principles, about who I am – whereas when you have a pressing local problem, first of all, you just want to solve it, and so you’re willing to compromise and negotiate to get it solved. And second of all, you know the people who you are interacting with, you have relationships with them, and that makes it infinitely easier to solve the problem. 

So, I think there are real divisions on issues and in our identities, but also there are divisions over trust in terms of the extent to which we feel included in the mainstream institutions of our society or feel alienated from them. 

And I want to mention here the philosopher Anthony Laden, who has written about this very well, and also the extent to which we have become increasingly removed from local problem-solving, which makes it much easier to become absorbed in contests that are abstract.

Ryan: So, what do you think accounts for the declining trust in public institutions and in the decline in participation at the local level?

Wahl: Sure, so I think in regard to the first, I know there’s been a lot of public commentary claiming a decline in trust in public institutions. I haven’t seen data, so I don’t know whether it’s actually declined. I think when it comes to an institution like the University, it’s somewhat recent that we have attempted to be democratic as an institution, to be an institution that’s meant to serve the public, broadly speaking. And so, I think broad public trust in the University as a place that makes sense to send their children is, in a sense, a new ask of the public and a new aspiration, new historically. 

And I think in terms of the second question about what has driven the nationalization of politics, I think back to Benedict Anderson’s book, “Imagined Communities,” where he writes about the rise of national sentiment having to do with the invention of the printing press and newspapers in a vernacular language that covered a particular territory of a nation, and the way in which that started people thinking about their territory as a nation rather than a local place where they interact with people face to face. And I think that media has, since that point, increasingly directed our attention to the national scene. And I think people also just have less and less time to engage in the practice of politics in their local communities, such as through PTOs and so forth. And so I think it’s easier, because of media, to look at the national scene and harder, because of time, to be involved in the local scene.

Ryan: So, you’ve spent a lot of time focused on the topic of dialogue across political divides, especially in difficult contexts like police-community relations or in Charlottesville after the Unite the Right rally in 2017, on college campuses. I’m curious how you first became interested in this kind of work, and when you started this kind of work, did you realize how important it would become?

Wahl: No, I didn’t realize, but sure, the way I started it was before I ever went to graduate school, I was working for NGOs in different parts of the world, in China, in Peru, in New York City. And these NGOs were all in different ways really trying to change the way people behaved by changing what they believed, what mattered to them, and in particular, changing the way parents think about the education of their children, trying to convince them it was important in a particular way and for particular reasons. 

And what I noticed is that in none of these places did the NGO seem especially curious about what parents already thought was important for their children, what they already valued and prioritized and cared about, and I became really curious about the values that NGOs that are either tacitly or explicitly trying to spread a particular contemporary liberal ethos – what kinds of values they might unintentionally or intentionally be replacing. You know, what do people already believe matters? And there was this kind of a sense that these values were going into a vacuum, which clearly isn’t true, because everybody has things that matter to them, right? 

So, when I started graduate school, this was the question that I started out with. You know, when you look at attempts by international NGOs and similar organizations to spread a kind of a liberal ethos – and I don’t mean liberal as opposed to conservative, but I mean liberal democratic ethos, such as human rights organizations – how do the people respond based on what they already believe? How do their current values inform the way they respond to these efforts?

So I started going to graduate school and ended up spending over a year in India studying the way people respond to human rights activism and education, with a focus in particular on how law enforcement officers as well as officers of the armed forces responded to human rights activists and human rights education. And I found quite a few different things, but relevant to my work on dialogue, what I saw is that there were clear unintended consequences of both the more antagonistic methods that some activists used, such as naming and shaming campaigns to try to get law enforcement officers to change behavior around certain practices, and also unintended consequences to the more conciliatory collaborative efforts that were educative, that were part of human rights education programs. 

So, I came out of that really wondering whether there was a third way that could engage people in these efforts that was not as antagonistic as some of the naming and shaming approaches, but also left room for contestation in a way that these kinds of educational efforts didn’t or couldn’t. And that was when I finished my dissertation, moved to Charlottesville to take the job at UVA, and soon learned that the police department and the human rights office were collaborating on these public forums between law enforcement officers and community members. And so, this led me to become interested in dialogue in this instance, and then eventually dialogue more broadly, in different kinds of settings, between different kinds of people.

Ryan: And what lessons have you learned by studying these kinds of dialogues in terms of what works, what doesn’t? What can we expect when you have dialogues across differences?

Wahl: Sure, maybe I’ll focus on the work I’ve done on dialogue on college campuses, since that’s where we are. So, starting in 2017 in the weeks after the inauguration of Donald Trump, and then continuing through the years, I’ve been observing structured political dialogue sessions that have happened on college campuses throughout the Northeast and Southeast United States, and interviewing students who participate in the weeks after they participate, and then whenever possible, a few years later, to understand what happens for students, who thrives in these conversations, who suffers in these conversations, what meaning does it have for them personally, and then importantly for me, what meaning does that have for democracy? 

And what I found is that by far and away, people do not change their mind about political issues as a result of these conversations. What they change their mind about is each other. They change their minds about the people who disagree with them about politics. And I think that’s a good thing. Many people are worried that if we have students talking about politics in schools, that someone is going to end up brainwashed. And it turns out that if you structure a conversation for curiosity, in which you encourage students to be curious about each other’s political beliefs, they are not easily persuaded out of those beliefs, which I think is good. But through the years, what stays with them is a changed relationship to the people on the other side of those issues.

Ryan: And have you tested whether that would happen if you talked about other topics, aside from politics? I mean, if the benefit is you have a more favorable view of the person, could you talk about food or sports or travel?

Wahl: So, there are three ways in which people change the way they feel about each other, and each of them is a little bit more demanding. The most demanding way in which people change how they feel about each other depends upon surfacing the nature of their disagreement. And I’ll just go back and tell you what I mean by all that.

The most common way that people walked away from these conversations was by essentially personalizing the other. So that’s kind of a combination of individualizing them – seeing them as a particular individual, like Jim, who has this kind of mother or background – and humanizing them, seeing that they’re really a human being who’s very relatable. That was the low bar that happened for almost everybody. People would say, “You know, I thought I was going to hate this guy, and I don’t.” That was the lowest bar; it’s very common, and I don’t think that does require talking about politics. But it also doesn’t require very much of a person.

The second, slightly more demanding but also very common way that people shifted, was to see that somebody whom they thought was motivated by either ignorance or malice or insanity – or maybe some kind of combination of the three – actually has good intentions. That, I do think, you need some conversation about politics for, because you need to understand what drives people’s political views. You need to understand something of the hopes and fears and stories that people have grown by to understand the way they see the political world and to see that their intentions are good.

Ryan: Although I could see that working between Yankee and Red Sox fans.

Wahl: That’s true. That’s true. I think you’re right; you know.

So, the third and most demanding way that people shifted – and the least common, although it did happen – was in seeing not only that the person is a person, and not only that they mean well, but that there’s actually some soundness to their reasons, even as you don’t agree with them, even as you still think that they’re wrong and you’re not going to vote like they voted. And the way that that happened was by surfacing the nature of their disagreement. So, if you go in thinking that somebody is not very smart or not very well informed or a bad person, and you learn only that you share common ground, that you like them, that they mean well, it’s easy to walk away thinking that they’re still not very smart or not very well informed. Because if you share all this common ground and they mean well, why are they still voting in the wrong way? There must be something wrong with them.

And so it wasn’t until the cases in which students were able to drill down into what it was that actually motivated or drove the deeper differences – how they get from values that might be shared or goals that might be shared to a different way of realizing those through different political positions – that they were able to recognize that there was some soundness in another’s view, even as they still rejected it.

Ryan: And when you think about the impact of that on democracy, and in particular, on polarization, do you imagine that once people get to that point of view, there is more room for compromise, or is it just that there’s less room for really distrusting or hating the opposition?

Wahl: I think what you’ve described is kind of like the aspiration and the ground floor – you know, the best case and the minimum case. And depending on the conditions, I think that if you have relationships in which you can recognize not only the decency of the other person, but actually like them, and you also have other conditions such as a pressing local problem to solve or a way to work together, then I do think that it makes collaboration more than possible – it makes it likely. I think as long as you are in a national competition, in which politics feels very expressive and there is no concrete way to work collaboratively – especially if you’re an everyday person who isn’t a member of Congress – then it may not lead to bipartisan collaboration directly. But I do think that seeing somebody else as decent, who disagrees with you about politics, can potentially reduce support for conspiracy theories based on the idea that no decent person could actually have voted for the other candidate.

I think that it could reduce support for politicians who incite violence against the other side or who try to disenfranchise the other side when you have in your mind decent people on the other side. And I think that it can make you more likely to take their interests and concerns into account when you think about political issues, such that you’re more likely to support politicians who do the same.

Ryan: You wrote an article about this topic on college campuses, which is entitled “Just Talk: Learning Across Political Divides on College Campuses.” I’m curious what universities can do to foster these kinds of conversations.

Wahl: Sure. Well, I think UVA is certainly doing it, and the Karsh Institute of Democracy is spearheading a new dialogue program this semester. We have about 300 students who are participating, who will meet every three weeks for dialogues. So, that’s one way in which universities can encourage these conversations – by creating extracurricular, appealing activities that support students to have them. Because what I find often is students want to have them, but they find them scary and want support to have them. You know, we very quickly got 300 students who wanted to do this.

So, I think creating extracurricular venues for them is one way. Another way is helping faculty to make their classrooms rich, robust places for these kinds of conversations. And I think UVA is doing its best to do that as well, such as through having the Constructive Dialogue Institute partner with UVA in helping support faculty in doing that work. 

But I think it’s also important to recognize that these conversations are in no way a panacea or fix for the problems that are actually driving polarization, and they also can have unintended consequences themselves. So, I think when we recommend that colleges or other organizations have more of them, we should also think about the ways in which they are limited and the ways in which they are imperfect in their outcomes, as everything inevitably is, because of course, nothing is perfect. So, I think it’s important to hold both of those things.

Ryan: And that reminds me that you’ve also written about the intersections between activism and deliberation as different forms of education. I’m curious how you see those two approaches interacting, especially in today’s climate.

Wahl: First of all, both dialogue and activism have unintended consequences. Dialogue can create exclusions, both because of who ends up being in the room and who doesn’t, and also who feels alienated or heard and respected within the conversations – who finds these conversations easier, and for whom they tend to be harder. So, in the conversations that I observed in the research on college campuses, it was the case that students whose rights were directly threatened by policy proposals of the other side had an excruciatingly difficult experience in these conversations, because to shift the way you feel about another person when you feel directly threatened by their behavior is much, much more difficult.

So, it’s important to recognize that and to design conversations in ways that are as supportive as possible for students who are structurally vulnerable. I say that in reference to dialogue and its limits, because I think it’s important to remember that one way to address that problem, among others, is to remind students that dialogue is not meant to be the only tool of democracy. I think dialogue can be oppressive when we present it as the only way people are meant to communicate politically. And so, I think we can also remind students that there are many tools in the democratic toolbox, and all of them are important, and dialogue is one of them.

And then, you know, activism similarly has ways in which it contributes to dialogue and is made more robust by it, and ways in which it’s in tension with it. So, for example, in some situations, it is partially because of the efforts of activists that organizations are willing and have an incentive to sit down with the public and have a conversation. At the same time, it’s the pressure from some kinds of antagonistic methods that makes it more difficult for actors within those organizations to be receptive and transparent within the conversations. So, it can make the conversation happen and limit what’s possible within it.

At the same time, going in the other direction, ideas that are developed in the intensity of activist circles can then become a part of what’s talked about in dialogic or deliberative environments. So, sometimes you need the intensity and the moral clarity of activism, and a demonstration of the moral stakes of an issue that activists are able to dramatize for the public, in order for an idea to become clear enough and striking enough that it’s then taken up for consideration by people who are sitting down together and trying to figure out what they believe and figure out how to express it so it becomes part of the conversation.

Ryan: You’re working on a new book. I’d love to know when it’s coming out, and the title was striking to me, beginning with “Keeping Our Enemies Closer.” I’m curious how you picked that title, and if you could talk a little bit about the book.

Wahl: Well, my 10-year-old son still thinks that I should call it “Agree to Disagree,” so I might still let him win on that. 

But the book takes up three cases that I’ve been studying over the years, and it synthesizes what I found in them to think about what happens and what significance there is in different kinds of dialogue. So, I look at dialogue on college campuses, dialogue between the police and communities, and dialogue that happened in Charlottesville after the Unite the Right rally.

In these different cases, I make an argument about what’s important in terms of how to support dialogue that is productive, and what can go wrong, for whom, and why.

Ryan: I’m curious about the last piece – what can go wrong and why?

Wahl: One thing that I saw, which I bring out in this book, is that there are key differences between the kinds of conversations that are really intended to shift relations between individuals who are at least formally equal in their relationships to each other, and who have no direct authority over each other’s lives – like college campus forums, where students don’t have any direct control over each other – and conversations that are meant to shift the relationship of a public to an organization in which there are direct relations of authority, and a specific outcome is meant to be reached.

These two types of dialogues are vastly different in what people hope for and want, and in what makes them successful or not. It’s very easy to see dialogue as all kind of the same – sort of a mushy mixture of understanding and collaboration – but in fact, what’s necessary is really different. 

In the first kind of dialogue, where the point is mutual understanding, the best anybody can do is encourage participants to sincerely and receptively ask their curious questions, share their personal stories, and help others make sense of their political views, and to do so with as much respect as possible.

What I saw in follow-up interviews, even three years later, with people who participated in that kind of conversation, is that almost nobody remembers what was talked about, but they do remember how they felt around the people they were talking to. And they do remember that the person who they knew they completely disagreed with was a decent person, and that made a difference over time to them.

Compared to dialogues where people are expecting a shift in their relationship with an organization, relationships remain as important – perhaps even more so – because very little can happen without sincere, authentic relationships being formed. I think that’s just the way human beings are. So, all that sincerity, receptivity and story-sharing still matter, but it must be accompanied by clear and constant communication about what outcomes can be expected, how they’re going to be pursued, and how and when there’s going to be communication about progress toward those outcomes.

Because the suspicions around that kind of dialogue are going to make it hard for even well-meaning attempts to do good. It’s very important to meet those suspicions with constant and clear communication about what realistically can be expected as outcomes, how that’s going to be communicated, through what method, and at what time intervals, to be realistic about the kinds of suspicions that come up around those kinds of conversations.

Ryan: So, my final question is, “How does this relate to social media?,” which is a topic we haven’t talked about, but is obviously a place where people are engaged in all sorts of conversations. My sense is many of them are not so healthy. Is there hope for social media being a platform where you could have these kinds of productive conversations, or is being in person critical to this?

Wahl: It’s definitely hardest on social media, because I think so much of the good of these conversations comes from seeing the person before you hear their view – not literally seeing them, but apprehending the person before you process their view. And that’s because we need a reason to listen to someone. And the reason we listen to someone is usually because we feel that they are listening to us, or that they are sincere, and that they help us drop our own defensive scripts by dropping theirs.

And so, there’s a process that happens when you’re in a room with people and you have a facilitator who is helping everybody to put down their defensive scripts and really listen to each other. This is very hard to replicate on social media. However, I have seen conversations on social media between people who are really curious and really want to understand each other, and sometimes they can go well. So, I could imagine social media forums specifically for people who want to have earnest, sincere, respectful conversations about understanding each other.

But when I say earnest, sincere, respectful conversations, I want to add that it’s very easy to see dialogue as a kind of nice way to pave over our differences, as a distraction from the hard work of justice. And I think it’s really important to remember two things as we encourage these conversations. One, as I said earlier, that they’re not the only tool in the democratic toolbox. And two, that there’s no part of these conversations that is meant to politely avoid our disagreements. These conversations are meant to help us understand the precise nature of our disagreement so that we can understand well enough what we don’t share and what we do, so that we can do the important work that our country needs.

Ryan: Well, Rachel, thank you so much for spending time with me today, and thanks even more for all the work that you’re doing at UVA, which I think is incredibly important.

Wahl: Thank you so much, Jim. You’ve been so immensely supportive of dialogue work on Grounds, and I’m very grateful for it.

Ben Larsen, co-producer of “Inside UVA”: This episode of “Inside UVA” was recorded the week of Sept. 23, 2024. 

“Inside UVA” is a production of WTJU 91.1 FM and the Office of the President at the University of Virginia. “Inside UVA” is produced by Kaukab Rizvi, Benjamin Larsen, Mary Garner McGehee, Matt Weber and Jayden Evans. Special thanks to Maria Jones and Jane Kelly. 

Our music is “Turning to You” by Blue Dot Sessions. 

Listen and subscribe to “Inside UVA” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll be back soon with another conversation about the life of the University.