What do you think?
Rate this book
A Change Is Gonna Come: How to Have Effective Political Conversations in a Divided America
Get your head out of your @*&. Snowflake. Stupid liberal. Ignorant conservative. There is much discussion today about the decline in civility in American politics. Couple this phenomenon with the fracturing and hardening of political attitudes, and one might wonder how deliberative democracy, much less political civility, can survive if we can't even talk to people with whom we disagree. Insults are thrown, feelings are hurt, and family and friends, at best, decide to avoid political discussions altogether. At worst, arguments cause social groups to break apart. How can deliberative democracy survive if we can't even speak to people with whom we disagree?
As this book argues, we need a new way to discuss politics, one that encourages engagement and room for dissent. One way to approach this challenge is to consider how public opinion changes. By and large, public opinion is sticky and change occurs very slowly; one exception to this is the more recent and significant change in public opinion toward LGBTQ rights and marriage equality. The marriage equality movement is considered one of the great success stories of political advocacy, but why was it so successful? Brian F. Harrison argues that one of the most powerful reasons is that a broad range of marriage equality advocates were willing to engage in contentious and sometimes uncomfortable discussion about their opinions on the matter. They started everyday conversations that got people out of their echo chambers and encouraged them to start listening and thinking. But the question remains, if simple conversation can work in one arena, can it work in others? And how and where does one approach such conversation?
Drawing from social psychology, communication studies, and political science, as well as personal narratives and examples, A Change is Gonna Come reflects on the last fifteen years of LGBTQ advocacy to propose practical ways to approach informal political conversation on a variety of contentious issues. This book seeks to answer the seemingly simple question: how can we be politically civil to each other again?
As this book argues, we need a new way to discuss politics, one that encourages engagement and room for dissent. One way to approach this challenge is to consider how public opinion changes. By and large, public opinion is sticky and change occurs very slowly; one exception to this is the more recent and significant change in public opinion toward LGBTQ rights and marriage equality. The marriage equality movement is considered one of the great success stories of political advocacy, but why was it so successful? Brian F. Harrison argues that one of the most powerful reasons is that a broad range of marriage equality advocates were willing to engage in contentious and sometimes uncomfortable discussion about their opinions on the matter. They started everyday conversations that got people out of their echo chambers and encouraged them to start listening and thinking. But the question remains, if simple conversation can work in one arena, can it work in others? And how and where does one approach such conversation?
Drawing from social psychology, communication studies, and political science, as well as personal narratives and examples, A Change is Gonna Come reflects on the last fifteen years of LGBTQ advocacy to propose practical ways to approach informal political conversation on a variety of contentious issues. This book seeks to answer the seemingly simple question: how can we be politically civil to each other again?
- GenresBook Club
208 pages, Hardcover
Published April 1, 2020
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 29, 2023
TL;DR: Good book, lacks the required depth warranted towards this topic so it ultimately falls short.
Brian Harrison provides useful tips and guidelines for having productive conversations about politics, in a way that is informative and easy to read. There are good tips, insights, theories, and frameworks offered in this fairly short read that I found helpful, that I'll be carrying and working with for a while. However, as much as I wanted to love this book, due to the lack of depth in portraying the personal element of these conversations (even some that were personally addressed to be outside this book's scope), I feel this book ultimately comes up a bit short.
That's not to say the book is useless, which would be throwing out the baby for the bathwater. The focus of this book is on how to understand how ideas change, how people form opinions, and strong ways to view political persuasion. Harrison references many interesting studies from behavioral and political science, focusing on topics like in-group out-group persuasion and how opinions are offered and received. This stuff is genuinely useful! I feel like I'll be thinking about ways to effectively work with emotions in politcal conversations, as well as appealing to shared in-group identities.
However, the void of unadressed topics hangs over this book and the reader like a dark cloud. I feel more time should have been spent addressing personal energy and burnout when having these kinds of conversations. Harrison spent many words on receiving other opinions, with very few to no words on drawing personal boundaries on topics, vocabulary, or personal attacks. The same educational rigor was not applied when discussing when to engage in politcal conversations or how to engage. Especially disheartening with how much the book talks about politcal divisions, it does frighteningly little to address members of politically extermist views and/or groups and the care that might need to be applied to them.
In addition, examples of conversations on political topics showing off some of the lessons to be learned from this book would have also done wonders for making topics stick. Perhaps a small example conversation of a family talking elections at dinner could have driven many of the teachings and theories home.
Some (perhaps arguably all) of these issues I bring up are addressed in a short three page section at the end of the book (Power and Politcal Argument Profiles). These are labelled as important, but ultimately out of the scope of the book, and perhaps in need of another book to fully address the depth of the issue. Not only do I feel as if this was important to have at the start as a disclaimer for readers to frame the possible shortcomings of this book, but ommiting these topics meant the book didn't hit quite as well. Given the focus of the book's ending (on how effective political conversation is similar to the rule of "yes and" in improv comedy), time REALLY needed to be spent addressing this, or it should have been reiterated to keep what the focus of this book was. If we assume, as the book asserts, that "yes and" is the proper way to view political conversation, this can mean different things when placed against political extremism, conspiracy, or "hatred" towards a poltical group falls directly towards you as an individual. With no mention of maintaining personal safety in these conversations, the perceived audience of this advice is someone who is not personally affected by the human cost of the current politcal present. Black mothers teaching their children how to best avoid police murders, or trans activists dealing with death threats both have to contend with personal safety in political conversations. The likelihood of danger may be low in most circumstances, but it cannot be glossed over.
Without the introduction of power dynamics, or even how life might fit into one's experience of politcal arguments, the advice of this book feels like it falls flat. Without time given to consider vulnerable groups or interpersonal complexity, these guidelines are positioned as useful only to those who exist in equal power dynamics, with equal ability to hear and be heard. This is not true, and the Harrison does not say it is, but the lack of addressing the "mess" of these conversations almost feels like I've been given the formula for solving a problem, without explaining how I'm supposed to use it in a real scenario. It is as if all the helpful examples were left as an exercise for the reader.
Despute my issues, this is still a useful book, if only for knowing what tools are available for effective conversation. I'd rather have been given examples on how to use them or focus towards the complexity of actually using the tools, but sadly that was not in the scope of this book. Perhaps the best way to sum this book up is that I enjoyed it and found it useful, but it feels like it has the depth of a researched NYT article rather than the depth of a hollistic guide on having effective political conversations, which I so desperately wanted.
Brian Harrison provides useful tips and guidelines for having productive conversations about politics, in a way that is informative and easy to read. There are good tips, insights, theories, and frameworks offered in this fairly short read that I found helpful, that I'll be carrying and working with for a while. However, as much as I wanted to love this book, due to the lack of depth in portraying the personal element of these conversations (even some that were personally addressed to be outside this book's scope), I feel this book ultimately comes up a bit short.
That's not to say the book is useless, which would be throwing out the baby for the bathwater. The focus of this book is on how to understand how ideas change, how people form opinions, and strong ways to view political persuasion. Harrison references many interesting studies from behavioral and political science, focusing on topics like in-group out-group persuasion and how opinions are offered and received. This stuff is genuinely useful! I feel like I'll be thinking about ways to effectively work with emotions in politcal conversations, as well as appealing to shared in-group identities.
However, the void of unadressed topics hangs over this book and the reader like a dark cloud. I feel more time should have been spent addressing personal energy and burnout when having these kinds of conversations. Harrison spent many words on receiving other opinions, with very few to no words on drawing personal boundaries on topics, vocabulary, or personal attacks. The same educational rigor was not applied when discussing when to engage in politcal conversations or how to engage. Especially disheartening with how much the book talks about politcal divisions, it does frighteningly little to address members of politically extermist views and/or groups and the care that might need to be applied to them.
In addition, examples of conversations on political topics showing off some of the lessons to be learned from this book would have also done wonders for making topics stick. Perhaps a small example conversation of a family talking elections at dinner could have driven many of the teachings and theories home.
Some (perhaps arguably all) of these issues I bring up are addressed in a short three page section at the end of the book (Power and Politcal Argument Profiles). These are labelled as important, but ultimately out of the scope of the book, and perhaps in need of another book to fully address the depth of the issue. Not only do I feel as if this was important to have at the start as a disclaimer for readers to frame the possible shortcomings of this book, but ommiting these topics meant the book didn't hit quite as well. Given the focus of the book's ending (on how effective political conversation is similar to the rule of "yes and" in improv comedy), time REALLY needed to be spent addressing this, or it should have been reiterated to keep what the focus of this book was. If we assume, as the book asserts, that "yes and" is the proper way to view political conversation, this can mean different things when placed against political extremism, conspiracy, or "hatred" towards a poltical group falls directly towards you as an individual. With no mention of maintaining personal safety in these conversations, the perceived audience of this advice is someone who is not personally affected by the human cost of the current politcal present. Black mothers teaching their children how to best avoid police murders, or trans activists dealing with death threats both have to contend with personal safety in political conversations. The likelihood of danger may be low in most circumstances, but it cannot be glossed over.
Without the introduction of power dynamics, or even how life might fit into one's experience of politcal arguments, the advice of this book feels like it falls flat. Without time given to consider vulnerable groups or interpersonal complexity, these guidelines are positioned as useful only to those who exist in equal power dynamics, with equal ability to hear and be heard. This is not true, and the Harrison does not say it is, but the lack of addressing the "mess" of these conversations almost feels like I've been given the formula for solving a problem, without explaining how I'm supposed to use it in a real scenario. It is as if all the helpful examples were left as an exercise for the reader.
Despute my issues, this is still a useful book, if only for knowing what tools are available for effective conversation. I'd rather have been given examples on how to use them or focus towards the complexity of actually using the tools, but sadly that was not in the scope of this book. Perhaps the best way to sum this book up is that I enjoyed it and found it useful, but it feels like it has the depth of a researched NYT article rather than the depth of a hollistic guide on having effective political conversations, which I so desperately wanted.
August 14, 2022
Brian put out an absolute banger with this one
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews