Friends on Unknown Political Journeys
By: Chuck Brown
Tags: Leadership, Politics, Adaptive Leadership, Problem Solving, Impeachment

First, some background on this friend: I’ve known him for over 20 years but I’ve never quite been able to categorize his politics. He holds opinions that somehow resonate on the far left and right (e.g., “Hillary should be locked up…for undermining democracy in Latin America!”), he talks about everything except who he votes for, and he believes in conspiracy theories just enough that you appreciate his skepticism without completely writing him off.

Basically, I don’t get him, but the guy is a magnet for folks across the political spectrum.

The last time I saw him was in April, in a monied, liberal enclave in the Pacific Northwest. The final season of Game of Thrones was under way, which is what we were in the middle of discussing when he got a text. The woman he was dating was in the area and asked if she could come by and hang out.

I didn’t have a problem with it. In any case, I could never resist meeting one of his other friends; you never knew what kind of person would walk through that door.

Ten minutes later, the three of us were sitting around the coffee table and cracked open some beers.

“We were just talking about Game of Thrones that time,” I said, “are you into the show at all?”

“Oh yeah I love it! What’s going to happen you think? I feel like Sansa will end up on the throne, she’s so badass now and probably deserves it the most.”

(Note: if you didn’t watch the show, just hang in there.)

For the most part, it was one of a million entertaining and innocuous conversations about a show with widespread appeal. And then it took a sharp turn.

We had been talking about “The Wall” and what it meant for the fate of the characters now that it had fallen. You may recall that this was a time when Trump was constantly talking up the border wall (and the global border wall business was booming, in general). To me, that felt like a good time to segue into politics.

I said something along the lines of, “can you believe Trump’s obsession with building a massive border wall here? Talk about an idea from another era. Makes no sense at all.”

“Well I mean, I actually build a lot of walls in my work. I’m in construction,” she replied. “In fact, one of our new contracts is to work on a portion of the border wall in Texas.”

I stifled the urge to spit out my beer and say, “wow that sucks!” — knowing I couldn’t make my standard assumptions when it came to the friends of my friend — and instead just offered up, “oh interesting, how do you feel about that?”

“How do I feel?” she asked, narrowing her eyes as she looked directly into mine. “I feel great. It’s my company and I put in the bid for that contract.”

Ohhh I see.

My head was spinning. A young woman working in construction — check that, who owned a construction firm — living in a liberal city, who wanted to see Sansa on the throne after years of getting abused and dismissed by men, who also felt great about building Trump’s border wall so we could keep out the damn immigrants.

In the span of a few seconds, I felt both a rush of excitement to meet a role model like her, a young female boss in maybe the most male-dominated industry there is, and then punched in the gut. Even when I was trying to be careful, I had made so many assumptions about who she was in the space between those two feelings.

Maybe the only reason I was able to recover at that point (rather than sliding into yet another pointless argument) was because my friend was there.

He was the bridge between us. He wasn’t going to make my argument for me, but he represented all my hopes in the world at that moment that I could still reach across the void that had suddenly opened up between me and this other person.

And what ensued was the most productive conversation I have had across political lines ever.

The details would take too long to lay out here. The point is that it never would have happened without him. We both trusted in my friend’s impartiality, and his presence kept us open to new ways of thinking because we knew he didn’t have either a liberal or conservative agenda. So when I said something that he agreed with, it was like getting an endorsement from the Pope. That was what allowed me to move from a technical approach of arguing based on my logic and facts to an adaptive approach of engaging a stakeholder who had no stake in who would win the argument.

This is a type of stakeholder that isn’t typically categorized in Adaptive Leadership but I want to name here: Arbiters.

He might be the only one I know so don’t expect to find many out there. Try anyway. Because my friend said relatively little that night but his role was incredibly impactful.

Without him, I would have been making an empty argument. With him, a wall-builder stepped into a different way of thinking.

Now, I’m also mindful that this conversation was likely only possible because of who we were. All three of us in that room were white, and I found myself being able to wade past things that were said that would have been deeply triggering for others.

For instance, when I talked to my wife about what happened (she is a person of color and works in gender justice), she had a visceral reaction. There is so much trauma wrapped up in what Trump is and represents, especially for women of color, that a white man extolling the merits of reaching out to one of his supporters can be seen as painfully ignorant. She does not feel any inclination to try and engage with someone who, at least by association, disagrees with her rights over her own body and to even exist in this country.

I don’t blame her at all. These aren’t conversations she should need to have, and any white person who preaches otherwise should be very mindful of who they’re giving advice to.

But neither can I dismiss the value of engaging that night, believing that for me, under those circumstances, a different kind of approach to this problem was possible.

Which is why I look at this impeachment process and see an exercise in futility that will, I believe, do more harm than good. It’s yet another technical attempt at solving an adaptive problem.

I believe the Senate will acquit Trump no matter what; Mitch McConnell and his fellow Republicans have no credibility in my eyes. Their supporters believe that progressives like me will do anything and everything to undermine Trump’s presidency; I have no credibility in their eyes.

But my friend, the Arbiter, he does. He and others like him can be a catalyst for transformative conversations. Yet by and large, we’ve actually pushed them out of the conversation for not having a rigid set of beliefs we can wrap our heads around. Being neither “woke” nor “patriots,” we want less and less to do with them.

My own political journey means I will never be one of them, which I’m completely fine with. But I do believe they can unlock a better future for all of us, and we need them now.