The Goal of Political Dialogue

John Wetterstrand
2 min readJan 12, 2021

Two fundamental assumptions must be present for any constructive political dialogue to take place.

  1. The assumption that the other participant has good intentions.
  2. The assumption that the other participant is thinking rationally.

If either of these assumptions is not present in yourself or in your “opponent”, the conversation is, for any useful purpose, terminated.

I wrote a post a couple weeks ago called How to Have Pleasant Political Conversations. Today, I had a debate with someone that ended up with us thanking each other for the conversation and wishing each other well, even though we still disagreed about the original issue. It’s really possible (and not as hard as you might think) to have pleasant political conversations.

But what was the purpose of our lengthy debate if neither of us changed our opinions in the end? Was the conversation a failure? Of course not.

The goal in a political conversation actually completely excludes changing each others’ minds.

But if a person has good intentions and is thinking rationally, how can they possibly disagree with you?? The only explanation is that they must be a bigot — RIGHT?!?! Obviously, there are still a couple of reasons a person might not be coming to the same conclusion as you are.

One of these reasons is that the other person may not have not considered something you have considered, or you have not considered something they have considered, or (most likely) both.

The foremost goal of political conversation is to help each other consider ideas that you (both of you) may not have previously considered.

It may not always seem like someone is thinking about the things you say, but if you are engaging kindly and clearly, chances are they’re going to have to at least acknowledge your points, as you should be acknowledging theirs. Perhaps next time they have a conversation on the subject with someone else, they’ll remember that they have to leave some room for other ideas that they had not previously accounted for.

Regardless of whether or not that is the case, the point of defining success in this way is that it’s completely dependent on your own humility. As long as you have thought about some ideas you had not previously thought about and tried to help the other person see some ideas they may not have thought about, your conversation was a success.

Post debate, acknowledge to yourself the good points that your opponent made during the discussion. As you realize that you have considered a few new ideas, you’ll feel hopeful that your opponent may have done the same.

Originally published at https://roughingit.substack.com.

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