Democracy is a marriage. Do we need a divorce -- or therapy?

The writer and scholar of conversation Ian Williams on why the capacity for dialogue broke and how to rebuild it

I’ve heard one refrain as much as any other since Election Day. It goes something like this: I cannot even begin to imagine what is going through the minds of half of the country.

For some, like Ed Warren, a frustrated Democrat writing in Persuasion, this bafflement is a spur to curiosity:

Democrats have shown a lack of empathy towards their own constituents. They have consistently failed to listen to average voters while simultaneously judging them. It is a toxic combination that has so undermined the Democratic brand that it led to a resounding victory for Donald Trump and down-ballot Republicans across the country.

Meanwhile, for the writer Roxane Gay, writing in The New York Times, there is danger in trying to empathize with and cater to madness:

We must refuse to participate in a mass delusion. We must refuse to accept that the ignorance on display is a congenital condition rather than a choice. All of us should refuse to pretend that any of this is normal and that these voters are just woefully misunderstood and that if only the Democrats addressed their economic anxiety, they might vote differently.

Today I’m excited to bring you a deep dive into the question of what happens when a country loses the ability to talk to itself, and to understand how others are thinking. Should the seeming incomprehensibility of others strengthen our resolve to live in a reality all our own? Or should we continue to practice humility about what we may not be seeing, even when we’re pretty sure what we’re seeing is a fascist nightmare?

To help us think about these questions, we spoke with the Canadian novelist, poet, and essayist Ian Williams. He has been examining the nature of human encounters for much of his writing career. In his 2024 CBC Massey Lectures (available as a book titled What I Mean to Say: Remaking Conversation In Our Time), he looks into the language of human relationships, beginning what he calls a “conversation about conversations,” an investigation of how we relate — or fail to relate — to one another through speech in our fractious times, and how our relationships might be repaired.

Williams’s concerns will be familiar to readers of this newsletter. The crisis of conversation, he writes, is part of the larger crisis of democracy:

[W]e need to address the deterioration of civic and civil discourse. On the civic side, we speak to each other as if we have all become two-dimensional profiles, without history, family, or feelings. On the civil side, our leaders speak to us, goad us, with incendiary rhetoric. We fall for it. Their inflammatory language combined with the usual hot air we expect of politicians combined with stressed, seething citizens is enough friction to cause wildfires across democracies.

Even as social media has eased access to the public conversation, Williams argues, it has flattened its context; as an ever-increasing diversity of voices enters the public sphere and the civic conversation, we’re in many ways less prepared than ever to manage the shifts in conversation and consciousness that have followed. But there’s no alternative if democracy is to endure:

There is a greater danger in not having the conversation about the state of our world, by which I mean the state of our lives, than in having it. If we don’t talk, we risk imagining each other in ways that are self-serving; we use each other as props to confirm our treasured biases, to invent malice, and to scapegoat for social problems. Conversations act as a corrective to our assumptions and delusions.

I have been saying that we need to talk to each other, and I equally mean that we need to listen to each other. 

We present an excerpt from the book below, along with a short conversation with Williams, who told us about the distinction between conversation and conversion, what he’s learned from Claudia Rankine, and how in this era we can actually have the political conversations we desperately need.

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So this newsletter is concerned with political communication and often with the question of persuasion, which in the schema you lay out in the lecture and book isn’t really “conversation” but an attempt at “conversion.” I wonder what you make of techniques like deep canvassing, which aims to change minds through serious conversation.

I know that there are times when persuasion is necessary, that political and social advancement depends on having people change their minds. Deep canvassing is definitely better than knocking on someone’s door and offering them a button as an incentive to vote for your candidate. It takes an interest in the voter. Or pretends to, I don’t know. And that’s my contention with persuasion: conversation becomes an instrument to extract what you want from your partner. It presumes that you are right without hearing your partner’s reasons. It already has rebuttals and defenses against their opinions. 

I had a friend who was outside gardening when a canvasser came to his gate with a big smile and asked, Can we count on your vote in the upcoming election? My friend asked, Which party?