Strangelove: How I Learned To Stop Hating And Love Conservatives
“You know your secret weapon?” Fox News host Sean Hannity once asked me. “You’re likeable,” he said, and then gave me a hug. Which might be a surprising scenario for anyone, but especially a left-leaning lesbian like me.
How did that happen? I spent the first sixteen years of my career as a community organizer, working to help ordinary people make extraordinary changes in their communities — whether fixing a broken stoplight or passing health-care reform. Then, rather suddenly, a television executive saw me speaking at a conference in 2009 and came up to me afterward and said, “We should get you on television.” I demurred. She insisted. And less than a year later, after some great training and good luck, I was hired by the Fox News Channel to be an on-air commentator arguing about politics and current events from a progressive perspective. I spent two years at Fox before joining CNN, where I’m currently a contributor.
People, mostly other liberals, always ask me what it was like to be “in the lion’s den” at Fox News. I could tell them what they probably expect to hear — that everyone has fangs and is very mean. But it’s not true. Sure, the hate mail was atrocious — pretty much every time I would go on air and defend some basic liberal position on an issue, whether raising the minimum wage or ensuring access to contraception for women, or even defending the basic existence of government of, for, and by the people — I would receive a trove of hate mail, not just attacking my opinions but attacking me as a person. Hate mail slathered with sexism and homophobia. (I even got racist hate mail, which is saying a lot considering I’m as white as un-tanned snow.)
But the fact is, everyone in the public eye gets hate mail — and women and people of color and gay folks in the public eye, whether they’re on the right or the left, get extra-ugly hate mail. Do folks on the left get it worse than folks on the right? Frankly, I don’t know, and I don’t care. There’s a lot of nastiness spewed in all directions.
But the people at Fox News? The people I debated on air, whether Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, or you name it? The folks behind the scenes, whether the head of the network or the producers and camera operators? They couldn’t have been more lovely. That goes for the conservatives I’ve faced off with on CNN, from Newt Gingrich to S.E. Cupp to Ana Navarro and more. In fact, several are now my good friends.
For me, who certainly walked into the cable news biz with a lot of unflattering stereotypes about conservatives, my experience has been a stark realization about how we put each other into political boxes of “otherness” that have nothing to do with reality. Sean Hannity and Newt Gingrich and I have almost nothing in common politically, but fortunately our politics are only a fraction of who we are as people. And as people, as human beings, we have a lot alike.
That’s not to say our political differences aren’t important. I’m a political pundit. Trust me, I think those political differences are incredibly profound and vital. It’s just not the sum total of what defines us.
Being face-to-face with some of the most well-known conservatives in America, and forging personal relationships with them especially when the cameras were off, has made me appreciate our commonalities far more than I’d ever before imagined. Which made me realize that I have more in common with all conservatives than I think — even the ones who send me hatemail! Starting with those commonalities, making those connections, is the key to building relationships and therefore being persuasive.
That, in a nutshell, is “emotional correctness.”
Emotional correctness is how we say what we say — the tone and feeling we convey, the respect and empathy we show others not necessarily with our words even, but our style. After all, people won’t hear anything we’re saying if they don’t listen to us first. And we get people to listen to us by being emotionally correct.
Emotional correctness is how we show each other that we care, on a human level, regardless of whether we agree or disagree on political, or any other, terms.
Emotional correctness is how we say what we say.
Nowadays, I get stopped in the street by people who recognize me from television. Some of those folks, especially when I’m visiting red parts of the country, recognize me from my days on Fox News. The interactions usually follow the same pattern, with folks saying to me something along the lines of, “I don’t agree with everything you say, but I enjoy watching you. You seem nice.” My all-time favorite variation on this theme was a woman who stopped me in the middle of a rainstorm at Disney World last year (while I was encased in a plastic rain poncho) and said, “You make me want to pull my hair out a lot of the time, but, ya know, sometimes you make good points. And you’re fun.”
We know from history that the greatest injustices require the greatest responses, with mass social movements and ordinary people pushing for extraordinary change. We need more people engaged in change than ever before, certainly more than are engaged currently. Just sitting around preaching to the choir — and denigrating the other side — will not alter the dynamics of understanding and engagement to bring millions and millions more to the cause of social change.
But one by one, if we can build bridges of compassion and find ways to really listen to each other, a society rooted in emotional correctness will emerge. And while that certainly will make us all more effective at talking to our extended families and selling our business propositions and products, emotional correctness will also make those of us who believe in peace and justice and equal opportunity for all even greater advocates for change — change that the vast majority of people will support when they are actually able to hear us.
Sally Kohn is a CNN contributor and political essayist. She enjoys long walks on the beach with conservatives — and progressives, too. This is an excerpt from her essay, “Emotional Correctness,” from The 10 Habits of Highly Successful Women on Amazon Kindle.
