If you could escape all the anger about politics, would you want to?

Nearly a decade ago, I knocked on the doors of my neighbors at a prior residence, asking them to try an experiment: spend a few hours with your political opposite. Invite some other friends to join, and we’ll even buy everyone some pizza to sweeten the deal. (I was working at the time for Living Room Conversations, a domestic peacemaking organization.)
They turned me down — literally every one of them. And I was honestly stunned. I mean, these are people who would have bought Girl Scout cookies from me, since they knew our family well.
What was I missing? These kinds of red-blue conversations had been life-changing for me over prior years — exhilarating, stretching and often fun. But none of this seemed to matter to my wonderful neighbors, who listened to my best pitch for political peacemaking, and instead seemed to hear me inviting them to a fight — or something even worse.
This “isn’t an easy ask. You’re messing with their tribal dynamics,” said Village Square national director Liz Joyner in a phone call, suggesting that “many of us get a kind of creepy comfort” knowing that everyone on the other side is “really trying to destroy democracy.”
But what if this darkly suspicious worldview is actually downright wrong — and naïve to the goodness of heart and positive intent existing across the political spectrum?
That’s what 20 years of friendships between this conservative kid from Utah and many thoughtful liberal colleagues has taught me. And I’m not the only one. If you’re aching to clear away some of the political anger gripping you, it’s time for you to meet Wilk.
Wilk Wilkinson is a father, husband, and a former cab and truck driver who works now as a transportation operations manager in Minnesota. He grew up poor, but always felt loved in his home. “While most kids I knew couldn’t understand why we didn’t have a phone or a color TV,” he said, “I was too busy camping, hunting, and fishing with my dad to really care.”
As a young adult, Wilkinson was mostly disengaged from politics, like many Americans today. That changed on 9/11, when he can remember hearing the news while sitting in a Walmart parking lot ready to deliver plants to the garden center. Over subsequent weeks, this young man was struck by how powerfully Americans came together.
“But it did not take very long and some of those people that were talking about unity began the Bush bashing” — confusing Wilkinson to hear the “ugliest” rhetoric. “I became quickly disgusted by the disdain and the hatred.”
This pervasive emotion may well be one of our deeper examples of bipartisan unity. As Jonathan Rauch has said, “The dominant emotion on the right is anger. And the dominant emotion on the left is contempt.”
Rather than stepping away from this emotional heaviness, Wilkinson began listening to political talk radio, 10-12 hours a day, as a truck driver during the Obama years. But he kept sensing that “this is not what we are supposed to be. This is just too ugly.”
“It just kept on getting worse and worse, and I kept on getting angrier and angrier,” he said. Eventually, Wilkinson started a T-shirt company on the side to “show liberals how wrong they are” — with messages like, “My rights do not end where your feelings begin” and “If this flag offends you, I’ll help you pack.”
Yet he recollected feeling “absolutely miserable,” and even starting to experience suicidality. “I just don’t even want to be here anymore.”
Wilkinson is currently neither “miserable” nor “overcome by anger about politics or much else,” observes Mónica Guzmán as she interviewed the Minnesotan on the “A Braver Way” podcast recently about navigating political anger — a media project the Deseret News is helping promote this fall before the election, in partnership with KUOW, Seattle’s NPR news station.
So, what changed?
With people more likely to “engage when they’re enraged,” Wilkinson had been effective at building an audience with the “fear, outrage, and grievance model” (spelling FOG, Guzmán points out, “which is perfect because you get lost in it”). But this blue-collar American says, “I quickly realized that what it was doing was not helping to change anybody’s mind about anything” — rather, it was just making people angrier (including him).
“I was wasting my time and my money on something that was not in any way going to make the world a better place.” More fundamentally, Wilkinson says, “I began to realize that many liberals wanted the same things that I wanted. They just wanted to get it a different way.”
“People that I believed were wrong, were just wrong. They weren’t evil.”
Guzmán adds a memory of picking up the book “Weapons of Mass Deception” during college — which she now describes as “one of those books that really exaggerated things but really acts like it knows everything.” Yet she recalls how she “just devoured” the book with relish. “YEAH!! Like all this is so messed up,” recalling how “anger almost feels good sometimes … to just be angry and to feel right.”
For someone who feels like they’re ready to burst, Wilkinson remarks, once they “spew” all the vitriol inside, “the pressure is released.” And “you falsely feel like you have accomplished something, but nothing is actually accomplished.”
Guzmán recalls the famous cartoon:
“It’s not like … they calm down” after venting and it “all feels great,” agrees Braver Angels Debate Coordinator April Lawson. “In my experience, they just stay in the spin” of hyper-charged rhetoric, like “this is crazy and these people think this and everyone should listen to this.”
There’s a larger trend of people convinced that “to be a virtuous person is to stand up for something and speaking out,” she adds, prompting them to say something “controversial and abrasive or loudly.”
“I didn’t want to be miserable anymore so I started focusing more on gratitude,” answers Wilkinson. And after being inspired by “Man’s Search for Meaning,” a book by holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, he also decided he was not going to allow “those things that are outside of my control to make me angry.”
It’s precisely the sense of “helplessness” about conditions that can fuel anger, Guzmán points out — a feeling that “there’s no way to change them. There’s nothing I can do. … I’m stuck.”
In fairness, righteous indignation has contributed to positive change in America at times, Guzmán adds — galvanizing people to motivate others around them and “focus their attention, to let them know, I matter, this matters, so listen up.”
Yet the “ultimate freedom is being able to choose my response and how I am going to react to things that are outside of my control,” Wilkinson says. “I had never thought of it that way,” Guzmán responds. “Yeah, I don’t want to be controlled,” and expressing appreciation for the idea that “when you find a way to choose your response, what you’re really doing is exercising your freedom.”
So “let’s say that you’re on social media and you see something that really ticks you off,” Guzmán asks Wilkinson, “what do you do?”
“I wait a second” before those “keyboard warrior fingers get going. Before you speak, let your words pass through those three gates (of ancient Sufi wisdom): ‘No. 1, is it true? No. 2, is it kind? And No. 3, is it necessary?’”
“What if everybody really took to heart this old Sufi saying before responding to things on the internet?” he asked, suggesting everyone pause long enough to ask, “Do I want my children to read this, next week, next month, five years from now? Do I want this to be part of my legacy?”
OK, but what about someone hearing this and thinking Wilkinson shouldn’t have given up on the T-shirt company, Guzmán asks — saying, “No man, this fight is real” and “too important to be taming and walking away from the emotion” which can be “so mobilizing” to your side’s victory.
“There’s things liberals are just wrong about. And we need to take it to them,” is the attitude. “I’ve got no qualms with saying that liberals are wrong on most things,” Wilkinson responds.
“I’ll sit here as a liberal and take it,” says Guzmán with a smile. “Yes, go ahead.”
“And I’ve got no problem with liberals saying I think conservatives are wrong on most things,” Wilkinson adds. It’s “the way we convey that message.”
“Never allow your emotions to dictate your actions,” he proposes. “Your default position in all situations should be kind. I don’t see that from Donald Trump.”
“I do believe in a lot of ways and certainly in most policy positions, that what (Trump) is doing far better aligns with my life and what I want from my country than what Kamala Harris and Tim Walz certainly do.”
“But I don’t like the way he goes about it. I think there is a much, much, much better way.”
Wilkinson eventually started a podcast called “Derate the Hate” — drawing on a metaphor from his days trucking, when an engine can spin so fast and get so hot it overheats and destroys itself.
“Derating means slowing it down so that it doesn’t spin out of control and destroy itself,” Lawson explains.
When listening to someone overheating politically before your eyes, she goes on to recommend from her years of experience with healthy debates trying to redirect someone caught up in rage away from the “spin of anger” by asking something like, “Why do you believe this? Why do you care about it?”
Or, “Hey, I’m really curious about that part. Have you had experience with that?”
Anything to try and “get it back to ground,” she says — “to something they’ve experienced or that they’ve seen.”
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