Talking to Rural Conservatives by Celeste Inez Mathilda

Talking to Rural Conservatives and How It Can, Surprisingly, Help Your Mental Health by Celeste Inez Matilda, narrated by Bee Flowers.

Talking to Rural Conservatives is a short zine about building communication skills, how to talk about politics with people we don't always agree with, and why that's important.

There's been a trend on social media that feels important to me, which is lefty rural folks publicly declaring their progressive politics.

I'm happy to see it.

I want to say a few things about why these posts matter.

I think a common reaction, especially from non-rural lefties, will be something like, good, tell those conservative people that not everyone thinks like them, stand up to them.

Which I get, and I like doing that under the right circumstances.

But there's something else that's important about it.

What I see is rural lefties declaring their politics in ways that are relatively approachable to conservative rural folks.

I think some people might see this as somehow like softening your politics to appease or cater to the enemy, bootlicking even.

I hope I'm wrong about that because that's not how I see it.

I think that talking politics in ways that are approachable to conservatives, talking to conservatives themselves, or even talking politics with conservatives is strategically important and can really help ease some of our anxieties about the state of the world.

Thinking about how and why we talk about politics.

There are a few different reasons to talk about your politics, and the approach changes depending on the context.

One is to signal your politics to your peers.

This can range from letting people know that they can trust you and that you share the same goals, to performativism, just doing things to look progressive.

A second reason is to discuss politics with your political peers in order to learn from each other, deepen your analysis, uncover incorrect assumptions, develop nuance, etc., which is very important.

These conversations happen in community with people we know and trust.

This creates space for more honesty, vulnerability, and being able to challenge each other without compromising the relationship.

A third reason is to discuss politics with people who you don't totally agree with, to see if you can come to a better understanding of each other, why you each feel the way you do, how you each got there, and to find and hopefully deepen your common ground.

This has to be done more carefully, alongside relationship building and trust building.

If we come across as judgmental or too rigid, the other person will simply reject us and the conversation.

This is how we need to talk to most conservatives, rural or urban.

A fourth approach is for confronting people who are willfully, deeply, and actively promoting hate-based opinions.

These are people like the ultra-rich, who are destroying everything for their own profit, people who run toxic evangelical churches and incite mass hatred of a variety of groups, people who join neo-Nazi or white supremacist groups, people who are engineering, promoting, or recruiting for hate-based movements.