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How to Email Your Parents About Politics
An autumn ritual as unstoppable as the changing of the leaves: Every year, as the air turns cooler, the conversations with relatives turn to politics.
In any election year, and especially in this election year, that advice is more urgent than ever. And Ryan Holiday’s open letter to his father, “Dear Dad, Please Don’t Vote For Donald Trump This Time,” is a master class in how to approach a fraught conversation with purpose, empathy, and clarity. Point after point, he sticks to a single strategy: Appeal to shared values.
Here are three ways to do it, draw from Holiday’s letter:
Draw on past lessons
Frame your talking points around things you learned from them, and emphasize how much those teachings have stayed with you:
Four years ago, I wrote to you to ask you not to vote for Donald Trump. But this time around, that’s no longer enough. At some point, just finding it all unpleasant and shaking your head at the tweets, while saying or doing nothing more about it, is moral complicity. You told me that as a kid! That the bad prevail when good people do nothing.
Shift the context
Draw a direct line from the world of politics back to their own experience, pointing out the parallels between the stories they’ve told in the past and…
