“Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America’s Dangerous Divide” by Keith Payne

c.2024, Viking, $29, 272 pages

And there you sat, glowering across the table.

A table rather like the Grand Canyon, or the Pacific Ocean, and nobody brought a bridge to Thanksgiving dinner. Just like that, politics was served up, your happy holiday got ugly, and you wished you’d stayed home. You’d like a do-over, please, so read “Good Reasonable People” by Keith Payne and take a deeeeep breath.

Growing up in small-town, white-bread Kentucky, Payne was raised on information that reflected his surroundings: Christian, family-oriented, and straight. If he or his classmates asked questions about racism, living “literally... on the line between the North and South,” or their town’s complicated history, he says, teachers often changed the subject.

After moving away from home to go to college, Payne learned about people who weren’t like him, and he assimilated and embraced other ideas and cultures. He became “a secular liberal college professor” who’s distressed today at the divide he sees.

“We need more humanizing,” he says, “because people in our country have been dehumanizing one another a lot.”

To end that, and to pull together again, understand that “there is no liberal mind or conservative mind.” We are all just humans “trying to make sense of the circumstances…”

Our perceptions, he says, spring from “the racial group we are born into,” the social class we attain, and the thought processes we use to protect our mental well-being, which is called the “Psychological Immune System.” We overestimate how bad things will be and how long we’ll suffer. We want to be good people, but we hold ourselves and our tribe in higher esteem than we do others, adding meaning to even the most meaningless groups to inoculate us from things we think we can’t believe. These are the answers to the divide.

Says Payne, “It is time to look plainly at why people believe what they believe, choose what they choose, and want what they want.”

Grrrrrr, your nephew just drives you batty with his ignorance, right? You wish he’d wake up and look around and, yeah, he probably says the same about you. You’ll never understand why he liked that candidate – not unless you read “Good Reasonable People.”

Point fingers, if you must. Blame the polls, lackadaisical voters, electronic media, whatever, then let Payne re-frame the issues with pages and pages of sense-making “AHA!” moments and forehead smackers. Here, you’ll see that the thought processes and various conceptions leading up to the election have been in plain sight all along – for decades, in fact – and they are explainable, if not understandable. In a small way, Payne goes on to hint at the future and how readers can look at their opponents with compassion and the kind of depth that could eliminate a good amount of anger.

Outwardly, this book isn’t going to change anyone’s political leaning, nor will it change history on a large scale. No, “Good Reasonable People” could be beneficial and will mean something on a one-to-one, individual basis if brokering peace is on the table.