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Is it smart to fight fire with fire in politics? Some months back, Congresswoman Maxine Waters urged her constituents to be uncivil to Republicans in public. A restaurant owner in Northern Virginia asked White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave. Protesters disrupted the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. Hillary Clinton said that Democrats should not be civil with Republicans until they change their way of thinking.

Columnists Michael Gerson and Bret Stephens warn us about the futility of fighting fire with fire and how self-destructive Democrats have been. Regrettably, it’s difficult to practice the mature dialogue Gerson and Stephens advocate.

We’re naturally inclined to want to fight.

When you’re threatened, you lash out. That’s the only way to respond to a threat—and besides, the people who threaten you, deserve it.

But this paradigm doesn’t work in most personal situations.

Wait a minute—politics is personal? Absolutely. Politics is about people and trying to advance issues you hold dear, but it takes a majority to make anything happen, and you don’t gain cooperation with anger. Nope, it takes cooperation.

Getting others to cooperate means you have to engage in conversation and that means listening to what people with divergent ideas have to say.

It’s no different than the personal relationships we have in everyday life. The same rules that apply to happily co-existing with your spouse, your co-workers and your friends, apply to politics.

If you’re having problems with your spouse, do you call him evil for having a different point of view? If a co-worker is grouchy, do you respond in kind? You don’t reciprocate bad behavior with bad behavior because it leads to more of the same. To make the relationship work, you have to muster the courage and patience to ask questions and find out what is bothering the other person.

Whatever the cycle of behavior is, things won’t improve until the cycle is broken.

A former Danish politician, Ozlem Cekic, provides a stunning example of what I mean. Cekic was born to Kurdish parents in Turkey and was a child when her family moved to Denmark.

After being elected to parliament in 2007, Cekic received a lot of hate email. It wasn’t unusual to be called a “raghead” or a “whore” or a “rat.” What to do?

Most of us would either ignore the emails or try to respond in kind.

Not Cekic. A friend persuaded her that she should invite her deriders to coffee. That’s right, invite them to coffee. Often, she asked to meet with them at their homes to communicate her trust, and she would bring food as a way of promoting peace.

Remarkably, Cekic would always find some common ground, even with the Nazi who had sent her the most hate emails. Cekic learned two things. She had been just as judgmental of other people as those sending the hate emails had been, and the people who had been sending the hate emails were angry about the state of affairs in their lives and felt powerless to make any change. The hate emails gave them a sense of control, I suspect.

But we all have the power to create change.

Cekic shows the way by acknowledging those who thought they hated her. But to make it work, Cekic had to take the first step, which was to take the risk of offering the invitation and then being willing to listen and look for areas of common ground.

It’s dialogue that doesn’t demonize, Cekic tells us, that promotes change. Not fighting fire with fire.

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Jack D’Aurora writes for Considerthisbyjd.com

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Also published on Medium.