Have the Conversation Before It’s Too Late

We need to start an important conversation about all of the important conversations we need to have.

Our backlog of important conversations seems to be growing at a much faster rate than these actual conversations are taking place at. The docket is becoming overloaded. The conversations are overdue. Some of them are long overdue.

No one knows if or when these important conversations will ever take place, or who will participate, or whether fines will be assessed for overdue conversations (like for library books). What will ignite the conversations? Who will frame them, and then—if things start to drag—take it upon themselves to reframe them?  

And at what point does a conversation graduate from being merely “overdue” to “long overdue” (say, about paid family and medical leave, IUD insertions, mental health, and paternity leave)?

The only thing we know for sure is that these conversations will be worth having. They might even be tough, difficult, or uncomfortable conversations—or perhaps they won’t be difficult or uncomfortable or overdue at all, because they will never happen.

And this is often the point of declaring that a conversation is important to have. The affirmation becomes a stand-in for an actual exchange. Sometimes the most important conversations are the ones you don’t have, or never intended to have.

I write a lot about politics and do my best to try to keep up with the important conversations people are having—or planning to have. This involves watching a lot of interviews, debates, and speeches—in which politicians are constantly identifying important conversations that we need to have. The topics might even call for a dialogue with the American people, just so long as no one politicizes anything (always a danger with politicians). As a general benchmark, anything that elicits a moderate response on X or Facebook can be lazily credited with starting—or sparking—a national conversation.

[Read: Actually, conversations are bad]

I’ve found that when someone responds to a question by establishing that such-and-such is an important conversation to have, this is usually a sign that the person is about to dance around the issue for a while. Still, they will dance with great urgency. They will announce—forcefully, reassuringly—that the conversation will be important to have. And by saying so, they will have successfully validated and obfuscated the topic in a single move.

In other words, this is a delay tactic. To designate something as an “important conversation” means “come back later.” Stall for time and hope the problem recedes. Maybe it will even resolve itself. That was essentially the Democrats’ approach to discussing (or not discussing) issues such as inflation and the border in the 2024 election, and it didn’t work. Now Democrats are talking about having the kinds of important conversations that losing political parties tend to engage in—and that typically include words reserved for the examination of dead bodies: autopsies, dissections, postmortems.

Recently, we’ve heard from a lot of Democratic eulogists on this. They keep insisting that they badly need to regain the trust of working-class voters, with whom they’ve been deemed out of touch. What better way to get back in touch than to have these tough and maybe painful conversations? Maybe they can do this in lieu of Kamala Harris’s postelection fundraising e-mails?

[Read: Is this how Democrats win back the working class?]

I’ve also heard that Democrats should preach and scold less, and let others lead these overdue conversations. Or even drive the conversation, if they’re old enough.

“I think we just need to go out and listen for a while,” Representative Debbie Dingell of Michigan told me last month. I guess she was calling for Democrats to go into listening mode, which is always a popular refuge for election losers.

Perhaps most of all, Democrats doomed themselves by refusing to have the one conversation they desperately needed to have: about President Joe Biden’s age. No doubt it would have been a delicate, sensitive, uncomfortable, and highly personal conversation. At some point.

[Read: Biden’s age is now unavoidable]

But in fact, that point was in about 2021. By the time Biden had his debacle of a debate performance against Donald Trump in June, his ability to get reelected to—and to serve—a second term had become an overdue conversation. And then a long-overdue conversation. And then a moot conversation.