[Editor’s note: This essay is excerpted from chapter six of Eric Liu’s forthcoming book LIVE LIKE A CITIZEN: 8 Ways to Change Your Mindset and Our Country, published this month by Simon & Schuster, LLC.]
Civic life is full of change and the discomfort of change. That’s because life is full of change and the discomfort of change. In politics, change talk is ubiquitous. Elections are called “change elections” when enough people are in enough pain to oust the incumbents. Local fights over housing and zoning are all about change: NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) activists resist it, YIMBY (yes-in-my-backyard) ones welcome it. Demographic changes in the United States have led to a surge in white nationalism and Christian fundamentalism. Climate change, of course, is the meta-change upending markets and politics everywhere. Yet we don’t talk so much about the one kind of change that is elemental in a healthy democratic culture: changing your mind. When we do talk about changing minds, it’s often critically.
We mock politicians who switch positions because we assume they have no core beliefs and are just gravitating opportunistically to power. But politicians have no monopoly on opportunism.
The way you and I build followings and get likes on social media is to project certitude, to shame dissenters, to banish doubt. We, like politicians, are often just following incentives.
Knowing how to change—your opinions and beliefs, your mental models for making sense of the world, all of which I am going to abbreviate here as “changing your mind”—is core to living like a citizen. Why? Because citizens in a liberal democracy are not meant to be preprogrammed automatons. We are meant to use our freedom to take in the world, to learn from experience and interactions with each other, and to adapt.
If you are unwilling or unable to change your mind—in response to the environment or evidence, new arguments or insights—then you are wasting our democratic system of self-government.
Let me tell you about one way I’ve changed my mind.
I used to scorn libertarianism—the political philosophy that prizes individual liberty, natural rights, and private property above all and opposes most government intervention in markets and personal life. I thought it was a fancy justification for raw selfishness and was profoundly naive in its underlying assumption that individuals can do without state or society. I cowrote an opinion piece for Bloomberg mocking libertarians, saying they were as blinkered in their understanding of reality as the communists of old.
I wouldn’t write that piece today. What changed? First, I read the rebuttals that came in and thought about them. The most perceptive ones named what I knew were weaknesses in our argument. The biggest weakness was the oldest and perhaps laziest rhetorical trick in the book: we treated the most extreme and objectionable version of libertarianism as a stand-in for all libertarianism.
Second, then, I started taking libertarianism and classical liberalism more seriously—not as the cartoon version voiced by some politicians on the right but as a complex explanation for how societies thrive. I read more than John Locke and John Stuart Mill or the insufferable novels of Ayn Rand. I read modern thinkers like Robert Nozick and Friedrich Hayek, James Scott and Elinor Ostrom. I realized I often agreed with them about the benefits of change emerging from citizens bottom-up rather than from states top-down. I learned that many classical liberals valued a civic culture of mutuality and responsibility as much as I did. And in the age of Trump, like many progressives, I’ve come to appreciate more the benefits of limited government and decentralization and the dangers of concentrated federal power.
Finally, maybe most important, I talked to actual libertarians.
One was Matt Kibbe, who at the time was the head of FreedomWorks, the think tank and political operation that helped feed the Tea Party and birth the Freedom Caucus in Congress. Matt and I met because we were on opposing teams in a PBS debate about the role of government. He’s the author of Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff, a manifesto whose title seemed to me to beg the deepest question: Is taxation taking people’s stuff or is it creating a system where we can safely have stuff? We argued over that question. But I noticed that, for all our disagreements, Matt and I kept breaking the binary of the debate. We kept agreeing on a meta-level: on the limits of left-right framing, on the way the party duopoly and mass media snuff out nuance.
We continued talking after the debate and we’ve been friends ever since. He’s a member of Citizen University’s Civic Collaboratory. He left FreedomWorks in 2015 and, after a stint running a super PAC for Rand Paul, he and his wife, Terry, founded Free the People, a media company that makes documentaries and other story-driven content to make abstract issues of liberty more relatable. He had me on his YouTube show called Speaking with the Enemy. He’s introduced me to other principled right-of-center leaders.
To be clear: we still disagree on so many things, from vaccine mandates to income taxes to the war in Ukraine. But I’ve come to appreciate the intellectual depth of his approach to freedom and the state. We’ve added each other to our social and professional networks. And he’s been a part of the changing of my mind. Which is to say, he’s now part of the ever-changing composite system of sense making that is my mind.
The point of this single instance of a mind shift is not that right or left is right or wrong or that shades of gray is always better than black-and-white. The point is that no mind is an island. Your worldview is shaped by your experiences and your relationships. The source material for both is other people.
At the same time, we are not drones with a hive mind. Humans are not bees. The individual mind and heart matter because the individual in a liberal democracy is the core unit of dignity. Not the race, not the class, not the gender, not the party. The pursuit of happiness is an individual search for purpose and recognition. [...]
In this essay, I describe three steps to changing your mind. First, know your own mind. Second, learn and know minds that are different from yours. Third, honestly assess what you’ve got invested in your current mindset—and diversify your investments.
These three steps constitute a climb. Each step requires curiosity. Each requires successively more courage. So, as always, begin the journey not in isolation—not in your own head—but in continuous conversation and interaction with others.
Know Your Own Mind
Most of us have opinions or “takes” on things in the news or in our communities. If I ask you what you think about the encampment of homeless people in the church parking lot in your neighborhood, you’ll likely have an answer. But you also likely haven’t thought much about where opinions like that come from.
All of us have mental models for explaining the world. Your opinion on the homeless encampment is a product of a background set of assumptions, beliefs, intuitions, and dispositions. Those moral and explanatory frameworks are about poverty, addiction, and mental health, yes, but also at a more general level about compassion and permissiveness, personal and collective responsibility, order and disorder, good intentions and unintended consequences.
You have a theory about how people, given the chance, will always do X or how governments are good at Y but not Z. Maybe that theory was formed by your parents. Maybe it was the product of a stressful experience in your life. Maybe it is the result of your inborn wiring for a certain kind of moral response to things. Maybe it is what you’ve digested from your media diet. Maybe it’s the cultural norms of your ethnic or religious community. Maybe it’s just what you heard someone say the other day.
Step back and examine the contents of your own mental models: what you think, how you think, and why. It will make you a more effective citizen.
I first started collaborating with my friend Nick Hanauer back in late 2006. We were both involved in politics in Washington State, I as someone with experience in national politics and Nick as a venture capitalist who had started several civic organizations. (He was my coauthor on that piece mocking libertarians.) As Democrats, we were frustrated with the uninspired campaign the national party had run in the recent midterms. Party leaders had decided to boil down their message to the acronym MMEE: Medicare, Medicaid, education, environment. TV ads and door hangers were made to emphasize that Republicans would threaten those four things.
On the one hand, you could say the message worked: Democrats made great gains in Congress that election. On the other hand, the message was not a message; it was a policy list. It showed that the Democratic Party had forgotten how to speak a language of values. Party leaders no longer could state clearly what they believed and why.
We realized at that moment that neither could we.
Sure, we had broadly progressive views on various policy issues. I could tell you I was pro-choice or against tax cuts for the rich. But I’d never truly examined why I believed these things and how or whether these beliefs hung together in a “belief system.”
So Nick and I began a conversation that turned into scribbles on a pad that turned into grids on a whiteboard that turned into a Word document that turned into a short book we published in 2007 called The True Patriot. It argued that true patriotism isn’t jingoistic bombast; it’s closing the gap between our nation’s creed and deeds. Four years later we wrote another book called The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government. It argued that a democracy, economy, and community are gardens, not machines—complex ecosystems that, left alone, will be overrun by noxious weeds—and that citizens must weed, seed, and feed them. Gardens require gardeners.
Both projects had an impact, shaping debates on patriotism in the 2008 presidential contest and influencing national economic policy and civic renewal work ever since. But their greatest value to us was that they distilled our mental models for how things work or should work. In fact, more than distilled: they forced them into full and systematic articulation. They revealed that we both liked to approach things in an “orthogonal” way—that is, not along a strict left-right axis but often at an angle to it.
I now can state a coherent point of view about the responsibilities of freedom. About how love of country should be measured by contribution, not chest-thumping. About the true source of prosperity. About the proper role of government in the marketplace and in our personal lives. About the power of citizens to remake institutions. I can tell you why I’m more communitarian than libertarian. And I can describe why my views, like a binocular, often mesh elements of left and right.
Those views have changed in small and larger ways in the decade and a half since we wrote those books: that’s the point of this essay! But now I can map the changes and challenge myself to ask whether they result from the pull of Seattle progressives or the experience of parenthood or anti-Asian racism or something else. And I can have compassion for and curiosity about someone else’s changes in views.
I am not saying you need to write a book to know your own mind. Just make a list. Tear out a piece of notebook paper or open your Notes app and take inventory of the core values and beliefs that shape your civic worldview. Start by answering some broad questions like the following and keep going as you are inspired:
Do you usually trust people or mistrust them?
What kind of power would you say you have?
Do you think poverty is mainly a matter of personal responsibility?
Do you think government protects your freedom or threatens it?
Do you think capitalism is, on balance, good or bad?
Then invite at least one other person to do the same and meet with them to share your lists. While taking turns describing what you think, you will reveal how you think and why. This is the inquiry. It’s important to do this in conversation. Push each other to flesh out or burn off the shorthand to make your reflexive reactions more reflective.
When you say capitalism is evil, do you think it can be reformed?
Do you truly think all government spending is wasteful?
More wasteful than corporate spending?
What government rules do you think are necessary?
When you say “Follow the money,” are you more skeptical of the money of one party than that of the other?
When you say you feel small, do you think all giant institutions are suspect or just certain kinds? Which kinds?
Was it your family, your social setting, or something you experienced directly that makes you think this way?
Was there ever a time when you realized what you thought was wrong?
You’re not having a debate. You’re going on an archaeological dig, a joint excavation of the sedimentary layers in your head and heart: slogans, folk beliefs, inherited mantras, hard personal lessons, deeply considered concepts, gems of insight, long-buried trash. Doing this digging does not require special credentials. It requires only a willingness to ask and answer questions.
And it’s fun! Not just for civic nerds like me but for anyone who wants to feel a sense of civic agency and power. Because whatever the level of sophistication and length of your inventory and your inquiry, you will uncover ways you have been letting others set your direction and make up your mind for you.
You’ll then be able to apply your increased self-knowledge not only in the kind of intentional study I have just described but in the unpredictable flow of life in your community.
Akhil Amar is a constitutional law professor at Yale. Friends and fellow sons of immigrants, we call each other “brothers from another mother.” As a scholar and a public intellectual, he’s always had a heterodox profile. His policy views are generally liberal. At the same time, he calls himself an originalist—an approach to interpreting the Constitution favored by conservatives. He participates in the activities of both the American Constitution Society on the left and the Federalist Society on the right.
He once told me that the most important question he puts to his students is Do you know your own mind? The implication is that even at (maybe especially at) elite educational institutions, many people have never stress-tested their intuitions about how society and law operate.
Akhil practices what he preaches. His writings about the Constitution and American political history are a decades-long articulation of his nuanced mental models for what our country is and could be. They are admired and critiqued by readers on the left, on the right, and in the center. But it’s in his classroom teaching that his practice really shows.
In 2019 he was teaching his Intro Con Law course for undergraduates when two students entered the hall to disrupt the lecture with a piece of protest-as-performance-art. They suggested that Akhil condoned ethnic cleansing because the Constitution enabled the dispossession of Native Americans. They implied he was complicit in attacks on women’s autonomy because he had testified to the judicial and intellectual qualifications of Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court nominee. (This was before Kavanaugh was publicly accused of sexual misconduct.) The protestors criticized his affiliation with the Federalist Society. Then they said they had a pamphlet to share.
Akhil defied every expectation, especially that of the protestors, when he gamely welcomed them and invited them to the stage to speak about their pamphlet. They did. They shared copies with the students. Akhil didn’t rebut or argue or try to control. He stayed off to the side, listening. When the protestors finished a few minutes later, he thanked them and invited them to stay. The protestors declined and left. Then he continued that day’s lecture on civil rights. Along the way, he noted the points the protestors had raised about how the Constitution has been used to deny rights to nonwhite people. He added that a university education should equip people to reflect on the meaning of a protest.
His behavior in that unexpected moment spoke volumes about what he believes, how he thinks, and why: he trusts profoundly in the clash of ideas and in the benefits of having that clash happen face-to-face. He believes it is the Constitution’s genius that makes the clash possible and its failings that make it necessary. He thinks beyond the binary. He is entirely comfortable having his mindset and worldview challenged. And of course he knew he supported neither ethnic cleansing nor the oppression of women.
Later, Akhil told reporters for the school paper that even though this was the kind of classroom disruption that university speech rules don’t protect, he judged that the disruption was minor and had created a teachable moment. Perhaps as remarkably, the protestors later publicly expressed appreciation for his grace.
Getting to know your own mind makes you more open and less defensive, which makes others that way too. And it makes you ready, even eager, to get to know other minds.
Learn Other Minds
Having named your mental models, you now must do something a little harder. You must resist falling in love with them. As the saying goes, “Don’t believe everything you think.” Maintaining a critical distance from your own civic mind, questioning from time to time whether the frameworks you’ve used are still useful explanations and tools for living, is called epistemic humility. It is a crucial part of living like a citizen.
To cultivate such humility, get to know other minds that hold differing views. Ask every day: Am I being too pure? Too single-source and party-line in my politics and media? Too homogenous in my social network, my sources of inspiration, my cultural tastes and styles? Too righteous and binary in my values? Too hostile to ambiguity? Too flattening of other people’s complexity? Too showy in my signaling of virtue? Too moralistic in my condemnation of error? Too willing to shut down my own mind for the favor of a clique or a cult?
The first and easiest thing to do is broaden your media and ideas diet. I don’t mean just to read, watch, or listen to voices and opinions of people who see the world differently from you. Do that, absolutely. I mean particularly to search out people living and dead who themselves have done some work of civic self-excavation and change.
When my daughter Olivia was a college student, I gave her an unusual birthday present. I curated for her a “right-of-center-on-race book club.” She was on a very progressive campus, minoring in REMS (race, ethnicity, migration studies). I realized that at a key moment in her formation she wasn’t going to get much exposure to non-left vantage points. So I gave her my dog-eared copies of Shelby Steele’s The Content of Our Character, Jim Sleeper’s Liberal Racism, Stephen L. Carter’s Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s The Disuniting of America, and others.
These weren’t right-wing screeds, but they were critiques of what was becoming a more rigid identity-politics left—all by people who’d done some soul-searching and changed. Olivia read the books; we talked about what she liked and didn’t. And they all went into the making up of her mind, which today is progressive and inclusive on race matters but also skeptical of all groupthink, progressive or otherwise.
Mere exposure to unfamiliar minds has its benefits. But the more you read and listen, the more you will be able to check your first reactions of disagreement or disgust or defensiveness. The more you may even be able to practice what Charles Darwin called the principle of charity—putting arguments you don’t like in their most favorable light and assuming that the people making them have the best intentions. This isn’t to be charitable to them; it is to be charitable to you—to give yourself the gift of stepping into someone else’s shoes, head, and heart, even if they challenge your long-held worldview.
Another way to learn other minds is to expand your diet of friends and collaborators. Form relationships with people outside your bubble and consume their way of making sense of the world. Digest it; draw nutrients from it. There are organizations you can join whose express purpose is to make friends across divides. Interfaith America uses the potluck dinner as a literal and metaphorical way to promote pluralism. Braver Angels and Living Room Conversations invite people from left and right to meet in people’s homes to discuss their differences. Rich Tafel—a pastor, social entrepreneur, and conservative thought leader (and Citizen University board member)—has been diversifying his friend network throughout his career. In the 1990s he was the founder of the Log Cabin Republicans, the leading advocates for gays and lesbians in the GOP. He pushed for LGBTQ+ rights, expanded the party, and built bipartisan and cross-ideological support for AIDS funding. In that work he sharpened habits that have shaped his career: creating alliances among unlikely partners and learning the different languages spoken by different civic tribes.
More recently, Rich designed a popular workshop series called Cultural Translation, in which he explains what progressives mean and conservatives hear and vice versa when they use words like equity or liberty, belonging or freedom. In a time when the letters D, E, and I have been demonized, he trains people in government, corporate HR departments, and the academy how to make words and values mean something again.
The third way to learn other minds is perhaps most important: focus on a third thing—not just you and me talking about you and me but both of us working together on a third thing. A shared experience that transcends differences. This is what the military has long provided for our diverse society.
I experienced this when I spent two of my college summers completing Marine Corps Officer Candidates School. My platoons comprised people from small-town Michigan and Maine and Georgia and Mississippi, inner-city Detroit, working-class New York, posh Connecticut suburbs, state schools, and private colleges. We took turns leading each other in units as small as a four-man fire team and as large as a two-hundred-man company on tasks as mundane as marching to the mess hall and as serious as nighttime tactical exercises. As we focused on all these tasks and challenges, we had side conversations about our upbringings, our political views, our family expectations, our ambitions. Not everyone who made it through was going to choose to take a commission as a second lieutenant—I declined mine to go work in government—but all of us were bonded by this experience of knowing and becoming known via third things.
If I could wave a wand I would make service—civilian or military—mandatory for all young people. Working alongside people who differ from you creates an indirect path to understanding that might be stickier than the direct path. It makes you more willing to change and grow because the change and growth are a by-product of the work and common endeavor.
This is why David McCullough III started the American Exchange Project. High schools around the United States have foreign exchange programs, in which students go abroad for a stretch to live and learn about a new place with a host family. What struck David is that in these polarized times young people could use a domestic exchange program. So he created one—the first of its kind in the nation.
In the American Exchange Project pilot in 2021, high school seniors from Kilgore, Texas, and Lake Charles, Louisiana, did immersive exchanges with their counterparts in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and Palo Alto, California. They got to make friends across ideology, geography, class, race. AEP has since expanded to dozens of communities across the country for weeklong exchanges. There are host families, service projects, distinctively local experiences. It’s all free. The people who experience the exchanges change their narratives and assumptions—about each other, about other parts of the country, about themselves.
Bryce Borders, a participant from Kilgore, put it succinctly after he returned from New York City: “Our country is very divided, and the main reason that’s happening is because we simply don’t know each other.” When eight or ten high schoolers from various towns all converge for an exchange, they have a shared purpose: discovering a seemingly foreign place by doing things together.
The third thing can also be a text or some other object of study. There’s a method in Jewish education called hevruta in which pairs of students analyze a Torah portion together. One day I was talking with Joni Blinderman, who leads the Covenant Foundation and its work to promote innovations in Jewish learning. It hit me as we were chatting that we could create an experiment in “civic hevruta,” where pairs would study pieces of civic scripture like the Declaration or the Gettysburg Address and apply the same methods of close reading and connection making to other texts and ideas.
She liked the idea, and in early 2025 the Covenant Foundation and CU brought together about twenty educators from synagogues, Jewish day schools, and innovative nonprofits across the United States. They ran the gamut from Orthodox to Reform and had a range of views about how to respond to the October 7 Hamas attack. But they were united in their desire to care for their anguished and divided congregations and communities.
Over the next couple of days, we studied Torah alongside the Preamble to the Constitution, Reagan’s farewell address, and Frederick Douglass’s speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” We juxtaposed ancient rabbinical teachings about justice with John Lewis’s reflections on moral formation. This allowed participants to talk openly about how to model doubt, when and when not to empathize or compromise, what the uses and limits of outrage are, and how best to serve. There was no consensus; there wasn’t meant to be. We were ostensibly learning a text, but in truth we were learning each other. A collective focus on a single object of study enabled each participant to understand the minds of their colleagues. And become more open to change.
Citizen assemblies operate on the same principle. In these local gatherings participants are chosen by lottery to deliberate on a community issue, whether it’s land use or childcare or climate policy, and provide guidance to policymakers or voters. Citizen assemblies are as old as Athens. But they are percolating now across the United States and globally not just because the guidance of an informed mini-public is more useful than a poll but also because participating in an assembly helps citizens learn, in a nonconfrontational format, how others see the world and approach problems.
Now, some of you might resist the suggestion to broaden your media and friend diets, much less to do something with people from other tribes. This is all nice, you might say, but life is
short. Why should I waste precious time watching Fox or MSNBC or reading about how people I don’t like got to be that way? Why should I seek relationships with people who vote or pray or dress or love in ways that make me deeply uncomfortable?
My quick answer is because life is short.
As a human, you should want to experience life as fully as your circumstances allow. As an American human, you should take full advantage of the fact that we have the full breadth of humanity in our own country. David McCullough III is a young man. He’s also the grandson and namesake of the celebrated American historian, which gives him just this kind of perspective on life and the purpose of life.
My deeper answer is because it is uncomfortable. It is precisely the discomfort, the difficulty, that makes learning other minds worthwhile and worthy.
The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, says that each of us has an inborn “moral palate” that predisposes us to certain moral tastes. Conservatives tend to favor a pattern of moral reasoning that’s about sanctity and loyalty. Liberals are drawn more to care and fairness. We define what’s right in different ways and that’s an everlasting source of tension and conflict.
In culinary life, I might try something that pleases your palate, but if I don’t like it, I never have to encounter it again. In American civic life, in a pluralistic open self-governing society, we must encounter each other perpetually. Your moral tastes will shape what I consume, and vice versa, like it or not. My palate can’t ever be fully segregated from yours. It behooves us, then, to learn how to integrate in productive ways.
The point isn’t that you should always be trying to change your mind. The point is that you should always be able to change your mind, to add subtlety or complexity or new dimensions to how you take in a person, an issue, a situation in civic life. Learning the views of people who see things in a way that’s perhaps distasteful to you is not an exercise in self-flagellation; it’s an exercise in civic muscle building.
Copyright © 2026 by Eric Liu. From the forthcoming book LIVE LIKE A CITIZEN: 8 Ways to Change Your Mindset and Our Country by Eric Liu to be published by Simon & Schuster, LLC.
Printed by permission.
