It’s Thanksgiving, and you’re seated across from that proverbial uncle who believes that Nancy Pelosi heads the Illuminati and that pizza and pedophilia go hand in hand inside the Beltway. What do you say to such a person?

You could try to move to the far end of the table and say nothing. You could punctuate the pumpkin pie with bitter words. Or you could try to say something welcoming in the hope that, having done your best to make a human connection, you’ll get a human response.

That’s what many of the interlocutors in journalist Anand Giridharadas’ new book, The Persuaders (Knopf, Oct. 18), have been working on ever since MAGA hove into view. They face formidable odds against a welter of closed minds and open mouths. And, as Giridharadas’ narrative lays out clearly, they also confront a powerful internet-based operation, much of it from nations unfriendly to the United States, that sows division where none exists and widens division where it does. Given all the ways that Americans divide—mostly over politics but also history, race, religion, sexuality, and other raw spots—the work of the hatred-fueling trolls has been easy.

Healing promises to be much harder. And so it is that those interlocutors have been going out into their communities to talk about uncomfortable issues in nonconfrontational but firm ways. As Giridharadas tells Kirkus, “There’s a pro-democracy side and an anti-democracy side out there. We’ve got to build the pro-democracy side by growing the circle, not by circling the wagons.” One of his subjects, for instance, is an expert on political messaging for leftist causes. There’s a problem inherent in that very job description, she notes: “Democrats are deeply, deeply comfortable with being against things, and they are far less comfortable with stating what they’re for.” People want to hear what you’d do if you were in charge, she holds, not why the guys in charge are bad. Calls to abolish the Border Patrol are nonstarters in that regard, to name one example. It’s far more persuasive, she counsels, to invite everyone in the audience to come up with ways to “create a fair immigration process that respects all families,” this expert counsels.

A former foreign correspondent for the New York Times and current political commentator for MSNBC, Giridharadas makes no bones about where his sympathies lie. Politics, he holds, is about “haggling over the future,” and there’s room for anger in bargaining for it. “Look,” he tells Kirkus by phone from his New York home, “this is not a book about advocating ‘Kumbaya.’ I’m not opposed to polarization as such. Maybe 20% or so of people out there are actually committed to fascism, and we have to fight them. But politics is also a contest about how we should live, and that’s where we need to change people’s minds.”

If you’re a member of what Giridharadas calls the “reality-based community,” then doing so would seem to be best accomplished by consensus building. He suggests that we consider a right-wing conspiracist to be a victim of bad information—in his words, “incredibly well-funded bullshit”—adding that it does no good to blame the victim for being duped by that vast disinformation machine. The trick, as one of Giridharadas’ subjects notes, is not to try to fight fiction with fact but instead to show that victim, patiently and empathetically, how he or she is being conned.

One of Giridharadas’ case studies, in that regard, involves discussing a freighted issue such as raising the federal minimum wage by finding some shared value around which to talk. As one activist frames it, “No matter what we look like, where we come from, or what’s in our wallets, most of us believe that people who work for a living ought to earn a living.” In the world today, with huge changes afoot and free-floating fear abundant, it’s easy for people across the spectrum to feel lost and defensive, and everyone wants the world to make sense, even if the explanations get wacky as they drop down the rabbit hole. The overarching task may be to change the world, one activist concludes, but first we must “help people shake off any limiting beliefs, whether those are about ourselves or about society, and replace them with something else.”

Giridharadas has been working on The Persuaders for several years, gathering material while processing his own thoughts about what happened when, in 2016, plutocracy gained an extended toehold in American politics. In what seemed a looming civil war, it was critical to emphasize civil discourse about possibilities for positive change. “Think of it,” he adds. “People working on the ground, talking, changed people’s minds about LGBTQ rights. We’ve changed minds about race. We’ve changed minds about smoking. The important thing to understand is that it’s possible to change minds in the first place.”

So pull up that slice of pumpkin pie and talk with your QAnon-besotted uncle. Start with something easy to agree on—hating the Patriots or Cowboys, say—and then, following the lines of argument that Giridharadas sets out, move on to the tough stuff. “Plant doubt,” he says in closing our conversation. “Raise questions. Get people to wonder about motives.” It’s tough work, but reality will thank you for it.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.