Ben McAdams On Finding Common Ground In A Divided Nation

Ben McAdams is a Democratic former advisor to Salt Lake County Mayor Peter Corroon (2007-2009), former Utah State Senator (2009-2012), the former Mayor of Salt Lake County (2013-2019), and a former Member of the United States House of Representatives (2019-2021).

By Aiden Singh, January 13, 2025

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from my December 2024 conversation with Ben McAdams. Excerpts will be published serially in the lead-up to posting an article documenting the full conversation.

- - - - - - -

Aiden Singh: So you're in this role as an advisor to the Mayor of Salt Lake County. What specifically did the role entail? What kind of things were you working on?

Ben McAdams: Well, Salt Lake City is a blue city in a very red state. And so, typically, you'll see Salt Lake City is always in a food fight with our state legislature. Our legislature meets from January to March every year, and there’s always some ordinances and reforms that Salt Lake City will have passed during the prior year that the legislature wants to come in and overturn.

So the mayor was a Democrat. And there were things that he campaigned on that the legislature had said it would overturn if Salt Lake City adopted them.

And the mayor came to me and said that, while his voters would love him for being in a food fight with the legislature, and it's good for the legislature to be in a food fight with the mayor because their voters love that, it’s a terrible way to get things done and to move the city forward. He said that he wanted to have a constructive relationship with the legislature.

So he asked me to be the liaison; to be this bridge between Salt Lake City and the state legislature to try and find common ground and move forward. 

He was elected in November of 2007 and one of the things that he had campaigned on was that he would enact ordinances protecting Salt Lake City residents against LGBT discrimination in housing and employment. And that was one campaign pledge in particular that conservative members of the legislature had said that, if he enacted these non-discrimination protections, the legislature would overturn.

So that was one of my tasks up at the state legislature: trying to build support for his LGBTQ non-discrimination protections. It took about a year and a half - I think it was October of 2009 that Salt Lake City adopted these protections.

I had been traveling the state, meeting with state legislators, meeting with those opposed to the ordinances, meeting with lawyers, meeting with the Chamber of Commerce, and meeting with representatives of the LDS Church to build support and consensus for this. 

And when Salt Lake City adopted these ordinances in 2009, the first person to speak in support of it was a representative of the LDS Church who said that these ordinances were fair and that they supported Salt Lake City's adoption of these ordinances. 

The second person was a representative of Equality Utah, who also said that they supported these ordinances - that we had threaded the needle and built consensus. 

And the main opponent of these ordinances had been a state senator who had been saying he’d work to overturn them it adopted. He's somebody I'd spent about two and a half hours with in his living room, on two different occasions, talking about the ordinances, listening to his concerns, and trying to get his support. And when the ordinances were enacted, the press called him for comment and he said, well, I hate what Salt Lake City's doing, but I think they should be able to do it, and the legislature shouldn't intervene. 

So we managed to get the ordinances through, not with the support of the legislature, but by working to get the non-opposition of the legislature. 

So it was a huge success. And I was proud to be part of that and building that consensus.

Aiden Singh: The country's quite divided right now - the temperature's quite high in the public discourse. 

But you had this role where you were working for a Democratic mayor and you were liaising with these Republican state legislators. 

From your experience, are there any lessons, for dialling down rhetoric and finding common ground between folks who disagree? Are they are they takeaways for the national level?

Ben McAdams: I think so. 

I would say this experience was the best training ground I could have asked for in terms of the rest of my career in public service. I was working on some of the more difficult issues of our time and building consensus on them. 

So I think the first takeaway was it's important to listen. I didn’t go and tear people down and tell them how awful they were. Like in the instance of the state senator who wanted to overturn the LGBT protections, I just reached out and I went and listened to his concerns for 2 to 3 hours. And, he certainly said things that I strongly disagreed with, but I just listened. 

And in today's politics, I think one of the things that we don't do enough of is listening to somebody else from a different perspective. And listening, not for the sake of then shaming and arguing back, but just listening because I wanted to understand where he's coming from. 

Because I felt if I could understand where he was coming from, we could address some of his concerns in the best way possible. But I also then shared why I, as a straight married person with kids, wanted to live in a community where I knew that my neighbors were protected - why this was a value of mine.

And we had different perspectives, but we could respect each other. And I think he came to the conclusion that Salt Lake City should be able to do it wanted to do and reflect the values of its community. So I think the importance of listening is a big takeaway. 

And the other thing that I learned from this experience is being able to grant somebody the human dignity that their position - even if I disagree with it - is sincerely held. And grant that it is a position that they believe in because they care about our country or state - they’re coming from a position of wanting to preserve what they love about our state and our country. And while I, in his case, felt that his position would make our community worse, not better, I gave him the human dignity of granting that he wasn’t holding his position just because he's an awful, vile person. 

And we didn't come to an agreement, but I think having that shared acknowledgement that we each held our position for sincere reasons was the basis of really building support.

Today we often don't grant somebody from a different perspective the dignity of acknowledging that their position is sincerely held and is altruistically motivated. 

Those are good lessons to take away and try to apply to day-to-day life in national politics.

——————