Illustration by Rohan Cain. It was a glorious sun-kissed morning and we were actually cresting Heartbreak Hill, the two-kilometre stretch of road between Rose Bay and Vaucluse, when she uttered these words, and I had what can best be described as an "amygdala hijack" – a takeover of the brain's limbic system. Faster, shallower breathing; increased heart rate; dilated pupils; a flood of stress hormones, mainly cortisol – all resulting in general loss of conscious reasoning. "I can't f…ing believe it," I said, raising my voice and pulling over to the kerb. "You mean I'm driving around Sydney with a f…ing Trump supporter, and she happens to be my cousin." Her reply was mint-julep-on-the-front-porch composure, spiced with challenge. "Don't tell me you think that woman would have made a better president of our country?" she said evenly. "Are you out of your mind?" I screamed. "Donald Trump is a psychopath. He's a sociopath. He's a pathological narcissist."

I can't quite remember what else was said – a common occurrence, I'm told, among people whose amygdalas have been commandeered (think Mike Tyson chewing off Evander Holyfield's ear during their 1997 heavyweight title fight) – but I'm sure there were words bandied about like "Mexicans" and "Muslims" and "pussies" and "walls" and "emails" and "barefaced lies". "Look, I don't think I can do this," I said, reaching across the front seat to open her door. "Are you throwing me out of your car?" she replied with a look of pained incredulity. "I don't know," I spluttered. "Yes. No. Of course I'm not." I was ashamed of how I'd responded to my cousin, not because I thought I was wrong about Trump, but because of the way I'd expressed my views. Truth be told, I'd been violent.

And then we resumed our journey around the foreshores, me anguished and white-knuckled behind the wheel; she seemingly self-possessed, but probably just as troubled. "Wow, Cuz," she said after a few minutes, obviously trying to light some kindling under our frozen silence. "Perhaps we should talk about something else in future." Hillary Clinton last November: the writer's cousin referred to the Democratic presidential candidate as 'that woman'. Credit:MATT SLOCUM Many years ago, during another upsurge in Middle East violence, I visited a village in Israel called Neve Shalom Wahat al-Salam (Oasis of Peace), high up in the hills above the old armistice line, established after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. For decades, Neve Shalom had served as a rather quaint experiment in peacemaking, where Jews and Arabs sought to co-exist across the faultline of their endless conflict, and where enemies sometimes came together in encounter groups run by the "School for Peace". For four days I sat in a room with a group of Israelis and Palestinians, listening to their stories of pain and enmity. Among the Israelis were kibbutzniks, soldiers, settlers, rabbis, those who believed in peace, those who didn't. Among the Palestinians were supporters of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Hamas, plus others who had been involved in the first Palestinian uprising years earlier.

For the first 2½ days, both sides raged at each other and wept and dug their heels in and competed for the legitimacy and truth of their own sense of victimhood. The room was electric with tension as they challenged the other's history, language and culture; as they traded wound for wound, memory for memory, loss for loss. Then, slowly, tentatively, on the third day, they began to listen and, without realising it, started to confront the dark stereotypes they'd formed of the other. They began seeing each other as human beings, not the devils of their worst imaginings. It was the first time many in that room had actually met their "enemy". By the time they said goodbye, there was hugging and crying and, in some cases, the exchanging of phone numbers. For a brief moment it looked like peace was the most natural thing in the world. Even in the best of circumstances – and this was anything but the best – the ability to truly listen has always been questionable. We hear what we want to hear; or fail to hear anything at all. I remember years ago a friend recounting the first time she met her Spanish husband's family, and witnessing all the siblings and the mother at the dinner table shouting at the father "Escuchame! Escuchame!" My friend didn't speak Spanish, so she thought Escuchame was her new father-in-law's name. It wasn't. It was the Spanish word for "listen to me". The whole family had been begging the father to listen. I think about these episodes now as, all around us, the shouting gets louder. The hardening of positions. The ugliness of partisanship. The mocking, goading and contempt for people who hold different views to our own. Everything amplified to new levels of outrage.

Supporters stand near Donald Trump's bus during a campaign stop last October in Alabama, home state of the writer's cousin. Credit:Brynn Anderson When did we lose the ability to truly listen? Did we ever have it? In the days, weeks and months following my conniption in the car I stewed over my reaction. I was ashamed of how I'd responded to my cousin, not because I thought I was wrong about Trump, but because of the way I'd expressed my views. Truth be told, I'd been violent. Violent in my thinking. (This cousin of mine is … what was Hillary's word? Yes. Deplorable.) Violent in my speaking. (I'm driving around Sydney with a f…ing Trump supporter.) Violent in my actions (nearly ejecting her from my car). I'd proved myself no better, no less self-righteous, no less dogmatic and contemptuous than those I'd criticised for their so-called narrowness or ignorance. In fact, I'd probably proved myself worse, given my job as a journalist is to seek views from all sides. And therein lay the rub. I hadn't even asked my cousin why she'd voted for Trump in the first place. What was it about having grown up in the "Cotton State" that so leant itself to a Clinton wipeout? (Trump won Alabama by the enormous margin of 62.9 per cent to 34.6 per cent.) What was it about Alabama's Confederate history, its old racial anxieties, its parlous economic state, its disaffection with the Democratic Party, its contempt for Hillary Clinton herself, its hunger for something, anything, different that so assured Trump's victory? I didn't know because I hadn't asked. In the days and weeks after our trouble-filled car trip, my cousin and I met regularly for family breakfasts, lunches and dinners. We talked books and films and – with my daughters – music, fashion and dating. We exchanged private intimacies about lost loves. We explored issues relating to faith and reason. We laughed. We cried. We bonded. I grew to love her.

Just before she returned to the US she gave me her copy of David Brooks' The Road to Character, a book I'd expressed interest in reading. The book was an exploration of the lives of some of the world's great thinkers and leaders, and how they'd struggled against their own limitations to build strong inner characters. "People who are humble about their own nature are moral realists," Brooks writes. "Moral realists are aware that we are all built from 'crooked timber' – from Immanuel Kant's famous line, 'Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.' People in this 'crooked timber' school of humanity have an acute awareness of their own flaws and believe that character is built in the struggle against their own weaknesses." For months I couldn't stop thinking about my weaknesses – intellectual arrogance being just one of them – and how at the heart of my response to my cousin was the casus belli for every war, every act of religious intolerance, ethnic hatred, racial discrimination and environmental vandalism that had ever plagued human history: "I'm right. You're wrong. I know the truth. You don't." That's the hell realm of today's political discourse: a crescendo of mutual disgust and loathing delivered in a forest of hashtags and 140-character assassinations. Six months after my cousin returned to Alabama, I read a story by Frank Bruni, one of David Brooks' colleagues at The New York Times, about the depths to which civilised debate had fallen in the US. "If not physically then civically," he wrote less than two months before the fatal confrontation in Charlottesville, "we're in a dangerous place when it comes to how we view, treat and talk about people we disagree with. Ugly partisanship may not be new, but some of its expressions and accelerants are. We'd be foolish to let this moment pass without owning up to them." I sent this story to my cousin with a note saying, "And I'd be foolish to let this moment pass, too, without saying to you how sorry I am for the way I reacted in the car on our very first drive together. I know we got over it … more than that … we became close buddies … but the shame remains in how I reacted to the fact that you supported He Who Shall Not Be Named." (I still couldn't resist that dig.) "It was unforgivable and I've remonstrated with myself a lot ever since, plus learnt a great deal about how my own reaction was/is symptomatic of 'the dangerous place' we're all in." She replied almost immediately: "I very much admire your gracious and humble reflection on our inaugural – no pun … really :) – car ride in Sydney. To me our experience was epic … campfire storytelling-worth and a gateway to other dimensions! We came out on the other side – together and closer, with respect and a sense of humour and appreciation."

President Donald Trump speaks about the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last month. Credit:AP We sure did, although I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a part of me – call it the ravenous ego part – that didn't want to send her an "I-told-you-so" email cataloguing the Trumpian horrors to date. Hmm, where to start? What about the undermining of American intelligence agencies, upending of traditional alliances, cosying up to dictators, enormous policy vacuums and legislative defeat on health care, attacks on overseas women's health organisations, multiple firings and resignations, general bellicosity, and possible obstruction of justice, not to mention collusion with the Russians? Or just keep it simple with character traits like vanity, bullying, recklessness, cruelty, misogyny, laziness, vulgarity, shameless dishonesty and a worrying propensity to support neo-Nazis? Oh and did I mention unhinged? But to what end? So that I could download all my old judgments, opinions and biases (conscious and unconscious) with her? So that I could debate the "facts" and "truth" as I saw them? That would hardly constitute listening, it certainly wouldn't be true dialogue. It would be just more of the same sound and fury; one ego (mine) trying to convince another ego (hers) who was right. Besides, in the three telephone conversations we've managed since she returned home, I've preferred venturing down different pathways: Are you happy? Who are you dating? Are you still moving to the north-west? Have you seen The Handmaid's Tale? Do you have any friends across state lines in devastated Texas? Are you coming back to Sydney for Christmas? (Yes, it seems she is.) I wanted to know these things because (a) I cared, and (b) it's not often you rediscover a first cousin after more than three decades, have a spectacular blow-up on the first day, then end up forging a new kinship. It made me think Thomas Jefferson was right when he said: "I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend."

Of course, I'd still love to know whether she's had even a scintilla of doubt about the mental fitness of the occupant in the White House these past nine months. That would be enormously comforting. But truth is, I'm wary of pressing her too much, reluctant to extinguish the flame of friendship. I'm afraid that if she calls my facts "fake", or mentions some cockamamie theory about a liberal plot to sabotage the president, the phone lines between Birmingham and Sydney might crackle and steam and put the kibosh on our yuletide turkey. If that were to happen we'd be no better off than the millions of Americans – and Australians – who seem to have lost a workable vocabulary and shared reality with which to ground ourselves in rational discourse. So with all that in mind I've decided to try to adhere more closely to the uncertainty principle, to the idea of becoming more comfortable with ambiguity and not knowing. And, yes, I recognise this won't help me clarify my views on gender-neutral toilets! I think the time has come, however, for more humility. In The Road to Character, David Brooks writes about the power of this quality and how it offers up the freedom to not have to prove your superiority all the time. "There is something intellectually impressive about that sort of humility," he says. "[It's] the awareness that there's a lot you don't know and that a lot of what you think you know is distorted or wrong … Wisdom isn't a body of information. It's the moral quality of knowing what you don't know and figuring out a way to handle your ignorance, uncertainty and limitation." I like that idea. It's not a capitulation to things that are unacceptable, or even a nod to post-modernists who think there's no universally valid perspective on anything. It's just about civility and courtesy and listening to what others have to say. My cousin reminded me of that on Heartbreak Hill.