We’re defined not only by our friends but by whose hatred we welcome
Writer Anand Giridharadas is a distinctive voice on politics and culture. His newest book, “The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy” is out today. Coincidentally, he comments this morning in the New York Times on the knife’s edge between liberal democracy and fascism where U.S. political culture sits just now:
It is time to speak an uncomfortable truth: The pro-democracy side is at risk not just because of potential electoral rigging, voter suppression and other forms of unfair play by the right, as real as those things are. In America (as in various other countries), the pro-democracy cause — a coalition of progressives, liberals, moderates, even decent Republicans who still believe in free elections and facts — is struggling to win the battle for hearts and minds.
One of the wonky left’s greatest weaknesses it considers its greatest strength: its smarts. Geeks considered “brains” in high school found that in the wider world their smarts were more reliably marketable than looks and personality.
“I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results,” Ray Stanz (Dan Ackroyd) tells his fellow Ghostbusters.
True. But a quick review of members of Congress should disabuse the left that smarts is all it takes to get ahead. Yet the left refuses to be disabused. And here we are, staring down an authoritarian movement inimical to the principles it claims to revere.
Giridharadas point up the flaw in the left’s sense of itself. The reality-based community needs to expand its palette, to get more muscular, less reactive, and less dependent on cold facts for winning hearts and minds:
The pro-democracy side can still very much prevail. But it needs to go beyond its present modus operandi, a mix of fatalism and despair and living in perpetual reaction to the right and policy wonkiness and praying for indictments. It needs to build a new and improved movement — feisty, galvanizing, magnanimous, rooted and expansionary — that can outcompete the fascists and seize the age.
I believe pro-democracy forces can do this because I spent the past few years reporting on people full of hope who show a way forward, organizers who refuse to give in to fatalism about their country or its citizens. These organizers are doing yeoman’s work changing minds and expanding support for true multiracial democracy, and they recognize what more of their allies on the left must: The fascists are doing as well as they are because they understand people as they are and cater to deep unmet needs, and any pro-democracy movement worth its salt needs to match them at that — but for good.
In their own circles and sometimes in public, these organizers warn that the right is outcompeting small-d democrats in its psychological insight into voters and their anxieties, its messaging, its knack for narrative, its instinct to make its cause not just a policy program but also a home offering meaning, comfort and belonging. They worry, meanwhile, that their own allies can be hamstrung by a naïve and high-minded view of human nature, a bias for the wonky over the guttural, a self-sabotaging coolness toward those who don’t perfectly understand, a quaint belief in going high against opponents who keep stooping to new lows and a lack of fight and a lack of talent at seizing the mic and telling the kinds of galvanizing stories that bend nations’ arcs.
We need to get louder. But more than that. We need to learn how to get and hold attention. To shed the depressive glass-half-empty progressivism for the glass-half-full kind.
“The right presently runs laps around the left in its ability to manage and use attention. It understands the power of provocation to make people have the conversation that most benefits its side,” Giridharadas writes. We need to tell stories more than recite statistics, to trumpet our successes even as opponents try to divert attentions elsewhere. We’d rather rant about the right’s latest outrages than about how wiping out student debt will change people’s lives forever. So much so that they advertise it to their friends for us.
We hate repeating things. Message discipline is tough, especially when the message is flat and not compelling. But repetition is powerful. Did you know repetition is powerful?
The right, Giridharadas reminds, is always seeking ways to weave together disparate, small harbingers of social change people notice everyday into sweeping, John Ford-ish narratives about threats to hearth and home. The left is always bringing “four-point plans to gunfights.”
But we need to win those gunfights, and sometimes start them. We are defined not only by our friends but by whose hatred we welcome, as FDR loudly declared.
Why did the Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Beto O’Rourke, go viral when he confronted the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, during a news conference or called a voter an incest epithet? Why does the Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman so resonate with voters for his ceaseless trolling of his opponent, the celebrity surgeon and television personality Mehmet Oz, about his residency status and awkward grocery videos? In California, why has Gov. Gavin Newsom’s feisty postrecall persona, calling out his fellow governors on the right, brought such applause? Because, as Anat Shenker-Osorio, a messaging expert who advises progressive causes, has said, people “are absolutely desperate for moral clarity and demonstrated conviction.”
A collateral benefit is that moral clarity, powerfully and unreservedly defended, give voters an ideological place to call home. Trump hates the people MAGA hates. His rallies may appeal to people’s baser instincts, but they come back again and again because it feels like home. The right, Giridharadas says, has erected “a metaphorical roof over the head of adherents, giving them a sense of comfort and belonging to something larger than themselves.”
“The right deeply understands people,” Black Lives activist Alicia Garza tells Giridharadas. “It gives them a reason for being, and it gives them answers to the question of ‘Why am I suffering?’ On the left, we think a lot about facts and figures and logic that we hope will change people’s minds. I think what’s real is actually much closer to Black feminist thinkers who have said things like ‘People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.’”
The left needs to be as creative as it thinks it is. It needs to deepen its understanding of and empathy for its audience, and to weave a story to which Americans want to belong.
What the country is trying to do is hard. Alloying a country from all of humankind, with freedom and dignity and equality for every kind of person, is a goal as complicated and elusive as it is noble. And the road to get there is bumpy, because it has yet to be paved. Embracing a bigger “we” is hard.
The backlash we are living through is no mystery, actually. It is a revolt against the future, and it is natural. This, too, is part of the story. The antidemocracy upheaval isn’t a movement of the future. It is a movement of resistance to progress that is being made — progress that we don’t celebrate enough and that the pro-democracy movement doesn’t take enough credit for.
It is time for the pro-democracy cause to step it up, ditch the despair, claim the mantle of its achievements and offer a thrilling alternative to the road of hatred, chaos, violence and tyranny. It’s going to take heart and intelligence and new strategies, words and policies. It’s going to take an army of persuaders, who believe enough in other people to try to move — and join — them. This is our righteous struggle that can and must be won.
Rewatch Silverado, for heaven’s sake.
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