And won victory after victory after victory
Anand Giridharadas took inspiration from his research for “The Persuaders,” and particularly from his chapter on progressive messaging authority Anat Shenker-Osorio. The left focuses so much on what it stands against that what the left stands for gets lost. It’s a habit we need to kick, she tells students. “We have to be for a thing.”
“As we fight against the neo-fascist right, let us not forget what we are for,” Giridharadas tweets in harmony.
In conversation this week hosted by the Brooklyn Public Library, Giridharadas explored “the possibility and the difficulty of persuasion in a time of polarization, disinformation, conspiracy theories, political violence, and more.”
But we should stop putting our political adversaries at the center of the progressive narrative, Giridharadas told the audience:
We are trying something hard and awesome. And at the risk of kind of mixing progressivism with patriotism, it is an awesome pursuit in history. Most of our ancestors lived in small, little monocultures in all kinds of different places in the world where they never met anybody who was different.
We are building an entire country on the idea that human beings are enriched through encounters with difference. And, even though there is this incredibly scary movement, it is not the protagonist of this drama. We are the protagonist of this drama. We have won victory after victory after victory to get here.
Look at this room. Most places in the world do not look like this room, right? And [opponents of the American experiment] are a barnacle on our progress. They are not prosecuting some awesome new revolution that is a cool, new idea. They have fought against every major advance of extending freedom to more people. They have lost virtually every time. They will lose again.
And I think we have to buck up, get our act together, talk and think like winners, and remember that the cause of the country we’re trying to fight for is an attractive cause, and make it attractive — joyous, your word [to a panelist] — and bring people in, not keep anyone out.
“When are you running?” an audience member shouted when Giridharadas finished.
Freedom is a contested value, Shenker-Osorio’s research demonstrates. It is a word — better yet, freedoms, plural — that the left needs to reclaim as Giridharadas does above. Indeed, the political right uses the word as a shibboleth, a tribal signifier. As penile dislpay, if you will. A dominance move. Freedom is something the right hoards exclusively for its own faction. Using freedom that way, in this country, is a lie.
“They have fought against every major advance of extending freedom to more people,” Giridharadas insists. It is something the left should repeat, loudly, to drive home how much the right’s embrace of freedom is itself another Big Lie.
For the American experiment to keep succeeding, and for others to be persuaded to pursue it with us, people must be inspired. It’s something we too often forget. A Black man won the presidency uplifted by the inspiration in a single word.
“When are you running?”