Can we “match the level of in-the-streetsness”?
“I can’t seem to get out of my own way,” my best friend from college used to complain. By that he meant that all his smarts and cleverness were stumbling blocks to getting what he wanted out of life. Which was another way of saying he thought too much.
Democrats and lefty allies have the same problem: stubbornly insisting this is a survival-of-the-smartest world when it isn’t.
Anand Giridharadas the other night issued a warning about that. First he notes that while lefty anger is dialed up to 11, our actions do not reflect it. Are we serious about stopping fascism or what?
Do our actions “really match the level of in-the-streetsness” we saw in the 1960s, Giridharadas asks. Just as I’ve argued before:
Winning in your head is like bringing sports visualization training to the Olympics and thinking you’ll be competitive when you show up with no conditioning and no skills.
At some point, you have to play the game for real. At some point, you have to run the election and count the votes. At some point, you have to win on the ground instead of in your head. You’d best be good at it.
And that “on the ground” fight is won in part through stories, not data. Stories are how humans process data and make sense of their actual experiences. Abstractions like “the economy” or GDP do not carry the same weight.
Giridharadas doesn’t say it this way, but Democrats must quit thinking that being the smartest person in the room wins elections. Think George W. Bush vs. Al Gore. Or Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton. Someone this week on social media noted that even when he’s alone Donald Trump is not the smartest person in the room. And he won the presidency.
Trump’s movement was built on tapping into human sentiment, Giridharadas says, “in all the dark ways, in all the morally neutral ways,” but it persuades and turns out voters. It’s a skill. Neither the White House nor the DNC rely on those skills. The Lincoln Project gets it though.
What’s driving political sentiment in this country is much deeper than data, Giridharadas believes. Economic data does not address people’s psychological distress and feelings of displacement.
“And right now in America, the bad guys know how to speak to psychologically adrift people, and the good guys do not.”
If we’re as smart as we think we are, we’ll learn. And fast.
Here’s a spot that goes for the gut:
@nowthispolitics The latest ad from Mothers Against Greg Abbott and Mothers for Democracy darkly hits back at politicians’ thoughts and prayers on the 11-year mark of Sandy Hook #mothersagainstgreggabbott #texas #sandyhook #politics ♬ original sound – NowThis Politics
It’s Happy Hollandaise Time! You help keep lit this beacon of sanity.