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Differing Views On How Persuasion Works
...and why the Democratic Party became so toxically unpopular.
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There are competing views within liberal politics about how public opinion takes shape, and thus about how Democratic officials should try to persuade voters—that Donald Trump and the GOP are bad, that Democrats are better, etc.
One, to quote American Bridge President Pat Dennis, is that “there is no socially prescriptive we, there’s just millions of people making decisions about what does and does not matter to them.” Democrats should thus try to ascertain what those things are, and be incredibly disciplined about speaking to the former. When you ask the swing voters who determine the outcome of elections what matters to them, they tend to cite the same set of issues over and over again. And so politics is ultimately a game of trying to make them hear you speak to those issues in compelling and well-tested ways.
The second, which I hold and write about here a lot, is that public opinion is much less atomized than this—which is why it’s so prone to big, uniform swings. People’s views about the parties and big civic and moral issues of the day are, to a large extent, socially constructed. They form and change not principally around the internal reasoning of individuals working with good information, but in response to whatever ideas are ambient and widely shared within communities. To quote, erm, myself, “political ideas form like fashions and fandoms. Who’s a face and who’s a heel? How do we know? What are the pressing problems in society and what aren’t? People alight on the ‘right’ opinions to hold by looking around and adopting views that reinforce their social statuses.”
And if this is the superior model, the challenge for politicians and operatives is a bit different: It’s to saturate the information environment with all manner of assertions, ideas, and actions that tend to portray their party in a positive light, and the opposition in a negative light.
Pat and I had gone back and forth in our newsletters over how persuasion works and (thus) how Democrats should comport themselves, and so we decided to switch formats and record a live discussion about the merits and demerits of both of these models. It was a spirited but good-natured conversation that I think our subscribers will appreciate, so I’m republishing it here for those who missed the live version. You’ll find that these models overlap significantly (we agree more than we disagree) but do diverge in important ways.
Related reading:
Brian’s initial offending piece, “What Republicans understand that Dems do not is that there’s value in hyperventilating about any story that makes the opposition look bad. If it doesn’t catch on, fine, move along to the next one. “But what if it crowds out the master narrati-” NO, who cares, be angry about everything that’s genuinely infuriating about your opponents. The result will be to create an unpleasant miasma around them that is more powerful than any collection of lab-perfect lines of persuasion.”
Pat responded at Oppo Drop w/ Pat Dennis: “There is, actually, a ‘master narrative’: it’s the idea that Democrats don’t care about the things that are important to you and your family. We must change this narrative. And until we’ve dug out of that hole, we have exactly zero freedom to flail about emotionally about irrelevant mean videos and attack our opponents over irrelevant issues of decorum. Digging out of that hole means working very hard to be disciplined about what we talk about and with which issues we are associated.