As I noted in the welcome post at Parallel Republic, the motivation to start this publication was driven in no small part by the feeling that either I am going crazy or nearly everyone I know is. So I thought I would start with charting a particularly prominent kind of crazy and briefly suggest some things we might do in our own lives to address it.
The kind of crazy I want to discuss is so common it ends up in the New York Times and goes viral. It’s the kind where you forget basic stuff that you know, selectively. It’s the kind that can be exceedingly, cruelly hurtful to others and dangerous in our collective lives. Specifically, the crazy involves the way too many people I know are coming to deal with each other across divides in worldview and the the expectations we have of persuasion in light of what we are doing to bring it about in others. Let’s start with the thing you already know about dealing with people; that thing that tends to be forgotten particularly when discussing political or other close morally important issues:
Persuasion is almost never something that happens in one encounter exclusively by means of reasoned argument
You know this. This is obvious. To make it less obvious I could add..
...with the possible exception of purely intellectual exercises (Sure 1+1-2 - but honestly even then, have you seen a toddler encounter math for the first time. They need to really spend some time with these more advanced arithmetic relationships before they start really running with the implications of those hard fought conversation events to the reality of mathematical isomorphism with objects in our reality!)
But, let’s stick to the obvious, and examine the evidence around you!
We ‘plant seeds’ with our loved ones to get them to reconsider how they do one thing or another (often involving household chores or remembering to put down the toilet seat). We ‘work on people’ with regards to the holiday destination we want to take. We ‘establish rapport’ with colleagues before making requests of a weighty nature. We understand in dating that person we fancy may take more than one encounter. We also often accept invitations for dates with people whom most reason suggests is probably a waste of time but some feeling suggests it is a risk worth taking. Generally, we know that getting your parents to recognize the genius of your favorite song — if effective at all— will usually take time. Argument won’t do the trick. Similarly with major life decisions, or changing them. You might be persuaded to abandon your commitment to your fiancé, but it usually won’t be based purely on one encounter, and if it is, it will probably not be an argument that got you there in that encounter!
But, when discussing politics and other far more morally weighty commitments (relative to a date or putting down the toilet seat), people often suddenly seem to think that if we have a conversation with our uncle Ted at a family holiday dinner and he doesn’t see the genius of your Clearly Right™ viewpoint on the issue that (a) Ted is unreachable and (b) conversing with Ted is futile and possibly ‘harmful’. You leave frustrated and if the person's prior view is sufficiently distant from the domain of acceptability to have decided upon, you may leave enraged.
You are engaged in what I am going to call conversion snobbery. Anyone who fails to respond to the charms of your efforts is clearly not worth the time, darling! I have noted countless times now that my students, acquaintances, and friends reach these kinds of conclusions on social media and in real life when making political arguments. Many pieces are written on this theme.
I, personally, was *very* into this during my first five years or so on social media, and pretty much since graduate school began, really. I was an authority you see, in possession of Clearly Right™ views! Your ignorance should be no barrier to my knowledge, you see? I was also a conversion snob.(I had to make amends. It was like a 12-step programme)
Recently, I saw this ubiquitous habit amplified in cruel and potentially dangerous ways by Mr. Wajahat Ali’s viral op-ed in the New York Times before the holidays; a near perfect example of this pernicious implicit and clearly wrong view of persuasion, which is contributing mightily to tearing the social fabric of democracy across much of the rich democratic and (for now) free world.
The title of this piece was: ‘Reach Out to Trump Supporters,’ They Said. I Tried.: I give up”.
So, what did he try?
Mr. Ali’s Experience
Before getting into how this threatens democracy (which is a bit more of an academic topic and upon which more posts will have to be written to fully address), let’s first look at this exemplar of this implicit, pernicious and clearly wrong context-specific view of persuasion.
First, though, I want to point out that Wajahat Ali is a very successful and impressive person. He is, by all appearances the kind of person I tend to admire: The liberal artsy type who does everything from write plays to work with the State Department and engage with important issues with care and sincerity. He’s, honestly, my kind of guy. So, out of the gate, I have favorable priors here.
So, why is this person appearing to misunderstand the very basis of persuasion and decide to advise the NYT’s millions of readers (eager to hate on an enemy in the most tribal period of American politics in living memory) to ‘give up’ on reaching out to voters who disagree with him and his co-partisans on the wisdom and morality of voting for Trumpism?
What experience could justify promoting such a conclusion?
Looking at his experience, I begin by finding only more to like about our good Mr. Ali! Deeply concerned by Trump’s election in 2016, he — drawing on his Islamic faith — set out to speak to Trump voters and help them understand that he and his were not only not dangerous, but in possession of important truths. He nobly asked his speaking agency to send him to places where Trump won in 2016. Since, he had given “more than a dozen talks to universities, companies, and a variety of faith-based communities” to reach out on important issues like
“how to “build a multicultural coalition of the willing.” My message was that diverse communities, including white Trump supporters, could work together to create a future where all of our children would have an equal shot at the American dream. I assured the audiences that I was not their enemy. I reminded them that those who are now considered white, such as Irish Catholics, Eastern European Jews, Greeks and Italians, were once the boogeyman. I warned them that supporting white nationalism and Trump, in particular, would be self destructive, an act of self-immolation, that will neither help their families or America become great again.”
Here,our hero sets out on a mission of dialogue, he tells us, motivated by deep moral and religious conviction. As a person of faith myself, more and more to like! Indeed, that middle part sounds a lot like the ethos I would want to further here in the Parallel Republic!
Even while I would probably have somewhat different specific arguments than Mr. Ali on some of these themes, I can’t deny supporting the entire thrust of the message he was selling in Trump country. Moreover, bringing it to those areas more than a dozen times and places for a few hours each, and having long car rides with voters who vote differently is just a good use of any American’s time if they are concerned that their neighbors err. That’s the right attitude!
So far. So good. So, What happened? Mr Ali tells us:
In Ohio, I spent 90 minutes on a drive to the airport with a retired Trump supporter. We were cordial to each other, we made jokes and we shared stories about our families. But neither of us changed our outlook. “They’ll never take my guns. Ever,” he told me, explaining that his Facebook feed was filled with articles about how Clinton and Democrats would kill the Second Amendment and steal his guns. Although he didn’t like some of Trump’s “tone” and comments, he didn’t believe he was a racist “in his heart.” I’m not a cardiologist, so I wasn’t qualified to challenge that.
In 2017, I was invited by the Aspen Institute — which hosts a festival known for attracting the wealthy and powerful — to discuss racism in America. At a private dinner after the event, I was introduced to a donor who I learned was a Trump supporter. As soon as I said “white privilege,” she began shooting me passive aggressive quips about the virtues of meritocracy and hard work. She recommended I read “Hillbilly Elegy” — the best-selling book that has been criticized by those living in Appalachia as glorified poverty porn promoting simplistic stereotypes about a diverse region.
I’ve even tried and failed to have productive conversations with Muslims who voted for Trump. Some love him for the tax cuts. Others listen only to Fox News, say “both sides” are the same, or believe he hasn’t bombed Muslim countries. (They’re wrong.) Many believe they are the “good immigrants,” as they chase whiteness and run away from Blackness, all the way to the suburbs. I can’t make people realize they have Black and brown skin and will never be accepted as white.
I did my part. What was my reward? Listening to Trump’s base chant, “Send her back!” in reference to Representative Ilhan Omar, a black Muslim woman, who came to America as a refugee.
I am befuddled. Without trying to be uncharitable, it really does seem to me that Mr. Ali is basically saying “I talked to Trump supporters and they didn’t immediately change their worldview in response to my Clearly Right™ arguments. They did this even while thanking me for being a good speaker and appreciating that I came or offering my hospitality! Better to forget they exist and watch Netflix.”
Our author goes from outreach, to total erasure for 70 million Americans and 48% of voters from the American moral community after a series of 90 minute to 2 hour encounters with people who disagree on deep and complex issues. Why would one move from that experience to that conclusion?
It seems that after talking at audiences for a handful of hours and taking some questions (and as a professor at a liberal arts college, I have some experience with this kind of thing), maybe having a dinner, or even a car ride, he was very disappointed that their experience with him did not immediately yield conversion experiences — where, one might hyperbolically imagine- an audience member trades their MAGA cap for a sustainably sourced knit pussy hat. Let it be said, that anyone with teaching experience could have told him that this was a ludicrous expectation.
- Alternatively, perhaps, an experience where some Muslim Trump voters do not “realize” that they should abandon all notions they hold that they might be equally valued because they “will never be accepted as white” to our Clearly Right™ Seer-of-Future-Social-Trends-With-A-Gods-Eye-View-Of-What-You-Are-Really-Up-To. Because, you, dear Muslim Trump supporter, may think that you are independently working to decide what is best for you and your family and where you place yourself in the American political space, but what you didn’t know was that you were really chasing whiteness. That this goal might have never crossed your mind should be no barrier to you accepting the arguments of this person who has no interest in your Clearly Wrong™ view of your situation. It does take nerve, I suppose to reject a prophet with absolute knowledge of How Things Are and Ever Will Be on incredibly important and apparently simple issues like American race relations (we just need to think as Mr. Ali does!).
Persuasion Doesn’t Work that Way
Perhaps worse than the conversion snobbery is the expectation that he should see conversion experiences as ones that in a moment’s reflection, can immediately be seen as ludicrous. Didn’t we all agree at the beginning that it was obvious that persuasion does work immediately on the basis of intellectual argument? And didn’t we also agree that you don’t persuade anyone by not talking to them?
Mr. Ali is hardly alone. Many hundreds of people I have interacted with on social media, in classrooms, in lectures, or on the street seem to expect and demand that ‘reaching out’ should lead to immediate conversion experiences if we are to deem the attempt to ‘reach out’ worthwhile and those with whom we speak not an absolute waste of our time. Nearly all the pieces explaining how people should not be open to the other side make this point: You are deaf to the Clearly Right™ truth, and are cast to be cast to outer darkness beyond the boundaries of our moral community. You are, in essence, voted off the island.
Let’s start think about those who think about persuasion with the most intense practical concern: Advertisers. Each advertisement placed is paid for, and they want something for their money. What do they want? They want to persuade you to use their product.
When was the last time you sat down to watch a television show and an advertisement tried to persuade you to buy their product or service by giving you a rational deductive evidence-based argument? Is it true that during the entire course of your programme the same commercial never repeated. That is, do the advertisers say ‘well, I told them once. If they aren’t persuaded, it must be futile. Best not throw good money after bad’? Of course not. That would be a fantastically bad idea! Have you even seen television, to say nothing of the ad bars on your favorite websites. You’ve heard of Calvin Klein ads, yes? Any rationality or even intelligible content communicated in those efforts of persuasion repeated 3-4 times during your show? So, if those with the most skin in the game of persuasion recognize that we don’t persuade only with argument, or evidence in a single encounter why do we?
Well, we don’t.
At least, we don’t, when we are talking about persuading and reaching out to plenty of others on plenty of other issues.
And, when it’s about ourselves, we usually can recognize that even on the issues we expect others to have an immediate conversion, we don’t have one ourselves. When we recount our own changes of mind or heart in the past, we can usually admit that it was a series of experiences that eventually were required for the change itself to occur. We recognize that in our own lives, when we have found religion, or lost religion, taken on a new perspective or abandoned one, this persuasion process leading to a different perspective was usually a cumulative effect of many experiences and arguments. I was an agnostic or atheist my whole life, and it was many years before I eventually became Anglican. There wasn’t one argument that suddenly said: Oh, thanks for that. Christ is real. Why didn’t anyone just say so!?
It often takes a village to change your mind.
As a personal anecdote, I have experienced and have been told (usually by frustrated partners over the years) that I change my mind on the basis of new information atypically quickly. And, let me confirm, that people who do convert quickly are often extremely annoying to others. It apparently can be frustrating to see people who have committed to something that annoys you and that costs you in other ways, suddenly just change their mind and become an ally at the drop of a hat. I can’t explain it, but it’s been my experience, my wife’s experiences, some friends and even a colleague or two.
But even in the domain of our political campaigns, people often hold candidates to standards they apparently don’t hold themselves. Biden supporters would have been horrified to learn he pursued Mr. Ali’s strategy during the campaign. Something like:
“We are going to put media buys for ads for one week, and will release one video explainer. There is no reason for more. If we didn’t convince them the first time there is no need to waste any of our resources getting more.”
Or consider, in romance, when out and about we see a person to whom we are attracted (remember those halcyon pre-Covid days? sigh.). Is it considered wise to walk up to them, give them the rational explanation for why they should go out to dinner with you, and, once rejected, never talk to this person again? Of course not! With friends and partners we ‘plant seeds’ that we hope will germinate into ‘a preferred conclusion’. Most long running partnerships are built on systems of long running mutual persuasion and growth.
Why should this be different in the democratic body politic? There we too are in a long running partnership, built on systems of literally intergenerational mutual persuasion and growth. What else is social and political progress, if not the fruit of that process?
Regress can certainly be the fruit of that process if those seeking progress choose to give up. It’s worth remembering how often Trump was criticized for repeating the same falsehoods over again at rallies, to which supporters might somehow see multiple times. Claims about various ‘hoaxes’ dismissed at first, became points to which supporters were persuaded. But, ultimately both parties’ leaders clearly understand the importance of persistence and emotion and if anything relegate rational argument as one of the last pieces of their toolkit for shaping public opinion.
A quick summary of the topic (much less the literature in media effects that I am familiar with professionally) of persuasion quickly reveals that it is complex, and not well understood. But, no one disagrees that in most instances it will take time. Moreover, persuasion seems to have both time and emotional components. Not merely computational and rational components. Why are we being so very selectively strange in our expectations?
I Tolerate Everyone Except… THEM.
It’s always dangerous to try to make statements about the motivations for the choices of others. So, while I wouldn’t want to explain the provenance of Mr. Ali’s specific choices, I can — I think — explain why something this unhinged was published by the NYT and shared all over social media.
But I think Susan Harding’s essay “Representing Fundamentalism: The Problem of the Repugnant Cultural Other” and Scott Alexander’s famed Slatestarcodex.com article “I can tolerate anything except the outgroup” can help paint a picture.
As many have noted, humans have a tribalism problem. Or, rather, humans have a tribalism adaptation, and that adaptation is pretty maladapted to life in a liberal democracy where the tolerance and forgiveness required to have conversations across disagreement is limited by tribal animus. For reasons I’ll touch on a little later, when these tribal lines are drawn down partisan lines in a democracy, things can get very bad indeed, and relatively quickly.
The problem is that tribalism is built primarily on external threats and challenges. It’s tightness comes from a sense of embattlement. Tight, highly costly policing of one’s own relations - as is the mode of tribal politics - is only worthwhile and sustainable if loss of the group leaves one in a quite poor place, ‘out there’ in a palace of danger or defiement. It is extremely important to demonize a group in order to maintain coherence in the absence of strong natural threats to a community (like during the pleistocene when humans were very much at risk from being killed by all that nature out there).
It’s a great tactic for elites in political organizations to use, and the power of those techniques very much increased when strong in-group, out-group dynamics exist between their tribes. We see this tactic used in war, for example, to increase unit coherence and ease acts against the enemy through dehumanization.This view of ‘the other’ as threatening or repugnant makes it very easy to overlook the repugnant cultural other, and oppress them, which for the record, is what Mr. Ali and those like him are arguing to do. They are arguing to treat 47% of Americans in the same way classist bullies argue the futility of engagement with workers, the educated to the uneducated, whites to non-whites, colonizers to the colonized, etc. It also, as Susan Harding argues at the end of her piece, makes any detailed engagement with the specifics of disagreements impossible.
I mean, Mr. Ali and half of my social media feed has literally written off 47% of Americans as futile to talk to due to their irredeemability. In our culture, we literally routinely counsel a more charitable attitude to people to who murder our children today than we do very often members of the outgroup. If I had a nickel for every time I was told ‘such and such’ right wing person ‘shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce,’ I could open my own eugenics institute and double my money! Just think about that again: It’s become normal in civil discourse and common among friends to discuss eugenics, so long as the ‘joke’ is about someone from ‘the other’. This is, to all those with an elementary education, not a new phenomenon. Moreover, I am confident these are the very same people who were wringing their hands about people’s relief at the death of Osama Bin Laden or will cheer at the death of Donald Trump or Mitch McConnell. There are plenty of examples going the other direction as well.
It follows then, that if you have this kind of dynamic towards a group, and you spend even a little bit of time being charitable, tolerant, and forgiving - say 2 hours in a lecture or a 90 minute car ride- the psychological burden on you is very high, and when you don’t get satisfaction from your lessers - deplorable, repugnant, others - after all you endured for them, it’s not beyond comprehension why you might forget that this is how persuasion works. I think this is particular once we mix in the mental and emotional taxation of living with an administration hell-bent on trolling half the public, and a media system keen to whip up those trolling attempts into a narrative communicating deeply threatening emergencies for kicks and clicks. But, it’s problematic if we start forgetting basic skills necessary for self-government, such as persuasion (or tolerance, or forgiveness) of those that we don’t already mostly agree with.
This, as they say… is not good.
And this is not only cruel, it is also an example of something incredibly destructive for democracy
When I first told a dear friend of mine that I was going to write my first blog post on the topic of persuasion and outreach because of this column being the final straw for me the in genre of ‘don’t invite Trump voters to dinner’ articles in the mainstream press, she was surprised by the strength of my negative response to Mr. Ali’s piece in the New York times . She knew of my frustration with intolerance across ideological grounds of the type that Mr. Ali was performing, but she still recognized it as out of character. It took too long to realize, but..
I was reacting and my attention was drawn to what felt like supreme cruelty.
My first thought upon reading this was that now all these people he was talking about in the piece will read about what he really thought about them the whole time. They would see that, for him, it was never the authentic conversation they thought it was. He was always trying to convert them and seeing their thoughts and arguments as obstacles to his purpose. It was a one way ‘reach out’ session that turned out to be a test. And in that session they failed his test and the whole country got the report card. The comment beneath the ‘F’ reads: “You and people like you are contemptibly not worth talking to”.
I next wondered if any of those people he mentioned in the piece actually did have a change of heart down the line, in part grown from the seeds of his own outreach attempt? How would they react to his characterization, and would it change their mind back? It was for this reason that it was hard not to picture Mr. Ali — and a disturbing number of people like him with whom I am friends (perhaps until I fail a similar test) — as something like a gardener stomping up and down on his germinating vegetable garden complaining about the futility of trying to plant vegetables in such poor soil with such contemptibly poor plants. If one is clear headed it is hard to take such a person too seriously. If one is clear hearted you probably feel something for the poor plants being denied opportunities to grow and change through more productive engagement with the gardener. Unfortunately, in our current crossroads those plants are people.
Ultimately, the belief that people ‘aren’t worth reaching out to’ is cruel, ugly, and bad for democracy or a flourishing community. It’s a dehumanizing discourse used in war, not within a nation. In any other relationship of mutual dependence we would call the withholding of such regard abusive, and it bears remembering that in a democratic society, we are in a relationship of mutual dependence.
And now some political science.
Republics are a lot like families. We are, in a way, married to every other person in a democracy. Much like in a marriage, it’s your right to withhold regard and be rude to your spouse, but they are still there the next day. And, while you were within your rights, the consequences make it an unwise strategy. Likewise, after you ‘fight to win’ an election for some political candidate running for office, the people you attack, condescend to, or sneer at? yeah, those people still get to vote. And, guess what? Like the people who went to Mr. Ali’s talks - any goodwill that was there you have very much damaged. The long term consequence is the opposite of persuasion but repulsion. It enhances polarization. This is one of the reasons that ‘negative partisanship’ drives so much of the political and voting behavior we now see. People appear to increasingly be motivated in their voting behavior not by love for their candidate or party, but contempt for those in the other camp. When you troll the libs, or ‘call out’ conservatives, it turns out they can hit back in the most consequential of ways. And, after being treated contemptably, favor those even further from your preference.
If we ‘stay married’ in such an unhappy union of disunity, democracy itself is threatened. This is a big point that I will draw out in a future post in greater detail, but to put it basically, the ultimate check on tyrannical government isn’t ‘checks and balances’ between elements of that government, it’s a game between the public and the elite. The reason we had legitimate fears in America about Trump not leaving office as norms dictated, and the reason why so many unprecedented norm violations happened over the past years, and the reason why so many actually illegal matters went without justice was because - increasingly - our two poles care about winning more than they do about the norms and rules that protect all of us and keep our democratic system - which is how we resolve governance disputes non-violently - break down. This is why a record percentage of voters in both parties saw violence as an acceptable response to losing.
We can step back and look at one less dramatic example. Obama radically expanded executive power and did a great deal of governing via executive order. This leaves the Presidency dangerously and increasingly overpowered. But then, it was this very weakening of the rules that protect us all. Democrats, like me, didn’t want Obama to stop governing. It was more important that we win the things we wanted that we couldn’t get through Congress than to say ‘these are the rules by which we govern ourselves for the good of all’. Then, this power passed to Trump, and his supporters felt equally keen with a greater expansion. Biden has increased this tendency still further, breaking all records in the first days of his presidency on executive orders. Today, Americans are more vulnerable to the personal attitudes and character of the U.S. President than at any time in the history of the Republic. It’s a slow motion constitutional crisis happening at our own behest, and driven by our antipathy for the other.
When Obama violated norms, Democratic voters didn’t stand up and say ‘no’. When Trump violated norms, Republican voters didn’t stand up and say ‘no’. Without that possibility democratic constitutional order is on fragile ground indeed. Because, while it is often forgotten, ultimately constitutional democracy is not a game played by citizens against each other, but ruled against the rulers. Republican democracy is primarily about self-governance through the contestation of elites who wish to rule, and only secondarily about how we organize that contestation. We must never forget it’s a system intended to empower us over them. When we are divided, they can get away with things that are bad for us and good for them.
Perhaps divorce, then? That was bandied about plenty over the last months! Divorce, in a nation state, is exceedingly expensive. The bills are measured, usually, in human lives as different factions fight over the houses, kids, businesses, and other resources. As in real divorce, both sides pay a large cost but unlike real divorce the bounce-back will never be quick. It’s generally a lose lose in the near and medium term, so you better be really unhappy before going down that road. And, it is probably worth taking a look at how objectively good things are, even if we need to work on making things more subjectively good.
This is Not a Game that We Have to Play or Encourage.
We don’t have to play this game. It’s just some effort not to. It’s becoming counter-cultural to try to stand apart from the totalizing tribal forces of polarization in our discourse. Most people that don’t fit, exhaustedly seem to simply disengage. They are the exhausted majority, according to Hidden Tribes.
That’s not a healthy strategy for us as individuals or citizens. But if countercultures that now underpin the poles of our great divides were able to begin humbly, so can an alternative. We can strive to participate and grow a counter-cultural habit that is more moderate in disposition, where we remember that we are not our politics, and we are not our statistical descriptors or our ethnicity. But rather where we remember that we are flawed people in multiple overlapping communities with distinctive histories and experiences and chosen allegiances who are prone to error, often slow to learn, and where if the big questions appear simple, it is probably because we are also prone to hubris and self-aggrandizement. More things, I think most people know, but seem to have forgotten, or rationalized away as ‘impractical at times as threatening as these’. But in this case, our politics are constructing the threat. We are the problem.
We are going to have to try to focus on working and living in what we can puzzle out in good faith to be right and true. And That means always reaching out, always trying to teach, and doing one’s best to always forgive one’s neighbor. Mostly, it requires the patience and forbearance that are necessary side ingredients of successful persuasion. A nation is a big family, and we are all in it together, ultimately. We need to start acting like it, even if we must begin doing it in a Parallel Republic that exists only in our own hearts and minds.