This past
week marked the beginning of what will be, if we are a lucky, an incredibly
challenging four years. One skill that has been lacking in our movement, but
which our Party will absolutely need to rebound during these four years, is the
ability to persuade. Our struggles along
these lines are not surprising. Genuine
persuasion is exceptionally difficult, and the sad truth is that for a minority
to persuade a majority to care about their set of issues is exceptionally
difficult. (We are a party built up of minorities)
But what we have learned in recent
times is that while our constitutional republic sometimes offers shortcuts
around persuasion (such as courts) there can be downsides to these alternative
routes. Put simply, the majority has a
way of expressing its displeasure and reversing gains that are achieved without
authentic consent.
There are three other short cuts
that can also serve as surrogates for true persuasion. The first is party capture. When your political party prevails you might
be able to force through a position that is profoundly unpopular with the
country as long as that position is essential to a wing of your party. If that doesn’t work, another trick, used
almost universally by interest groups and even some political parties, is to claim majority
status regardless of voting outcomes or results. “The true people, the true party, agrees with
us” and when something gets in the way of that story, the impediment is
described not as a reflection of popular sentiment but instead as either a ruse
or undemocratic.
This can be made
particularly effective through phrasing of issues. So the NRA can, for example, oppose gun
safety efforts on grounds that the “true majority” supports “the Second
Amendment” without acknowledging that many quite popular gun safety measures
are perfectly consistent with the Second Amendment.
The
third and final one is a bit more difficult.
A group may acknowledge that the public does not share the group’s
agenda and yet it may appeal to moral or constitutional rights which allegedly
justify bypassing popular opinion and thus undermine the need for persuasion. Sometimes
this approach is truly necessary. After
all, our constitutional system exists so that in the words of many, “we don’t vote
on rights.” It’s hard to quarrel with this logic and there’s no reason to give
up on basic rights. But no one should be
fooled into thinking that rights can be relied on over a long period of time in
the face of strong majoritarian opposition. The reality is that the electorate ultimately
turn political results in the direction it wishes and almost no piece of paper
can make someone safe if the Government refuses to honor it.
The alternative to the political risks
inherent in attempts to misconstrue or bypass public opinion is to truly get
better at persuasion. This means that
when it comes to decisive issues such as
global warming the goal should be
to build such a strong consensus among the voting public that elected officials
would not dream of denying its existence.
In our current polarized climate, however, it has become too tempting to spend more time
on trying to make that consensus appear real than on actually doing the hard
work of persuading people to the point of building consensus.
Persuasion is arduous, hard to measure, and
even harder to get donors to wait for as opposed to selling them on a
manufactured consensus that they can get behind. And changing minds may be harder than ever
because rather than remaining open to persuasion issue by issue, people are
starting to embrace global partisan views both on the positive side (I go with
my team) and even more on the negative side (I am opposed to whatever the other
side wants).
In this vein, the challenge
becomes persuading voters on the other side to adopt a whole new world view and
not just a particular position. Despite
the heavy lifting this may require, the hard work of persuading people we are
right is going to have replace the bold assertions that we are right. The fundraising machines now fueling
promotion of what might be called the progressive point of view must refuse to
settle for assertions and begin to think about which of our opponents we can
persuade and what is the best way to persuade them. This does not mean compromising our values or
positions, but it might mean making compromises on language to be more
persuasive and thinking more about being persuasive.
None of this is easy. It might not feel good at first, although
there is much value in connecting with others who hold different views. But whatever the cost, persuasion is what is
required if we want to regain power. And we have no choice but to pursue this
goal with everything we have.
