How to Fight the Demons?
In commenting on the most recent blog, Mark Wayne Davis raised several questions at the heart of politics.
“I am against demonizing,” he wrote, “but there are demons who walk the earth. How is one to oppose one, for they must be opposed?”
“When one party participates in good faith and the other is gaming the system, advantage accrues to the latter. This is a problem akin to bringing a pad and pencil to a gunfight. The only solution I have seen is to have both tools at the ready and to be able and willing to pivot to using either as appropriate.”
It is the age-old dilemma. Can you afford to play nice if the other side is playing dirty? Do you adopt the enemy’s tactics to defeat the enemy? Do the ends justify the means?
Mao Tse-tung, the leader of the communist revolution in China, acted on the principle he believed. “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Seventy years later the Party is still in power and still using force to hold on to that power.
The political conflict here is still mostly verbal. The weapons of choice are lies, misinformation, character assassination, blatant appeals to prejudice, stoking anger, and thinly disguised incitement to violence.
How do we fight the toxicity without becoming toxic ourselves and adding to the toxicity?
In thinking about the answer to that question, focus on the audience. The object is to persuade the jury the accused is guilty, not to get into an argument with the accused.
We are angered and offended by the attack. The natural response is to hit back. Besides it feels good. But the opponent is not the audience. The audience is the audience. Our response should be directed to the audience’s reaction to the attack rather than to the attack itself. The reaction of most people to politicians attacking each other is to tune out. It is not their fight.
The message is not: look, there is this demon; but, look what this demon is doing to you. The difference and the success of the later approach was noted in a recent New York Times article about the wins by Democratic congressional candidates in Republican areas in 2018.
“The answer to defeating Trump-aligned Republican candidates was not to emphasize the president’s erratic, divisive tenure in the Oval Office. Instead Democratic candidates focused narrowly on policies affecting voters’ lives, like protecting provisions in the Affordable Care Act…”
Strong words stir up the already committed. But that is not where most people are. Joe Biden, probably the calmest of the Democratic presidential candidates this year, won the most votes and the nomination.
A gun is not always the best weapon.
Mark made a second point we don’t pay enough attention to when we get in political debates. “Integrity in crafting solutions and advocating for them is necessary, but equally essential is the ability to frame and name such that one’s message resonates with the internal metaphors by which most, if not all of us, make our decisions.”
For some, there is no integrity in their solution or their advocacy. “Repeal and Replace”, the Republican response to Obamacare, are just words chosen because they have a certain ring to them. A phrase repeated for the past four years. There is no connection to reality, no plan to replace.
Integrity by itself, however, is not sufficient to persuade. Solutions don’t sell themselves They have to be wrapped in words that “resonate with the internal metaphors” by which we make our decisions. There is no better way to say it.
Again, in figuring out how to do it, the focus is on the audience. How do people understand the stories they are living? Does the solution enter that story? Where are the receptors to make connection?
Crafting a message that resonates is not easy. After several days of working, a person whom I had asked for help had pretty much given up. “This is a lot more difficult than I thought.” It is easier to fall back on poll-tested words that quickly become clichés.
Part of what voters said was the President’s appeal in 2016 was, “he doesn’t sound like a politician,” “he is not just pandering to people,” “no one else is that direct.”
One of the commentators on CNN Monday night described Michelle Obama’s speech to the Democratic convention. “She doesn’t think like a politician. She doesn’t talk like a politician. That is why she is so powerful.”
Seth Meyers, host of Late Night, in an interview last year with the New York Times talked about interviewing politicians, “What I’ve found with politicians — and this is bipartisan — they’re just gonna answer the question they wish you’d asked and they’re going to say it the way they practiced it, and oftentimes it’s something they’ve said a bunch. So there’s the lack of the crackle you want during an interview.”
Voters too look for that “crackle”. The crackle that comes when their lives are understood, their fears acknowledged and their concerns addressed by messengers who speak plainly and from the heart.
Communicating in a way that “resonates with the internal metaphors” by which we make decisions is both a skill and an art. Not readily taught in workshops but necessary in opposing the demons.
Douglas Kane is the author of "Our Politics: Reflections on Political Life" published in 2019 by Southern Illinois University Press
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