Anand Giridharadas — The Persuaders — with David Leonhardt

for uh who live here or for this turnout tonight but I have to think it's a little more than that good evening everyone I'm um I'm Brad Graham the co-owner of politics and prose along with my wife Alyssa Muscatine and we have what promises to be uh quite an inspiring program for you this evening featuring uh Anan girdodas here to talk about his new book The persuaders at the front lines of the fight for hearts minds and democracy um Annan is a is a journalist and author a former foreign correspondent and columnist for the New York Times for for more than a decade he currently publishes every Tuesday the newsletter the Inc which is devoted to politics culture money and power he's also a political analyst for MSNBC and has written three previous books India calling which was a portrait of his family's native land through his family's immigrant history and his own experience working in India uh the true American riveting account of a case of post 911 vigilante violence and its reverberations on the lives of of both perpetrator and victim and the best-selling winners take all about how the the super rich lock in their gains and undermine democracy by hoarding wealth buying political influence and and using philanthropy to appear to be addressing the very problems that they're they're causing now that last book which came out four years ago I made a case for Meaningful structural change in such areas as racial Justice planetary sustainability and Humane economics and it led Anand to start exploring some people who are pursuing change through various forms of electoral politics but as he followed their work he realized as he explains in his new book that they're up against more than just the powerful forces that he had written about previously they're up against a pessimistic and factional political culture and an increasingly prevalent View that many people in this country have already made up their minds so it's really no use trying to change their minds this is a dangerous View as Anan argues because once people give up on the idea of changing other people's minds they effectively Stop Believing in democracy Anan became drawn to another group of people to activists organizers politicians Educators and others on the left who still believe in the idea of persuasion and the persuaders is about the efforts of these folks to build political support whether it's going door to door in Arizona to change Minds on immigration or conducting race training in Ohio to get people to rethink their identities and choices so uh anand's book really offers hope and some ways to I think about bridging our country's deep deep divides a set of review in the New York Times while the world seems to counsel despair the persuaders is animated by a sense of possibility and CNN tagged it a handbook for defending democracy now Anan will be in conversation this evening with veteran journalist David lean Hart uh Pulitzer Prize winning reporter who's held a number of positions in his 23 years with the New York Times including op-ed columnist Washington bureau chief at magazine a staff writer until until not too long ago he was writing the very popular newsletter the morning each weekday he's been on a temporary leave because he's working on on a book due out in in 2023 so please join me in welcoming both Anan and David foreign [Applause] nice crowd I'm sorry some people have to stand a lot of people have to stand hi David how are you I'm great what a nice intro these are all my parents friends and then four other people I think of this as like a home event for me because this is actually my neighborhood bookstore but it's more of a home event for you you're from here yeah um I'm really excited to see so many people out here tonight I'm really excited to be talking going on um we're gonna spend about half of our time talking to each other um and um then we're going to open it up and want to hear from all of you um so I I think that uh this is the second time that we've been talking about one of your books here um and I think that Anand is a really important voice today if you think about just you just heard sort of an overview of your last couple books and they're so they're they ask really interesting and slightly surprising questions about topics that are already on our minds right we we've a lot of us have been thinking about inequality but the idea that philanthropy that by name is meant to combat inequality is actually a big part of the problem so really sort of surprising and interesting idea and here there's another one which is arguably even more important which is we can't just Retreat to our corners and give up on the idea of debate and disagree agreement and conversation and discussion that is core to what a democracy is so I want to start here since I know lots of people are depressed about the state of American democracy in this Society I want to start with a little burst of optimism so you've written a book about persuasion I think when a lot of people think about the state of politics in America today they get down but if you think about the last 60 years we have had a civil rights movement that accomplished incredible things a women's rights movement a disability rights movement a gay rights movement I would not put this on the same plane as all those but most recently we've had a marijuana legalization movement we've had a bunch of things that kind of seemed radical or even crazy in some cases succeed and win and I wonder can you just talk a little bit about what from the work that you did on this book what do you think are the common threads of those movements that tell us about how people can be persuaded to change deeply held beliefs I love that question thank you all for for being here my hometown crowd I don't live here but I grew up here so a kind of Hometown crowd so happy my parents are here and get to do a book event with my parents in the audience and thank you David I love that question because in a few words you undercut what is I think a kind of pose that a lot of us have taken in the last many years which is those people will never change right you may have said it about Trump voters you may have said it about vaccine Skeptics you may have said it about Q Anon people you pick pick the person you might have said about I certainly have done it I think we've all done it whether you admit it or not and you just gave a litany of some extraordinary changes many of which have happened in the lifetimes of people in this room that all involved the changing of Minds right um and I think I I think of something I a quote I actually heard only for the first time a few days ago um from a woman who campaigns against child marriage for girls around the world right just imagine more grueling work than that we have a lot of Despair here imagine her despair doing that work and she said we overestimate what can be changed in the short term and we underestimate what can be changed in the long run and all the examples you gave right I think are in that moment so the threads I think the threads are very much in many of those stories what I try to write about in the persuaders and what the the persuaders that I'm writing about think about which is instead of having this view of other people the people you're trying to persuade um as fundamentally immovable what a lot of these persuaders do is actually separate the opposition or the people who are not with you yet into two distinct groups there are the people on the far Shore with a fully baked deeply committed worldview that is the antithesis of yours right there are people for whom allowing gay people to get married is the complete crumbling of a total worldview that holds their lives together I don't think that's a majority I don't think that was a majority of people in any era then there's a whole bunch of other people who are temporarily with them right now voting with them aligned with them on every issue right if you think about the first group is maybe 20 on a given issue that next group is how you get to 50. right it's a 30 ish group could be more could be less that is going with that for now but hasn't read the books hasn't watched the YouTube rabbit hole YouTube videos it's not coming from a profound deeply steeped place they are to use them not the phrase that I I love learn from my sister she says it's a very common office phrase strong opinions lightly held right that second group has strong opinions lightly held and the persuaders that I'm writing about when they look back and we talked in the book about some of their work on civil rights in these past fights gay rights they are militant about separating these two things and looking at that second group the group with less of a baked worldview as their opportunity and they think relentlessly about what needs to be done to make the people slightly short of a deep world view the people who could be as anatshank or a story who I read about in the book says who can toggle into an extremely Progressive way of looking in the at the world and can toggle into a very conservative way of looking at the world who can if shown a caravan of migrants on the border on Fox News toggle into a strong border politics and who if shown families being separated by Donald Trump's Administration can very easily be toggled into a this is not who we are and we've seen these we know these people right many of you frankly coming to politics and Pros for book events may be the kinds of people who have more of a baked worldview right but you and and you may overestimate the extent to which other people are like you and what the research quite clearly shows is that there is a large group of people who do not regularly attend book events on Connecticut Avenue who are capable of Shifting around on quite deep questions and so to me one answer to your question is even when these things get so hard even when you can imagine how Bleak it must have been for those civil rights leaders and literally getting beaten in their head like John Lewis how hard it must have been for gay people to just endure that dehumanization over and over again I think there is a disciplined practice that some of these persuaders pursue which is to say there are more people than meets the eye who can be moved who are actually as Beyonce says on her new album contradicted they are contradicted there is more than one story going on in them right now one story is speaking for them but it's not the only story in them they may be against trans people but they also love the Mets and think they are champion of underdogs I say as a joke but that's a real identity actually people have right there are people who literally will continue to cheer sports teams that have zero chance of ever winning anything what is going on with those people there is an identity an affinity to standing for the week among people who want trans people excommunicated from society and what these persuaders do again and again is that they figure out how to go in there and play thing number two against thing number one and they have faith in the possibility that people can change I think when you talk about the Civil Rights Movement what it reminds me of is the experience of reading Taylor Branch's history of the civil rights movement or you can read other histories as well that's my favorite it in in in retrospect we look back on it as this incredibly Brave physically dangerous some people paid with their lives but Victorious movement but that's not how it felt in the moment it felt like defeat over and over and over again until it didn't right and if you watch I'm sorry I forget the name what's the great movie about disability rights that Obama's folks just put out um right like it's the same experience in that it's defeat defeat defeat defeat but people keep pushing it you mentioned a not Shanker osario yes tell us more about her how many of you know the name anachenko Rosario great um I don't know if it's because you already read the book or yeah but but this is I want the rest of you to know her so I devoted a whole chapter to her which is my way of making that happen um if there's one person who I could put into every powerful room in this country just say please listen to this person it's a knot I struggle to do that so I write book chapters on people instead um anat shankarasorio is the what I would pithily call the Frank Luntz of the left if the left listen to its Frank lenses she is the widely acknowledges the premier messaging language and politics expert on the left what what are the messages that you know and sometimes people kind of diminish this as like you know Mad Men like advertising that like this is very what she does very deep work about um when people in politics and movements and activist spaces say things what do people hear right um and how do you make that better and anat is fascinating um and is the subject of a chapter because she is running a one-woman Insurgency against the Democratic party's reigning theory of persuasion she's trying to turn it upside down and it obviously cannot happen fast enough um I would summarize the reigning theory of persuasion in the Democratic party that she is trying to overturn as persuasion by dilution okay and those of you who are home Cooks will know why this is such a bad strategy so you take a an ideal like a noble philosophical goal like everyone should have health care right I think generally every one of the democratic party from Joe manchin to AOC would share that basic everyone should have health care I don't think they would prefer I don't think there's any Coalition who would in principle prefer for fewer to people to have Joe manchin provided the deciding vote to keep Obamacare right one of the deciding votes correct um he and so he got to the vote in his uh in his yacht um houseboat um I was thinking of the Maserati I confuse them yeah um but then what happens is there is this and you really hear this now because we're a few days away from the election um there is a fear of the specifically a white working-class voter um you know who's a numerous voter but also there's other swing voters but the party's very obsessed with them and they're very concerned that that group of people thinks that they're Communists uh thinks that they're extremists and so there's a lot of anxiety about that and then a lot of desire to say like okay we got to add some water to this Noble ideal and just dilute it so that it's palatable to these people who think we're Communists and think we're extremists and say terrible things so they do they add a lot of water and they whisk it and then they serve this gruel to people in like Western Pennsylvania which they're obsessed with in diners and then uh very often as you know from reading the newspaper these people still end up thinking they're Communists um the watering down of the girl does not in fact end the charges of Communism but now a second thing has happened which is maybe some of the people who come to politics and prose book events and they're maybe their their base is just kind of left a little sad and depressed by the thinness of the gruel and by the fact that their health insurance still kind of sucks um and so now you're in this space where they still think you're a communist and these people not excited about you and you've tried to persuade and I can understand why you're trying to do that you're trying to straddle different realities in a diverse Continental Republic but you've ended up a little bit nowhere that sounds familiar if you followed you know the Democratic party in our lifetimes anat is trying to essentially suggest that this is all wrong and it's wrong in her analysis because this moderate that you're chasing is a person who doesn't exist moderates she argues moderation in politics is a situation not an identity I want to say this again by the way this is now what a lot of social sciences have proven about homelessness homelessness is a situation it's not an identity it's not a certain kind of person it's a situation some people experience right and we've it's not just like a PC thing it's a actually different understanding of what the thing is right well moderation is sort of like that it is a thing people experience people not always moderate to be a moderate is to basically have a less to go back to the beginning a less baked fully totalizing worldview algorithmic worldview that tells you what to think about everything right it is not necessarily to be in the geometric Center of the spectrum and basically there's this myth at the heart of American politics that to be moderate is to be at the mean at the middle right they don't and my analogy for this is like your pizza burger Pizza Burgers like if you can't decide it doesn't mean you want a pizza burger it means you can't decide between pizza and a burger that is different from wanting a pizza burger right you may also want a pizza burger some people want to some people aren't the main right but we just kind of assume everybody who's undecided is in the center and we try to tack to them and so what anat says is once you understand that there's just a whole bunch of people who are contradicted who have not yet fully resolved how they think who basically don't come in with a totalizing worldview that tells them how to answer everything what you need to do to win them is actually affect what they think is normal not appeal to their reasoning powers to decide the immigration policy that would be ideal in their brain because that's not actually how people make decisions and you need to it's almost like this is my statement not hers but I think it rhymes with her work I think the way moderates choose a political stance is more similar to how we all choose pants then to how we write a college essay which is to say like when you buy pants it's basically based on some sense of like what's everyone else doing on pants these days are we going loose are we going tight is it just gen Z that's not doing the skinny ones anymore are we all not doing it are we rolling are we not rolling hey you left but that's literally how we buy pants like you ever think about you don't write anything down you don't read any studies but you also don't buy pants that are like that much outside of the pants that everybody's buying at any moment like no one here is probably wearing bell bottoms tonight like right how does that happen and she basically argues that for moderates coming up with what you think about immigration is kind of like that it's like what do people think in my community what is normal and the way to get that finally is to basically get everybody around a moderate voter every relative every colleague every uh Community member every person in their Bridge Club shouting from the rooftops the assumptions the frames the values of your world view make them think it's normal and to do that you have to make all those people the colleagues and they're excited and passionate and thin watery girl does not do that thin watery girl makes no one sing and so anat is a champion of doing big bold things getting people to sing about them everywhere and then encircling moderates so moderates say like I guess I should you know have whatever she's having so that's actually I want to jump to something because that's a perfect transition um to feel like in keeping with the spirit of your book we should talk about one thing where we may not fully agree it's try to persuade each other absolutely so um so I completely agree about the research on how misunderstood moderates have been right that there's particularly there's this notion that what moderates really want is like neoliberalism and social liberalism which just doesn't actually seem to be true if anything they want the reverse of both right big government cultural conservatism so I agree about a lot of the stuff about moderates my concern about the kind of thin gruel view of the world is that it basically means that progressives decide that they have the right answers to everything they're not willing to be persuaded about everything anything and they just want to persuade others and I think there's a class divide here because progressives tend to be college graduates right Working Class People not just working class whites working class Latinos as well working class Asian Americans tend to be more culturally conservative than college graduates and so I'm sort of left wondering is the way progressives should think about this is that we already have the right answers on everything immigration abortion is the United States the greatest country in the world gun policy affirmative action covid restrictions I could keep going we already have the right answers on everything and we just need to get these other people to to become enlightened or should progressives say you know what maybe we don't have the right answers on everything maybe the levels of immigration are too high maybe abortion shouldn't be legal in all three trimesters maybe we kept kids out of school too long you don't have to pick up this the specific ones but I guess I'm interested in what this tension is between I agree about the risks of thin gruelism but I worry that the flip side of that is sort of an arrogance in which progressives say to Working Class People if you're not with us you're ignorant if you're not with us you're bigoted uh and and you got to come around yes so I love that question because I think the dilution that I'm worried about is not diluting because you're in keeping with the values of the people you're speaking to it's diluting out of this kind of misbegotten fear of what they want that particularly on the economic issues you talk about is actually often not what they want but it's often encouraged by big corporations and and corporate consultants in Washington that have pushed that dilution where I think the question you're asking is harder is on some of the culture stuff and look I'm very clear I mean I I don't think that we can negotiate you know trans people okay trans people are 80 human if that makes certain voters feel more comfortable um I don't think that's the road for me however I think one of the big contentions of This Book Is that progressives need to do a better job of being able to stand for what they stand for and you know other people have the right to stand for something different but this is in some ways a book about their struggle to stand for what they stand for on these things and be much more empathetic about the difficulty of what they are sometimes asking voters the psychological shifts in particular that they are asking the voters I think if there is a if there is a sin here uh on among my allies and the people that I agree with on these things it is overestimating how easy it is for people to let go of old ways of attaching themselves to a society and assume new self-understandings understandings of others sources of esteem right and so I think in some ways the economic issues are easier because they're more broadly experienced um so let me say something about these kind of psychological transitions on the identity side I think a softly spoken backdrop to this entire book is something that actually I think we're in the left don't talk about enough which is and I'm not I know you're on objective of course yes no opinions um don't David leonhardt fired afterwards um that I sometimes think we don't properly understand or talk about how much we are living through have lived through have asked people to live through change we've asked people to live through in the lifetimes of everybody in this room right and just to Rattle off a couple you all know these things but just to like pause for a second and just give a list of things where if any one of these things had happened in a period of History you'd say that was a really big shift in the country right so the gender revolution over the last 50 years right lifetime of people in this room it I mean no per year prior 50 years in the history of the world the status of women change as much as and that of course changes every household right every single household is different the roles of people the every self-understanding of men have had has had to change it's a complete I thought you just meant the gender stuff of the last three years and that let alone the last 50. that's like the 401 level class right like just the and that's all part of it right but that I think part of what we don't understand is like that comes on the part of why that's so discomforting to people is like people are not even adjusted to like my wife now works right right and and now like wait a girl is what like and I think we who believe in those things are sometimes that stuff's not hard for me I'm very happy to you know uh be married to a woman who makes more money than me and like it's great actually um I literally don't know what these men are complaining about um but I think we underestimate just the psychic shift right that's one and then I'll just go but like race race and demographics like enormous shift in this country right becoming a majority minority country that level of Reckoning 1619 in the New York Times Like There's a that's not happening in Britain and France like about colonialism and the Monarch like there's a reckoning and a shift and a power shift that's a remarkable right China what China did to every County in this country in like a five-year period right taking old forms of work people did changing what kind of education you need to do to just survive so on and so forth financialization neoliberalism like Tech remember Tech like each of these things is an industrial revolution worthy event by itself just in terms of what I think about a lot in politics which is like the emotional level of like who am I am I going to be okay am I like what's my status um am I prepared for the Future these basic things that are very visceral to people each of these things has been a total cataclysm some good some bad right climate hovering over it all like none of the rest May matter because we may not be able to live here anymore um and the book I think operates in front of that backdrop in the sense that progressives while I am writing about people I agree with I'm not saying they have all the answers but they have answers that I agree with and I'm writing about their Pursuit I think I've underestimated you can't just snap your fingers and say everyone go live like that now right right you can do the policy stuff and it's very important and I'm a big believer in that but we are asking people to live in totally new ways and by the way we must I I don't think work gonna be the country we think we are or be true to the founding words if we don't do these things but psychological shifts are hard I think we're going to get to questions in a minute but I think it's I just want to do one meta thing here which is I think it's interesting that when I asked you about the list I left Trends out and trans issues and then it's the first one you went to and I actually think there's something important there which is uh I'm not an expert in Persuasion but it just seems to me that if if the if the people trying to persuade others insist that every issue goes to 11 to quote Monty Python it's much harder just one thing and then go ahead meaning to me it's reasonable to say to someone hey you know I think it's hard to decide I have my views on guns but I get why you would rather have more access to guns than me I have my views on abortion but I get why you think in the second half of a pregnancy the the fetus's interests overtake the woman's I have my views on immigration but I get why you think it should come way down of all kinds but let me tell you something a trans woman is a woman and let me persuade you of why and let me persuade you of why that's a different issue and I do think that if you're willing to treat people with respect and say look this to me is a different order thing and my guess is all of society is going to get there in 30 years I think it increases at least the amount of respect whatever it does to the odds of persuading the final chapter of the book is about this movement called Deep canvassing and I know you know a lot of you coming here will also wonder besides reading a book like what can you do right we all want to do things now deep canvassing is a very specific thing you can go do you can go get trained it takes a few hours online and you can go do this incredible partake in this incredible experiment that is happening across the country where people go door to door in their communities if you live in this ZIP code you might need to drive a little bit to communities where this actually matters um to move hearts and Minds on the hardest issues on trans rights gay rights undocumented people's rights and and other issues economic stuff also and one of the things they they do that's so amazing and often the canvassers themselves are of the identity of the issue that they're talking about right and often reveal that in the thing that was a big part of the original thing because it started with gay rights campaigners in LA and they do what you said which is they establish they never lie about why they're there they're very honest about their commitments on the issues but they listen a lot and they resist what I struggle to resist which is like when people say terrible things they their instinct is to is to be like oh that's do you have any more terrible things oh like this I I saw some biles spill out of your mouth I have I have this quite large bucket uh would you would you like to spit out some more bile and it turns out bile is finite that's what you see on the door I went to go Witnesses in Arizona people eventually run out of bile it can go on but it it runs out and then people actually feel heard right I mean part of what I witness on the doors in Arizona is like I think a lot of people's spouses don't listen to them the way these cam these like liberal Progressive canvassers are listening to them on that door seriously yeah yeah why do you actually feel afraid of that what do you actually think X group is going to do to your kids in school like what do you what do you what do you picture and it goes on and you get it out and then they start asking in a respectful way not to implant some view in you which if you've been married no you know does not work um but to say do you have sources of dissonance with that right do you have you ever known a person of this group and often people say yeah and often people will say I hate immigrants but Manuel is the most hard-working Gardener I've ever seen but you but you said they're lazy well Manuel's not lazy and what about his family no one in his family and then you and you see like it sounds crazy because maybe you're not like this but like people crack on the door like this thing has had peer-reviewed results where when they're able to change Minds in half an hour when they can get to people uh as much as years of social diffuse social change right and then they ask have you ever been counted out because of a factor beyond your control right so people may not know a trans person but they that the second thing almost always works it's called analogic perspective taking which fortunately is a term they do not use on the door um never never count liberals out on that kind of thing though um uh and and people then have these big epiphanies there was a black woman in La who was talking about basically how terrible her trans niece is and how dangerous and blah blah and niece that she loved when that niece was a child and then she starts telling the story about how when she moved to LA everyone in I think the beauty parlor where she worked treated her badly because she was not from LA it was interesting the black woman in America they were asking were you discriminated against she did not connect it to race she was just like they were just mean to me because I wasn't from LA and it was the worst experience of us and and then you see her have this opinion you just watch This Woman This one is on a video you watch this woman go holy I am that to my niece you know and I don't think the most militant anti-transactive I don't think that would happen with them but that woman represents that group that I spoke to by the middle that group of people are so persuadable who I think in many cases are a majority in this country and My Hope in writing the book was to remember that that's the game that if you give up on people if you give up on those people it's not I'm not telling you to do that because it's like a nice thing to go talk to those people like I I just want my kids to be safe and I want this country to be a liberal democracy that's expanded from what it is today and I think we can do this but I think it's going to require a total shift in our orientation and a total recommitment to to persuading this point we may not even be a conservative democracy right but I have promised that we are going to open this up to others if anyone wants to ask about democracy please do how are we doing questions so I'm pointing and then the mic is oh no no no come on up here microphone is right here you're going to go first and then anyone else can go after you you got this and if others want to line up please do no don't run we support you and if others want to you know line up we're ready first of all love the book oh my gosh I don't know is it yeah it's not on oops go ahead I'll repeat it if we need to uh really low sorry if I'm getting too deep into the book but you talk a lot about kind of that's impossible you talk about kind of this deprogramming especially when it comes to like Q Anon folks and I'm just thinking right now of like all the anti-semitic stuff going on you've got Kyrie that's like I'm retweeting but it's not promoting and I don't even want to like talk about Kanye how are we like going to fight this on it has to be addressed on a bigger scale I love the idea of creating this kind of like gamification of figuring out how to address misinformation but this isn't such a large scale on TV and now you're seeing it at Sports Games sports games but how do you how do you address that like when the urgency is people might die in the next few weeks well it's such an important question and it's not just the next few weeks I mean an enormous fraction of our covet deaths are purely because of disinformation and are in my view you know I mean the Republican party has engaged in something like you know I don't know what kind of manslaughter by negligence or or like amplification of lie it's if you kill one person you're in real trouble right if you kill hundreds of thousands of people by promoting lies then it's just politics um this challenge erase is one of the biggest for democracy I think the idea of uh you know disagreements about tax rates are very small compared to different realities um 40 I write in the book 43 million Americans now subscribe to Q Anon beliefs um which I will say out of local interest means that 43 million Americans believe a conspiracy that involves the idea that the pizza restaurant next door is the headquarters of a global cabal pedophile ring that rules the world so check out that their Pizza is actually really great the first thing is not true but it is true that their Pizza is really good um so I I decided to devote a chapter to this question and what I I I consult with two different experts who came from different places one was a cognitive scientist who studies how to protect people from climate disinformation but then he's gotten into other covet and others um and the second is a cult deprogrammer and look I would love to live in a country where I didn't need to interview a culty programmer to talk about the future of democracy she was an occult herself she got out she said you know and then she did these like the 70s were a very different time as some of you know um she did illegal kidnapping deprogrammings on behalf of parents of adult children parents would pay someone to kidnap their children from a cult hold them against their will and hopefully get their consent through very heavy duty persuasion um and I spoke to both of them about this problem and they both basically in their own ways came to something that you know really turned around my way of thinking about it which is they basically said in the internet age in particular something structural about the internet we're gonna have to accept that a certain perhaps large amount of disinformation is endemic it's in the air um you can try to get you know put pressure on Fox News advertisers or you can try to you know appeal to Elon musk's mom to like raise her son better or whatever um but probably this is a whack-a-mole situation so sticking with the endemic uh analogy that the answer is and it's gonna make the right wing crazy inoculation um vaccination but not don't worry not shots in the arm they basically think we need a public health approach to disinformation which focuses on protecting people from being infected by it through basically new kinds of training in schools and elsewhere videos online to be resistant to the very specific manipulative techniques of disinformation right sex ed used to be a thing that people maybe got from their parents maybe figured out behind the barn on the farm like you figured out where you figured it out then at some point we decided like that's really really dangerous uh everybody needs the same common understandings of a couple of things your parents can give you extra information or they can give it to you early or whatever but like everybody needs to know this to be a human right um the subjects I'm writing on this information chapter say this is the next big educational Revolution we our kids it's not just critical thinking read an essay and explain the three ideas that's Child's Play like this is there are specific techniques of manipulation on YouTube all over that your kids are going to be exposed to over the course of their lives and they need to become resistant to it we've solved problems like that educationally in the past we need to solve it again hello check is this working yeah it is yes next thank you hello uh I have a question that I want to combine your last book with this one which if everyone hasn't read winner take all maybe you can set that up because for me winner take all still as far as a room like this it makes everyone so uncomfortable you've made so many people wonderfully uncomfortable where's persuaders I think this is a room where everyone's like well yeah I know who I need to persuade I know who's wrong you know there's a real um inbuilt arrogance including for myself right in terms of how that works and then you see that people you want to persuade are using the same language and there's this mirroring effect whereas winner take all it's just sort of what do you think you're actually up to with all of this you know philanthropy I bring that up because there's such good data on the people who are running the oligarchy not just in the US but anywhere have such a financial incentive to persuade a certain percentage of the population to believe them to Hoodwink them right to not have democracy function so it seems to me that the really connected politically which you've surely thought of but I'm I'm curious now that you've done this work how that comes together and just a brief anecdote about Comet Ping Pong I well I just I'm living my life I live in My Little Life in Washington DC and a few years ago I won a supper club I don't I'm not trying to advertise anything it's just that I look less they're flaying children and making Mass out of them my sub Club I wear this funky little mask and it's fun it's on my website so this photo of me in a gold mask doing this to say hush so someone took it I found this out someone took it manipulated it and said that's Uma because that's the skin of children I have a real interest in this stopping because I never thought that it would find me and that if it can find me it's finding us all so that's my question um well that was quite a story that's the really brief version um so on the on the first point you know I don't know if you've had a chance to read the book yet but the book the other one this is a you know a quick conversation we've had about it I think the book actually is in many ways a different uncomfortable conversation which is that it's a it's a more loving intervention than a critique of a remote billionaire Elite but it is a loving intervention with you know people I generally agree with to say and I'm quoting Alicia Garza here one of the subjects of the book we are in love with smallness right that we have built movements that function like music fandom where if too many people start to also like the record you like then you don't like it anymore because it's being it's becoming too crowded in there and that's fine for music but that's really a terrible attitude for politics and Linda sarsour says in the book our movement is too hard to join you have to know too much stuff to get in it and our kids are not going to be safe if there's barriers to entry for the movement which is not to say any of the goals are the wrong goals so this isn't I think an uncomfortable intervention particularly it's not my intervention so much as a lot of the people I'm writing about these subjects say very difficult things for their own movements and spaces but I also picked some very credible quite radical well credentialed voices in the world of activism and organizing who no one could say they're mushy milk toast middle moderates right so I think it isn't it is attempting to have a different uncomfortable conversation the last thing I would say is you're absolutely right there is a very the right beliefs in Persuasion and it believes largely in manipulation also and this book is an intervention to say we need to believe in it at least as much as that very well-oiled machine that is very good at taking people from I noticed a couple cashiers speaking a foreign language in my Walgreens taking them from there to there's an invasion on the southern border that does not happen automatically the right has a full like value chain to take you from that observation to the 10 of a like toxic political view it has a full value chain to take you from um a kid coming home and saying is America a bad country I learned that America made a bad country in school right something all of our kids like try to process new kinds of History teaching or coming home and saying in different ways and the right has a full apparatus to take you from there to Kimberly crenshaw's leading a Marxist plot funded by George Soros to like make America like American self-hate you know self-hating so it's versions of actually meaning making for good and in truth and that don't involve hatred but we need to get in that game and not just ask for five dollars every three minutes and ask for votes we need to meaning make citizens through the full process of they see stimuli in their lives they don't fully know how to think about it yet and we need from the president on down to talk people through the era talk people through change and make meaning in ways that are for Progress for democracy for a bigger we and not just allow all that work to be done on the other side I think there's a really interesting when you say the right beliefs in Persuasion there's actually a really interesting thing about Trump here which is Trump has spent his life reacting to the audience and trying to get attention and what he cares about is what's going to play I'm grew up in New York in the 1980s so I've been having to follow Donald Trump for many decades um and it's interesting because on a bunch of stuff he went much further than the Republican party right and on a bunch of stuff he looked at the Republican party and he was like you guys are crazy we're not going to voters until him the trade is good we're not going to voters and telling them we're going to cut Medicare and Social Security and it's kind of interesting to see how when the right went out to persuade people Trump went much further than any Republicans had gone before on some issues and on other issues he basically said to The Establishment types the thing rule types to use your like no you're crazy we're going in the other direction and it seems to me there's a lesson there not just for the right yeah evening I Want to Thank You For Preparing an intervention that is not only so well intellectually grounded but also emotionally grounded and I would say even grounded in love it's and that's the way we're going to get people to change I Believe by appealing to them where they are and helping them to feel safe and making that kind of change so I very much appreciate that so but along with that that kind of change as you've described is going to call for a really large scale retail approach it's not going to be the kind of thing where they get get through through ads by the Lincoln project on Twitter or Facebook and so I'm wondering if you've given any thought to how that kind of large-scale broad scale change is going to be organized I wonder if you feel any obligation to help make that happen and I wonder how you see that sort of being moved into places that I think are going to be very resistant like the D Triple C and so on which have highly vested interest in the in the kind of non-effective persuasion that they're trying to do now thank you thank you so much um that's a really great question so him I think one of my core arguments in the book is what you're saying and I I gave a talk that was based on the book where I pulled some of the stuff out more explicitly because it really is a book about these stories of people and sometimes I let the people do the talking but in this talk I I basically said that the the political left has become an extremely online movement not an IRL movement right and the right has Evangelical Church networks which on the on its own is just those people are hanging out right and I mean they got pool boys apparently according to this new Hulu documentary and they're hanging out with their pool boys and it's it's a party um they have hunting and fishing clubs they have uh uh they have homeschooling Association like the right actually believes in hanging out and I really think in some very important ways like we've become the chip in five dollars movement right essentially a movement of like a mass public that is emailed to that like a small number like a small fraction of which like a cent to the emails and then the others of them are just like grumbling the whole time but then reluctantly voting for that movement because it like at least it's not you know fascism and I think that's not I don't think that's the highest and best vision of what the Democratic party or you know like I think there's basically no strategy as I understand it for belonging in the Democratic party my wife wrote a book called The Art of gathering Priya Parker you may know her book see her friend over there um and it is all about how you create collective experience between people my wife's not the only person who studies this there's a lot of thinking out there about how you I think the Democratic party basically has no theory of collective experience you know who did have a theory of collective experience whoever designed those Trump rallies right and so does the Trump rally have to be a media attacking like venomous thing is there no can we not imagine a positive uplifting version of that I think Bernie had it at certain moments I don't think it was quite as connective I was at a lot of those things I don't think it was as connective as exuberant as Transcendent Bernie really looks down on the role of emotion in politics really thinks it's beneath him I think he's mistaken I think he'd be president if he didn't look down on it um like I think we are stuck in various forms of high-mindedness that our moderates progressives that are really self-defeating and and a big argument this book to go back to the first thing you said is I don't think it's beneath that our dignity to bring an understanding of emotion back into politics right and I think good actors can bring emotion back into politics can understand how people form opinions as actually often being a chiefly emotional process and therefore be much better stewards of talking people through the era and building a kind of movement including through things like deep canvassing but also things like the Democratic party should have a representative in every building the way a lot of center-left parties did in the 19th and 20th centuries right you got a confusing letter from the IRS you go upstairs the Democratic party lady on the third floor that would be a normal way to actually have a party root in people's lives and not just email people for money so we've got three more I think three more people standing in line is that right and we got four to five minutes so lightning round yeah all right ask me Lightning round quest uh one two four one two four where's three go uh thank you for your time I want to ask you about your last book because I haven't been able to buy your most recent one yet um I have a lot of friends who are like Hillary Cohen uh from Georgetown you know they they go to Georgetown some go to the Ivy League schools and they're at a Crossroads of their career do they want to help in social justice or and a lot of these uh causes that they're sympathetic to or do they go work at Mackenzie Goldman the other prestigious big businesses um and so what I want to ask you is what was your most compelling argument uh to these you know ambitious young professionals to actually decide to commit their life and career to Justice and not you know having it be a side hustle and just real quick on the note of canvassing if anyone is eligible to vote in DC initiative 82 on the back of your bout will help tipped workers get a raise they are pay the sub minimum wage right now it'll raise the 1610 and please bring your friends to Dornoch in Southeast DC with Metro DSA uh this can help a lot of people if if y'all show up so career choice great question you know I think that that obviously this mat depends on what is your situation and like are you supporting family members and are you in debt and that like everyone has their own fingerprint of an issue but broadly what I when I get this question from young people after winners take all it is what problem in the world most infuriates you and these days people don't generally lack for answers to that um and then don't get diverted into a lot of the detours like well you have to get 50 years of training to be able to think about that properly or you know um any of the number of other you know like think what what is a solution to that kind of problem whatever that is that is I would say has four qualities public Democratic institutional and Universal right solves the problem at the root for everybody and then it may take that may be 50 years of work right your colleague David Brooks is a line like work worth doing most work worth doing can't be done in a lifetime I don't agree with David Brooks on a whole bunch of things but I think that's a very good quote um and so it doesn't mean you're going to deliver fair housing to everybody in a year but what would it look like to spend a long time moving the ball forward on Fair Housing what are the what are the blocks what and I think the diversion that I tried to talk about Winners they call was just to say like you can just you know help Exxon like comb the hair of geese who've been caught in an oil spill you know and and that will like do so much for that one Goose um and I and and I just think I hope the world is turning against that kind of performative small-scale non-systemic approach and it was not a real example interview people in their 30s and 40s and see who likes their job yeah that helps too hi I'll try to be quick um but uh I really like this argument from like the small D Democrat and me really loves it um but I worry that it puts a little bit too much emphasis on like individuals and like you can change things yourself without necessarily I I haven't read the book I'm looking forward to but uh I guess I'm worried especially like we don't live in a majority rule in this country so like persuading people is great but like when we're up against these sort of uh problems I guess my question is like what sort of systemic reforms would you like try to pair with this or that these movements could move towards yeah it's a great question and I don't want to be misunderstood on this point it's very important like in some ways this is not saying structural change is not important this is like stepping one step back and saying right now there's a whole bunch of structural changes that you and I might like and we're not getting them passed right and so I want to get them passed and including democracy reforms so that majority rule would actually be a thing that happens in this country and we just literally don't have the votes right now we don't have the votes we don't have the kind of pressure on Joe manchin in West Virginia that we should have I mean I would love if there was a million and I propose this uh in the government office today I think there should be a million people trained in deep canvassing it should be a priority the Democratic party and there should be then 50 000 people who've had that training in West Virginia who you can just turn on with a tap when you're getting a little trouble on something right 50 000 people who trained that method who you can send to every door and that but we don't have that right now right so this is not saying don't do structural change this is about how do you get to structural change when yes the odds are stacked against us but I can't change the odds being against us we're going to need to win even bigger majorities to get to a place where majorities can decide things but there's no the fact that we are in a disadvantaged position politically is not does not absolve us of the obligation of persuasion it just makes it even harder it's not fair it is not fair but you know there's no crying in baseball and there's no like whining in politics like we are going to have to you know beat the crap out of movements that have a lot of money and a lot of power and have figured out perfectly how to like wedge into people's psyches and have media apparatus that will do their bidding and it's not easy it's not for the faint of the heart but I think the people I'm writing about actually have a playbook for doing it that is quite transformative and can win even with that unlevel playing field thank you the Civil Rights Movement had to overcome a filibuster that needed 67 votes to be broke hey there uh thanks so much for writing this book I'm a teacher I teach social emotional learning although we have to call it life skills now because Chris Ruffo persuaded everyone that social emotional learning is Marxist indoctrination um what grade do you teach I work for a company that does social emotional learning curriculum for kids online amazing um one of the things that I like to work on a lot with kids is persuasion both because kids love persuasion love to learn about it because they have no power um and also because it's a good way to think about empathy how do you understand other people Integrity how do you know what you believe self-assertion how do you stand up for it and so my question is across all the persuaders that you talk to in your book what were the skills or the traits that they had that made them really go to persuading and what's something that someone whether they're aches I work with eight and nine-year-olds mostly or 88 could practice every single day to get better at humanitarian persuasive that's great that's such a great question Brian perfect place to to end because um I'm in a way writing about Olympic athletes persuasion and it's not necessarily that you can read the book and you know become an Olympic Athlete but I think they show qualities and orientations that you can absolutely adopt tomorrow and a lot of people have been saying to me in a few weeks the book's been out a few months it's been in some people's hands that those qualities are things people have been able to adopt so let me rattle off a few things I think one is to go back to the beginning that mental yeah take notes you're a good good teacher if you want people to take notes when you're talking I guess you got to take note right um that's actually one of the lessons I'm going to get to that um one is a mental model of other people particularly on the far Shore as being complicated and confused and torn contradicted as Beyonce says um rather than monolithic and having a single story right that's just a basic discipline and as a virtue of being empirically true and also you know thinking people on monoliths was just self-defeating which is how you lose I think another one is a facility with commanding attention right so again there's an AOC version of that and she's a big part of this book but I don't think you have to be AOC to understand attention again a lot of I think there's a little high-mindedness on the political left where like attention is looked down on or like being provocative right and I think once you understand that commanding attention in this era is actually how you get other things you want done that's just a really straightforward thing you can do um another is to not live in Outrage reaction to the other side actually to say what you're for and be obsessed by what you're for and be mostly spouting what you're for instead of living in reaction Carrie Lake said this and Trump said this and all of our just like the kind of quote tweet outrage that is really just amplifying what these other people are saying all the time and it's literally why they do it and they're so effective at it um have your conversation as an option cross Oreo says picking fights these people are all willing to pick fights I think Democrats often are just really unwilling to pick fights again I think it's beneath them picking fights is good you know Gavin Newsom after the recalls like liberated man started picking some fights they made a lot of people feel safe I think a lot of American citizens feel like children in a dangerous house who are not being protected by their parents and I think we want leaders to actually like can protect us stand up for us and then finally and this is the place I'll end I think we have to tell a better story about America and I think political leaders have to do that but I think we all have to do that I think that means reclaiming patriotism I am tired of people conceding patriotism to people who shoot beer bottles in their backyard to like prepare for a Civil War I don't think those people monopolize patriotism I don't just because they say they're Patriots or you know have a not even an American flag But A Thin Blue Line flag on their highly elevated I'm struggling with my masculinity pickup truck like I don't think they own the idea of America and I think those of us who want more democracy more human rights to save the planet instead of burn it down I think we have a hell of a story to tell I think we started in this country with some iconic ideas and words that no matter how flawed the implementation are iconic ideas and words that helped Inspire other people around the world I think we we're not brave enough as the artist Dewey Crumpler said to me we're not brave enough to be what we said at the beginning we have not been brave enough for a lot of our history partly because those ideals were so powerful that very few human communities have ever lived up to those ideals and quite consistently since then we have tried to get Trower to them not always in a purely Forward Motion but quite impressively bringing in every generation more people who are not included at the beginning to be included to be counted to be recognized to be seen we have done that again and again there is a minority faction in this country that has opposed every single expansion and extension of those ideals and those promises they oppose the end of slavery they opposed reforms for workers in the industrial revolution they opposed women voting they opposed the New Deal and any kind of safety net they opposed unions they opposed integration they opposed you know uh immigration law in 1965 that opened this country to people from all places and it's worth noting that they lost every single solitary one of those fights they lost every single one of those fights look at the room in their fight was to make this room impossible it didn't work and so it is really bad right now and I'm I say that as much as anybody but it is bad because a small group of people would rather break the country than share it they are not most of us they have tried this every single time we were extending the blessings of liberty to more people they will lose as they always do in the long run and the question is how long is that going to take and can we summon in ourselves a weird mix of open-heartedness empathy ruthless strategy and pragmatism feistiness rootedness in community all the things I've talked about today I believe we can I believe many people in this room are here in this room standing up because you're tired of seven years of a defensive Crouch of despair you want to do something you want to protect your freedoms from people who want to take them away and I really deeply believe more than I did when I started talking to the people I wrote about that we can win this fight we will win this fight and we have to reclaim the idea of persuasion if we're going to have a chance thank you a stirring note on the ground thank you thank you all so much um thank you so much uh and thanks to all of you for coming before I hand it over uh I just want to note that on my way in tonight I bought a book uh and I love this space our community is incredibly lucky to have it um uh the folks who work here need to be paid the lights need to go on so if on your way out you want to buy a book I would encourage you to do it if you want to stop it another day buy a book please do it uh I hope this bookstore exists for many decades to come and it only will do so if we buy books here instead of on our phones

Channel: Politics and Prose

Views: 19,093

Keywords: books, book, politics and prose, bookstore, author, author talk, author video, book talk, new books, book store, indie bookstore, independent bookstore, book tube, booktube, reading vlog, annotating books, book annotations, reading vlogs, journalism, journalist, Washington DC, DC, bookworms, bookworm, book worm, book worms

Id: NPGgSoA7YoY

Length: 65min 33sec (3933 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 04 2022