Be Us, Not Them

We can’t just do what they do. We have to undo what they do.

Driving up Republicans’ negatives in the public debate may feel like winning. But it drives people away from the political process and erodes the public’s trust in government and each other. This serves Republicans’ purposes, not ours. We have to get people to believe in democracy and in government, and we can only do that by giving people something positive to believe in. Lucky for us, according to the cognitive science, this is also the best way to win.

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Celebrity Divorce and the Silent Treatment

Apparently, the Hollywood media has been enthralled by actress Sophie Turner’s handling of her ugly public divorce from Joe Jonas, in contrast with Amber Heard who supposedly lost the P.R. battle in her trial with Johnny Depp. When Turner was asked why she wasn’t hitting back against the campaign of slander carried out by supporters of Joe Jonas, she said something like, “This way, people can tell where the crazy is coming from.”

Ms. Turner’s silent treatment strategy is being touted as “masterful” by the Hollywood P.R. crowd, enough to warrant an article in Forbes magazine under the heading of “Leadership Strategy.”

Our battle with Republicans seems to be playing out more like the Heard-Depp trial. With Trump and Republicans projecting left and right, creating false equivalencies, and pursuing their victimhood strategy, virtually every claim we make with regard to their fascist behavior is met with an equal and opposite claim about President Biden and the Democrats. Despite ours and some journalists attempts to set the record straight, ultimately, people can’t tell where the crazy is coming from.

In my previous newsletter, I talked about how we need to try a new approach, one that isn’t the same thing we’ve been doing since 2016. Here, I make the case for going with what the science tells us will actually work best: providing the American people with a clear picture of what “morally right” looks like. In short:

 We need to make it easy for people to tell where the good is coming from.

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The Macy’s-Gimbels Problem

There’s an old story about why you never see negative advertising in the corporate world. It says that, if Macy’s tells everybody Gimbels is ripping off customers, and Gimbels tells everybody that Macy’s is ripping off customers, people will start to believe that they both suck and find somewhere else to shop.

We talk like electoral politics is a binary choice. If people think Republicans are evil, they will vote for us. Our problem isn’t that Republican’s negatives aren’t high enough, it’s that our negatives are just as high. Too many people think we both suck, and yes, they can shop elsewhere, or not shop at all. People can vote for third-Party candidates or just stay home.

Trying to get people to vote for Democrats as the lesser of two evils is a risky, risky strategy. Too many people don’t understand that staying home and voting for a third-Party candidate are both votes for the greater of two evils.

That’s not the only problem.

We have different goals.

We can’t just do what Republicans do. Some of the tactics that work for them don’t work for us, because we’re trying to achieve different things. Republicans keep people afraid and divided to break down people’s trust in each other and in government as a whole. Their mission is to make it difficult, if not impossible, for government to stand up to powerful interests on behalf of the American people. Making people cynical helps them do that.

WE have to get people to care about what happens to each other and to the community as a whole. We need people, not just to support our policies, but to believe in government itself.

We believe that government is a good thing, or at least should be, in the right hands. It is the tool a society uses to make and carry out collective decisions. We use it to take care of each other, plan wisely for our future and improve our quality of life and, yes, that includes standing up to powerful private interests on each others’ behalf.

That vision of government is the foundation for everything we do, yet we rarely talk about it. We have to make the case for it out loud, because that vision of government has been under assault for fifty years.

Macy’s and Gimbals both had a stake in people’s believing that department stores are good. If people think both Parties are bad, Republicans win and we lose.

Safety-mongering

But – people always ask me – isn’t fear the strongest motivator? Fear mongering only motivates conservative political behavior.

"Terror Management Theory," though validated in more than 1,500 empirical studies, is little known. To our detriment. It predicts that anything that makes people afraid for their lives (9/11; covid; climate change) leads them away from democratic ideals, to support authoritarian leaders who frighten them, then promise to save them.    

- Richard M. Waugaman, Professor of Psychiatry, Georgetown University

On the other hand, experiments at Yale University showed that if you make people feel safe, support for liberal ideas goes up! Getting conservative participants to visualize themselves as safe made them just as supportive of social change as the liberals in the study.

This research demonstrates why Franklin Roosevelt’s famous fireside chats were so effective. Democrats have to stick to the mantra that “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” Whether the issue is crime, immigration, health care or job and retirement security, we have to make people feel like they are safe in Democrats’ hands.

Our core message has to be: “Don’t worry, it’ll be okay. We can do this together.”

Add to the good side of the scale.

Why is it so important that we only talk about what Democrats believe in positive terms, and never talk about what Republicans are doing and saying? It may seem counter-intuitive, but the cognitive science tells us that what gets talked about is more important than what we actually say about it. This is due to the impact of exposure to words and combinations of words, as opposed to the arguments we are trying to make.

Imagine that every voter has a scale in their brain, the kind you see representing the concept of justice. This scale has a “good” side and a “bad” side, like this:

We win elections by adding the most weight to the “good” side of people’s scales. Every time we talk about things like government being good or people being safe, we add pebbles to the good side of the scale.

Every time we talk about what we’re against, we add a pebble to the bad side of the scale.

Take a phrase like “Trump called immigrants vermin.” The “what” being talked about is the idea that immigrants are like vermin. We either assume that people know this is a horrible thing to say, or we say outright that Trump is horrible for saying it. Either way, we are still exposing people to language that involuntarily reinforces the association between these things that we don’t want associated. This is a bad pebble. When we talk about what Trump is saying, we help him add pebbles to the bad side of the scale.

Good and Bad Pebbles

What does a good pebble look like? Instead of talking about what we’re against, we talk about what we’re for.

In this case, rather than talking about what immigrants aren’t, we talk about what immigrants are.

Immigrants are us. Most Americans are descendants of immigrants, whether they came here yesterday or on the Mayflower.

Immigrants are brave. They uprooted themselves and braved enormous risk to come to America to find a better life for themselves and their families.

Immigrants seek freedom. They came to find the freedom that is America’s promise, a freedom they were denied at home.

Immigrants make our country better. They contribute their initiative and determination to our society as well as their culture and traditions, all of which makes America unique, dynamic, creative, and strong.

(The most recent immigrants? They are the pepperoni on the pizza that is America!)

Immigrants fuel our economy. We need a steady flow of immigrants into our workforce to keep our economy growing.

What we are FOR is making our immigration system safe, orderly, efficient and humane. It should be beneficial to everyone and reflect our common American values.

If we want people to view immigration not as a threat, but as a natural part of how our country works and one of the things that makes it special, we have to add lots of those positive pebbles to the “good” side of the scale.

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The Bottom Line

Driving up Republican’s negatives is not the solution.

We can’t just do what they do, because we’re trying to achieve different things than they are. Republicans use fear, cynicism, and division to break down people’s faith in people and in government.

No matter what we say about Trump and company, they will always make it a ‘he said, she said” situation. We have to make it incredibly easy for voters to tell which side the “crazy is coming from” and which side the good is on.

We have to drive our positives up. We have to be ourselves, not them. We have to undo the damage they have done.

The only way we can both beat Republicans at the ballot box AND repair our society, is by spreading safety, hope and unity. We do that by talking about who we are and what we’re for, by adding pebbles to the positive side of the scale.

I’ll be talking more about how to do that in future columns.

Thanks, as always, for reading and subscribing! I hope you are able to use this in your work and your activism!

In solidarity,

Antonia