How pro-democracy 'persuaders' are shifting political views
‘It is not true that people don't change,’ says author Anand Giridharadas
*Originally published on Nov. 23, 2022.
Anand Giridharadas calls it "the great American write-off."
He's referring to the divisive politics of his country, and the tendency to give up on "the other side."
It's an ideological stalemate that has stalled the growth of progressive movements in the U.S., says the Brooklyn-based author and journalist.
He acknowledges that MAGA Republicanism, disinformation campaigns, and QAnon conspiracies have pushed tens of millions of American voters hard to the right.
But in researching his latest book, The Persuaders, Giridharadas met fellow progressives intent on bridging this political divide, in the name of democracy, justice, and a better future for all.
"I spent a lot of time with organizers, activists, politicians, cognitive scientists, and even a cult deprogrammer, who hold certain insights about how we can reach people, even when it seems so hard."
His "persuaders" are uncompromising in their progressive values, but equally dedicated to reaching out and communicating with those who may not share them.
Giridharadas spoke with IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed at an onstage event, part of the Toronto Public Library's On Civil Society series, just after the U.S. midterm elections in November 2022.
Here's an excerpt from their conversation.
AG: It is not true that people don't change. A whole lot of 2021's anti-vaxxers are now fully vaccinated. A whole bunch of people who hated gay folks in the 1990s now vote for gay candidates, and for people who advance pro-gay policies. A bunch of people who have supported Donald Trump or other kinds of authoritarian movements around the world have since changed their mind and voted against those movements.
So persuasion is always going on. And when we turn our back on the idea of persuasion out of our despair, out of our fatalism, out of our depression, at what's happening, we leave that terrain open to the worst actors. There would be no Fox News if they didn't believe in persuasion.
NA: But you're not prescribing another Fox News on the other side...
No, I'm suggesting that if the most dangerous movements of our time believe in persuasion and conversion, and the most righteous and inclusive movements of our time do this kind of French philosopher shrug — "ugh, they'll never change" — then we are sleepwalking our way into tyranny and into regimes of disinformation.
What evidence was most compelling in persuading you that opinions can be changed?
Most of these people I write about in the book would say there's kind of a hardcore 20 per cent on the left and a hardcore 20 per cent on the right. You're not going to chat them out of their opinion on immigration at a bar in one night. But the average voter is all over the place: "I hate socialism, and they better not take away my universal health care!"
People are conflicted. People have differing moral commitments. People grew up in the Cold War and were told socialism is bad, but they have a knee injury and they like the Canadian health care system. People live really complicated lives and embody those complexities. They may say they're in a party, but they can be toggled into a pretty right-wing view of the world or a pretty left-wing view of the world on a given issue.
Tell me about the difference between displacing and replacing the way somebody thinks.
It's tempting to try to replace what someone is thinking with what you think they should think: "You have this pseudoscience in your head about climate. I would like to cut that out like a surgeon and just put in the correct science on climate change." Now, you cannot, in fact, replace other people's thoughts. And what (veteran activist) Loretta Ross said to me, and so many others did, is that you can only displace people's thoughts.
So how did that work in Loretta Ross's case?
She talked about how you have to make people have questions again, which is different from giving them your answers.
What do most of us do when we deal with people who have succumbed to climate disinformation? Displacement in that case is showing a concern for how otherwise intelligent, critically-thinking people have been misled by powerful people with an interest in misleading them, using common tactics of manipulation. "I'm just concerned that the same way big companies lied to us about smoking…that some of those same kinds of manipulative arguments are now being used against you."
*Q&A edited for clarity and length. This episode was produced by Lisa Godfrey.
