As I explained in the last chapter, in a democratic system, the minority is by definition the opposition. Their de facto position is fighting against the ideas of the other side. Political minorities fight against something that’s more powerful than they are. And over time, their entire self-identity can become utterly reliant on acting like the principled underdog.
When conservatives fight against teachers’ unions, fight against Obamacare, fight against debt, spending, the expansion of government, we are not setting an agenda. We are reacting to an agenda. When this process is iterated over and over, conservatives start to forget that fighting against things is not our true goal, but merely one tactic for reaching larger goals. We let our temporary political fortunes ossify into a permanent minoritarian mindset.
This is an error. First of all, conservatives are not actually in the minority. According to Gallup, significantly more Americans identify as conservative (38 percent) than as moderate (34 percent) or liberal (24 percent).8 Liberals are the smallest ideological minority, yet they adroitly think and act like a majority. They claim incessantly that they’re fighting for the “99 percent.” That is inherently majoritarian language, and the public frequently rewards them with legislative majorities to match it. Paradoxically, though conservatives outnumber liberals, we have become accustomed to behaving like a minority and fighting against things.
Let’s return to the 1980s for a moment. Conservatives constantly invoke the memory of Ronald Reagan, an excellent president. Was it Reagan who led the conservative movement to fight against things?
The answer is no. On the contrary, Reagan understood better than anyone that a minority fights against things while a majority fights for people. He understood the dangers of limitless government, to be sure. But he always brought the conversation home to the people hurt by overreach. He didn’t pretend that most people regard the size of the government as an intrinsic philosophical evil.
Here are President Reagan’s own words, delivered at the 1980 Republican National Convention in Detroit as he made the case for his election:
Together, let us make this a new beginning. Let us make a commitment to care for the needy; to teach our children the values and the virtues handed down to us by our families. . . .
Ours are not problems of abstract economic theory. [They] are problems of flesh and blood; problems that cause pain and destroy the moral fiber of real people who should not suffer the further indignity of being told by the government that it is all somehow their fault.
Work and family are at the center of our lives, the foundation of our dignity as a free people. When we deprive people of what they have earned, or take away their jobs, we destroy their dignity and undermine their families. . . . We have to move ahead, but we’re not going to leave anyone behind. Thanks to the economic policies of the Democratic Party, millions of Americans find themselves out of work. Millions more have never even had a fair chance to learn new skills, hold a decent job, or secure for themselves and their families a share in the prosperity of this nation. It is time to put America back to work; to make our cities and towns resound with the confident voices of men and women of all races, nationalities, and faiths bringing home to their families a decent paycheck they can cash for honest money.
For those without skills, we’ll find a way to help them get skills. For those without job opportunities, we’ll stimulate new opportunities, particularly in the inner cities where they live. For those who have abandoned hope, we’ll restore hope and we’ll welcome them into a great national crusade to make America great again!
Notice how different this sounds from many of today’s angriest voices who scramble to claim Reagan’s mantle. His speech is strikingly positive in tenor. It is optimistic, aspirational, and resoundingly pro-people.
Take a look at this “word cloud” of Reagan’s speech. The more frequently a word is used, the larger it appears. What single word stands out the most?
True, “government” shows up with prominence. That is to be expected in any policy speech. But “people” is Reagan’s most frequently repeated word. He mentions “people” 38 times in his speech. In fact, when you add in all the other times he talks about the kinds of people he is fighting for—“families,” “children,” “the needy,” “the elderly,” “immigrants,” “workers,” and so on—the number rises to 87.
Spending was mentioned just four times, “deficit” just twice, and “regulation” twice. Zero mentions of “debt.” The only specific policy words even visible are “tax” (17 mentions) and “economic” (18).
When Ronald Reagan made his case to the American people, he didn’t spend a lot of time talking about what he was fighting against. He spent most of his speech talking about who he was fighting for. This is what conservatives too often forget. We spend much too much time explaining economic policy to people who just want to hear how we can improve their lives and the lives of the poor.
Even when economics is not used to fight against things, explaining it generally distracts from our first-order goal. Economics runs quietly in the background, like your computer’s operating system. This is certainly important: You need to get it right or you’re in trouble.
But Republicans today have become like a bunch of computer geeks talking about “bits,” “algorithms,” and “binary values.” Most people don’t understand that stuff or much care about it. A hardworking parent isn’t interested in soldering. They just want their phones to work.
Even real-life engineers know this, by the way. When Apple advertises their new devices, they don’t do it by extolling their great chips or processing speeds, or talking about the engineering problems they faced. Instead, they show all the amazing things people can do with the device. They illustrate in vivid colors how owning Apple products will make your life better. Conservative communicators need to take the hint. We should stop selling chips and processors and start selling better lives.9
This lesson was a difficult pill for me to swallow. I have a PhD in public policy. I’m the president of a think tank. I love to debunk myths with data and technical arguments. One of my favorite things to do on weekends is lean back in a comfy chair with a good academic study. My colleagues and I can and do spend hours carefully measuring the pros and cons of particular public policy proposals.
So if I can train myself to swap negative, technical arguments against things in exchange for positive arguments on behalf of people, anyone can.
3. GET HAPPY.
Andrew Luck is one of the most successful quarterbacks in the National Football League. In his first three seasons, he led his team to two division titles, including the second-biggest playoff comeback in NFL history.
But the Indianapolis Colts star has become known for more than the cannon attached to his shoulder. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Luck has become famous for congratulating—sincerely and enthusiastically—any player to hit him hard.” The Journal contacted a dozen players who recently had hit or sacked Luck, and they all told the same story. “Any sack is met with a hearty congratulations, such as ‘great job’ or ‘what a hit!’ He yells it after hard hits that don’t result in sacks, too. It is, players say, just about the weirdest thing any quarterback does in the NFL.”10
Once, Washington Redskins linebacker Ryan Kerrigan hit Luck so hard that the quarterback fumbled the football. Since he was scrambling to retrieve it, he could not offer his customary congratulations. But don’t worry—Luck sought him out later in the game and told him what a great job he was doing. Kerrigan was baffled. “You want to say thank you,” he explained, “but then you say ‘wait a second—I’m not supposed to like you!’”
Andrew Luck is both unusually aggressive and preternaturally cheerful. His good humor is genuine, but it has the added effect of throwing the opposing team off balance. They don’t know what to make of him. Virtue, it turns out, is a competitive advantage.
I have no idea if Andrew Luck is a conservative. But conservatives need to be more like
Andrew Luck.
As a quick detour into neuroscience will soon show us, it is extremely challenging to overcome a bad first impression. And yes, there is a lot to be angry about in America today. Conservatives worry the country we love is in decline. We’re mad about it. But the plain fact is that debating with anger turns people off. The public is instinctively attracted to happy warriors who fight in a spirit of charity.
This is another classic Reagan lesson that some modern conservatives misunderstand. How often did you see Ronald Reagan truly angry? He always had a twinkle in his eye and a joke at the ready. His jokes were more devastating than any fire-and-brimstone words could have been. Reagan’s humor cut big-government liberalism and Soviet communism to the quick.
“It’s hard to get an automobile in the Soviet Union,” began one of my favorites. “It takes an average of ten years to get a car . . . so this man [ordered one] and the dealer said, ‘Okay, in ten years, come get your car.’
“‘Morning or afternoon?’ the man replied.
“‘Well, what difference does it make?’ said the dealer, wondering why the time of day mattered so far into the future.
“‘The plumber is coming in the morning!’”
Reagan helped change the world by pairing his spine of steel with a smile.
We need to be happy warriors as well. Our objective is not winning arguments. It is winning converts. Thin skin and a hair trigger make us look like an angry political minority. If we want to impress the amygdalae and posterior cingulate cortexes of the American people (stay tuned to meet a neuroscientist who will explain what that means) we need to learn to debate in the spirit of charity.
So the next time you accidentally lead with the economic case against the minimum wage and someone accuses you of shilling for billionaires or hating the poor, smile and say, “Nice hit!” before you make a better argument.
But here’s the catch (pun intended)—you have to actually mean it. Good humor has to be authentic or people see through it in an instant. Andrew Luck isn’t faking it. Neither can you. To be a happy warrior you must work to be a genuinely happy person.
4. STEAL ALL THE BEST ARGUMENTS.
A few years back, I was delivering a speech at a big Tea Party rally. The title of my speech was “Conservative Social Justice.” I laid out a host of ways in which conservatives could champion the poor, and made my moral case for why we are called to do so. Afterward, an unhappy activist approached me and began a lecture. “You can’t talk about social justice,” she insisted.
“Why not?”
“Because even using that language concedes the argument to the left!”
We hear variants of this all the time. If you are a conservative, there are certain code words you’re supposed to use and others from which you must keep your distance. Deploy particular language and themes that make you easy to figure out. And whatever you do, stay a mile away from the signals of the other side.
This common trope is brutally bad advice. The side that wins is the side that scrambles the categories.
Americans—by significant margins—believe that “empathy” and “compassion” are traits owned by Democrats. When all the average voter knows about a candidate is that he is a Democrat, the voter instinctively assumes the guy’s heart is in the right place. The left gets those two traits for free, we might say, before the campaign even begins.
Conservatives own several traits of their own. Most voters, across the ideological spectrum, instinctively associate “traditional morals” (on the social issues) and “strong leadership” with the political right. Tell a citizen nothing except a candidate’s GOP affiliation, and she will assume that the candidate takes charge and believes in leading an upright life.
This is the terrain each side holds when every campaign begins. Knowing this, should conservatives double down on traditional morality and strong leadership? Reinvest in our comparative advantage? Or should we trespass on our opponent’s traits, and try to launch a rhetorical sneak attack on the other team’s home territory?
This question could occupy endless theoretical debate. But fortunately, we have data on the issue, and they are unambiguous. The correct strategy is to appropriate: Make the arguments for empathy and compassion.
Anyone familiar with the world of business is probably raising an eyebrow. In the private sector, success almost always comes from redoubling on natural strengths. If you own a cardboard box factory, you want to focus on making the world’s best cardboard boxes. It’s usually a mistake to try to dive into some new and entirely unrelated line of work.
Politicians think they should follow the same rule. Most Republicans conclude their path to victory is to be redder than red—emphasize strength and traditional social issues and forget about the soft stuff. For a long time, conventional conservative opinion has declared it a waste of time to try to persuade Americans that we have compassion for struggling people. We have limited resources. Those people will never vote for us anyway. And the other side already owns that image. Why bother trying to trespass?
That’s a great argument, except for two tiny points: Trait-trespassing is the right thing to do and it’s the only way to win nationwide.
First, it is a simple truism that patriots and leaders fight for everyone who needs them, not the subset who support them. Talk to any of our veterans who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan. They were there to defend our entire nation, to keep every single American safe—even the people who don’t like or support the military. Each of us has to be a warrior in the same way. A servant leader is called to fight for every single American regardless of how they may vote.
And second, in a happy twist of fate, doing the right thing has a political payoff. Most Americans don’t want to choose between compassion and morality, or between leadership and empathy. We want leaders who have all these traits.
George Washington University political scientist Danny Hayes has done groundbreaking work in this subject.11 His research shows that Americans love a leader who throws out the usual script and competes on nontraditional moral ground. Hayes combs through decades of data. Here’s what he finds: If voters rate two candidates as equally strong leaders—meaning the Democrat has erased his initial deficit on this trait—the electorate breaks roughly 60 percent to 40 percent in favor of the Democrat. Conversely, if a Republican manages to overcome the empathy gap—if voters see both the contenders as equally empathetic—he or she wins with about 65 percent.
These are huge margins, and they offer a crystal-clear takeaway: Voters reward candidates who go after unconventional traits.
There are a handful of politicians who keenly understand this. Two of them happen to share a last name. In 1992, when Bill Clinton was first running for president, members of the Los Angeles police beat a motorist named Rodney King. Riots broke out across the city. In the aftermath, a hip-hop artist named Sister Souljah gave a now-infamous interview. “If black people kill black people every day,” she proposed, “why not have a week and kill white people? [If] you’re a gang member and you would normally be killing somebody, why not kill a white person?”12 Charming, I know.
Not long after Sister Souljah made those comments, Clinton was invited to speak at a conference Jesse Jackson had convened. Sister Souljah was also a speaker.13 Clinton surprised the room when he used his platform to take Sister Souljah to task. “If you took the words ‘white’ and ‘black,’” he lambasted, “and you reversed them, you might think [Ku Klux Klan leader] David Duke was giving that speech.”14
This episode became known as Clinton’s “Sister Souljah moment.” His remarks set off a firestorm on the left, but they were a politically brilliant move. Clinton had put on a clinic in trait-trespassing. As a Democrat, he was already assumed by voters to be empathetic and compassionate. With these comments, he was staking a claim to moral leadership as well.
What about a more recent example? As Hillary Clinton was touring the country in 2014 to promote her new book, she seized a “Sister Souljah mom
ent” of her own. She sharply criticized Barack Obama for the rise of the Islamic State. Obama’s “failure” to arm and train pro-Western rebels, the former secretary of state argued, had “left a big vacuum which the jihadists have now filled.”15 Clinton even took a direct shot at the slogan the Obama administration had recently coined to describe its foreign policy doctrine: “don’t do stupid [stuff].” Clinton retorted that “great nations need organizing principles, and ‘don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.”
Why did Clinton carve out such a hawkish position? Maybe she really believes it—but in any event, it was brilliant politics. As a Democrat, Clinton knows she already gets credit for the typical Democratic traits of empathy and compassion. By criticizing President Obama’s national security record, she was making a play for a classic Republican characteristic—strong leadership.
The Clintons know what they are doing. When Democrats shake up the conventional categories and convey that they’re serious about morality and strong on national security, they do well. They get at least as many votes from their own base, way more votes from independents, and even some votes from conservatives. The reverse will bear similar fruit. If Republicans work hard to win on empathy and compassion, they will get more votes across the political spectrum and especially from independents.
Every Republican leader needs to hammer this home. “The reason I am a conservative is because I care about poverty. I’m fighting to help the poor. And I’m going to do it whether they vote for me or not.”
If we started saying that and saying it often enough—and meaning it—the data suggest massive changes. A 10 percentage point swing of independent voters to the conservative candidate is within reach.
The Conservative Heart Page 19