Leaving those points on the table is political negligence of the highest order. In a tight presidential election, that margin could easily make all the difference. This is not something that can win. I believe this is the only thing that will win. And, most important of all, it is the right thing to do. Expand your moral imagination. Trespass on your opponent’s traits.
5. GO WHERE YOU’RE NOT WELCOME.
Humans have a natural tendency to go where we already feel comfortable. If you are an evangelical Christian, it is most fun to hang out with other evangelicals who appreciate and share your values. I get that.
Conservatives have this tendency in spades. We tend to be very insular, talking to each other about our goals and complaining to each other about all the bad things the left is up to. At most conservative events, you will not see much exposure to centrist or liberal points of view, to say the least. And it’s rarely in a leader’s self-interest to expose him- or herself to gratuitous shots from the other side.
Unfortunately, people who need converting are not converted when we don’t leave the house.
Our goal for the conservative movement is not to remain a motivated minority. We want to become a transformational moral majority. To do that, we need to become a more magnetic movement, attracting people who don’t yet see things our way and enlisting them into our cause.
Doing that requires rethinking how we engage with three different audiences:
True believers—those who are already with us;
Persuadables—those who are not yet with us; and
Hostiles—those who will never be with us.
We need a clear strategy for each group. And yes, we have to spend time with all three.
First, consider the standard Republican strategy for talking to true believers. Our leaders fire people up! They get us mad! At conservative gatherings, candidates take the stage and start lobbing rhetorical raw steaks into the audience. The press reports which anti-Obama lines got the biggest applause and who got the longest standing ovations.
There’s nothing wrong with firing people up. People who are fired up knock on doors, make phone calls, and turn out to vote. But there are right and wrong ways to fire people up. When we fuel the fire with negative, oppositional, and minoritarian rhetoric, we may still motivate some true believers, but we fail to make them into effective missionaries. We turn off everyone else who is listening.
Many of you, like me, may be religious converts. If that’s you, I would bet almost anything that you weren’t attracted to loud, apocalyptic declarations from your new faith’s most fiery adherents. More likely, you encountered other true believers who carried themselves with humility, courage, and clarity of purpose. You thought to yourself, I want what they have. I want to learn more. This kind of magnetic attraction is how hearts are won.
How can the conservative movement acquire this magnetism? Read St. Paul’s letters to the early Christians. He didn’t tell them to get fired up and go attack the pagans. But he didn’t instruct them to wall themselves off, either. Instead, he simply asked them to take part in their communities and be the best Christians they could possibly be. Don’t argue with one another or harangue your neighbors, he wrote. Share with everyone. Love one another. Live a life worthy of the calling you have received. Living in this way is how people “put on the full armor of God.”
Paul knew that by showing their true hearts to everyone, the fledgling Christians would magnetize themselves and draw in outsiders organically. Needless to say, we could stand to learn this lesson as conservatives.
The first step to put Paul’s advice into practice is firing up the true believers in the right way. Forget negativity. Speak to our friends and allies in a way that encourages them, improves them, and makes them want to share their own principles of happiness and freedom with others.
A more magnetic right will also be better positioned to reach the second segment of our national audience—the “persuadables.” These are Americans who are currently neither with us nor against us. They don’t wake up every morning convinced that conservatives are evil. They are persuadable unless and until we drive them away.
Most persuadable people are not deeply ideological. They are looking for bold solutions and are willing to give either party a chance. Many of them voted for Barack Obama but have precious little confidence left in his leadership. They tend to be political independents who pay relatively close attention to current affairs. They give both sides a hearing. And there are millions and millions of them out there.
To approach them, we need to learn from the unconventional entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley. When a technology company like Apple unveils a new product, it is not responding to existing demand from the marketplace. It is creating brand-new demand to match brand-new supply. Before the iPhone existed, nobody had a clue they needed an iPhone. Now people wait in line overnight just to grab the latest version a few weeks ahead of everyone else in their social circle. Apple manufactured this demand by targeting early adopters. They identified and spoke directly to people who want to try something new. They consciously chose a base of customers who view themselves as independent freethinkers and want to project that image to the rest of the world.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because I am describing my old self. It spurred my conversion to conservatism. I didn’t enter my adulthood with any political opinions to speak of, just a kind of reflexive progressive outlook. All I had was a gut instinct that my preconceptions weren’t cutting it, that I had to question everything and build a new understanding from scratch. I spent a long time as a persuadable. But unfortunately—or fortunately, I suppose, for their sanity—only a tiny percentage of persuadable Americans are crazy enough to spend a decade in school to figure out public policy for themselves.
We need a strategy to reach the rest. And to continue our extended metaphor, let’s try on the very same message that technologists use to target their own persuadables: “Think different.” Think for yourself.
We need to challenge these persuadables to ask questions. (If you consider yourself a persuadable, I challenge you to ask yourself these questions right now.) Is the country headed in the right direction? Have poor people grown in prosperity since the Great Recession ended? Is it easier now than in 2008 for the majority without a college degree to find a job? Almost everyone who looks objectively at the facts will conclude intuitively that the answers are “no.” Those at the top have done just fine for the past six years, but those at the bottom are worse off. What we’re doing is not working. Curious, ambitious people should not settle for this. They know we need to try new things.
We aren’t asking persuadable people to become registered Republicans. We’re not asking for some grand epiphany and a bulk order of this book. We’re simply daring them to think different, to consider a few fresh ideas that may fall outside their zone of familiarity. In short, we have to engage these Americans like those frighteningly extroverted supermarket employees who offer bacon-wrapped samples on toothpicks to passersby. We have to fearlessly approach new people and be clear. “Just try it. That’s all I’m asking you to do.”
There is one more characteristic of persuadables that’s especially interesting. Remember, these people pay close attention, and that doesn’t only apply when you speak directly to them. They always have half an ear open. And they keenly observe how you interact with a third group of people—those who are hostile.
Hostile people do wake up thinking conservatives are evil or stupid. They have their minds made up. As a result, most conservatives think there’s no point in engaging them. We tend to either avoid them or attack them, depending on our mood.
That is a mistake. Trying to throw bombs at hostiles and attempting to ignore them are both losing strategies. A better idea is to actually walk among them and understand them. We need to remember that even our ideological foes are human beings well worth engaging. Our goal isn’t even to convert them en masse, although that would certainly be nice. We may co
nvince a few at the margins. But more broadly, how we take a rhetorical punch will demonstrate to persuadables what kind of people we are, and indeed, remind us of who we are.
Of course, people who strongly disagree with us are rarely thrilled when they think we’re infiltrating their territory. They often respond with vitriol and anger. That turns out to be their loss, though, because persuadable citizens are watching. Conversely, when we engage the other side with grace and answer their anger with love, the persuadables see us do it. Think of all the attention Americans pay to videos of politicians contending with hostile interviewers and hecklers. They either come across as petty and thin-skinned or as reasonable and courageous. Interacting gracefully with our political “enemies”—that is, not treating them like enemies—is key to becoming a true majority.
Besides, our own arguments will be better for it. One of the problems with talking only to people who agree with you is that you end up being wrong a lot. If any conservative doubts this, just listen to how some MSNBC pundits talk about conservatives. The problem is not that they have progressive views. The problem is that they are wrong about conservatives all the time—because they never actually spend any time with conservatives. As a result, they mischaracterize our policies, misrepresent our priorities, and attribute motives to us that don’t actually exist.
Every conservative feels frustrated by this. And yet, when we never interact with the other side, we often end up unintentionally mirroring this bad behavior. At one rally in 2012, I distinctly remember somebody saying, “I just have no clue how anybody could vote for this president again!” I am certainly no fan of the administration, but we should not be totally mystified that anyone might possibly disagree with us in good faith. Some on the right are convinced that progressive policies are actually intended to hold people back, so that poor people will become reliant on social assistance and stay Democratic voters forever. But the truth is that most liberals do want to help the poor—they just have the wrong ideas about how to do it. We should not be like the ideologues on television and ascribe evil motives to our opponents. Most of the time, this is flat-out wrong, and it makes us seem just as out of touch as they are. These are errors, and our persuadable audience is watching.
We need to better understand what motivates the other side. If we don’t, we are going to be wrong about them the same way we’re sure they are wrong about us. We are called to find common ground where it genuinely exists, improve our own arguments, and win over persuadable Americans by answering hostility with magnanimity, understanding, good humor, and love.
6. SAY IT IN THIRTY SECONDS.
Gut instincts, love at first sight—all my life, I’d thought that snap judgments about others were silly and impulsive. I considered them a mark of shallow thinking. But then one day, I made just that sort of snap judgment, and it changed my life for good.
In the summer of 1988, at the age of twenty-four, I was traveling around the Burgundy region of France. This wasn’t some “find-yourself” backpacking trip; I was working. I was touring and recording at the time with a brass quintet. For a couple of weeks that July, we were playing concerts in and around the city of Dijon.
The first night I arrived, I took the stage and squinted out at a small audience. (In retrospect, it seems like all the audiences were small, which may be why I was barely making rent.) My gaze was drawn to the front row, and there I spotted a girl with black hair and dark eyes. She smiled at me. So, being a pretty typical twenty-four-year-old male, I made a mental note to talk to her when the concert finished.
That turned out to be no easy task. As soon as the performance ended, I made a beeline in her direction. I took a deep breath, marched up, and introduced myself. Turns out she spoke no English. She was Spanish, studying in France that summer. I spoke no Spanish. Our “conversation” was a ridiculous combination of hand gestures and monosyllabic words with international meaning.
Here’s the odd thing I remember about that night. When I first began speaking with her, a thought appeared in my mind seemingly from out of nowhere:
“I would like to marry this girl.”
Now, you have to understand that getting married was pretty far from my mind at that point. It was weirder still, because we were having next to no meaningful verbal interaction. She could have told me, “I am a serial killer and you look like a nice victim,” and I would have had no idea.
But “I want to marry her” is what popped into my head after just a few seconds. And it stayed there. I actually told my parents a few weeks later that I had met the girl I was going to marry, without even having the language skills to tell the girl herself.
How did that one turn out? Long story short: Today we have been married for almost twenty-four years, and have three kids.
A couple of years into our marriage, in the Spanglish that had grown into the private language we still use today, I told her of my snap judgment at our first meeting and asked what she was thinking at that moment. “I thought you were trying too hard,” she told me. So much for mutual spontaneous attraction.
Believe it or not, that story has something to do with the future of the conservative movement. What I got that night in France, in addition to a lifelong partner, was a crash course in brain science. I learned that I could form a shockingly complete opinion of others based on the first impression. And what was true for me the moment I met my future wife is true for people who are first hearing the new right’s pitch for America. We have just a few seconds to make our case.
Daniela Schiller is not your average neuroscientist. By day, she is director of the Schiller Laboratory of Affective Neuroscience at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. By night, she is the drummer for the Amygdaloids, a rock band made up of neuroscientists. They got started by covering songs about mental disorders (think of the Rolling Stones’ “19th Nervous Breakdown”) and eventually began producing original material.
When she is not performing in front of thousands of people, Schiller is designing groundbreaking studies that investigate the inner workings of the human mind. In 2009, she led a fascinating brain study with some colleagues at New York University.
Volunteers underwent a brain scan while they were shown pictures of male faces. Each face was followed by six sentences that described a good or bad action supposedly performed by that person. For example, a picture of a young man might be accompanied by a description of a favor he did for a friend, such as not smoking in front of him while he was trying to quit (good), or an insult he hurled out the window of his car (bad). They showed the same faces to each subject but varied the positive or negative information paired with each. This ensured they were examining subjects’ brain reactions to the little stories and not simply to looks.
Schiller and her fellow researchers were interested in how the brains of the participants apprehended this information to make a judgment. They found that two brain regions were activated and led to judgments within seconds: the amygdala (the region for which her band is named, which assigns emotional values) and the posterior cingulate cortex (which is involved in the coding of values and emotional memory). Both of these brain regions are found deep in the center of the brain, and are evolutionarily ancient. That means that long before people had today’s reasoning capacity, they possessed these structures to help them assess others.
Half a million years ago—before the advent of laws, police, well-ordered societies, or even well-developed languages—it was no easy task to distinguish friends from foes. Was a stranger a relative or a competitor? Should I flee from an unexpected visitor, fight him, or welcome him into my cave? Get it wrong and the consequences could be deadly. Those with the best judgment were most likely to pass on their genes.
Fast-forward to the present. Today our modern, reasoning brains still have this ancient mechanism. It whispers to our subconscious whether somebody we meet in a Dijon concert hall (or see on television) is a friend or a foe. “When you are exposed to information or someone speaks t
o you, there is already activation of brain systems that are involved in evaluation and emotional reaction,” Schiller says. “In social situations, there are so many cues that we rely heavily on these very quick automatic processes.”
“We’re not even aware that we make these decisions,” she explains. But “people make very fast judgments and usually they are very persistent.”16
How fast? The study states, “People make relatively accurate and persistent evaluations on the basis of rapid observations of even less than half a minute.”17
Once you make a bad impression, it’s very difficult to recover. “If you associate a person with something negative, even by accident—maybe because you didn’t like the person’s face or their particular expression in that moment—you immediately create an association with that person, and then it’s pretty hard to change these associations,” Schiller says. It can be done, of course: “The more developed parts of the cortex can inhibit the very basic activation of the more fundamental automatic reaction.” But doing so “would take a lot more effort” and is “a taxing process.”
In other words, science verifies the old cliché that “there’s no second chance to make a good first impression.”
This is yet another reason why explaining economics to everybody does not work. It simply takes too long. We think we have thirty minutes to lead people to a logical conclusion. In reality, we have less than thirty seconds.
This explains my snap judgment about my future wife. It was an ancient part of my brain reading out a message—“friendly.” On her end, the same factors explain why she didn’t run away in fear. Thank you, amygdala!
This is information you can use. Want to nail your next job interview? Focus on the first thirty seconds. Now we know why eye contact matters right off the bat, as does an authentic smile. It’s not that your future boss is shallow. It’s that his posterior cingulate cortex and amygdala are summing you up while his conscious brain is still thinking about lunch. For the next hour you might talk about your last job, the college you went to, or what you like to do in your spare time. It might be a great conversation. But still, he leaves the interview with the sensation that something about you just isn’t quite right. His amygdala subconsciously sabotaged you for your wimpy handshake.
The Conservative Heart Page 20