Persuasion
Here's where we left off the summary of the full life view at the end of the last post:
Each individual deserves to live a full life, and to decide what that means for themself
Government’s purpose is to secure the conditions that make a full life possible for each of us.
To accomplish that, government should do whatever works best.
Persuasion is essential to the third point. Unlike political ideologies on the left/right spectrum, the full life view doesn't dictate the answer to any political issue. Instead, it deliberately leaves the answer open to a determination of what will work best, which depends entirely on context; what's best for one nation, state, or city won't be best in others, or in the same place in some future set of circumstances. Figuring out what's best requires discussion, and discussion implies the possibility of persuasion.
Why persuasion matters
In the polarized state of American politics, the role of persuasion has diminished to the point where it seems to often be outside the scope of politics altogether. There is a pool of independents and undecideds that both sides of the spectrum court, but true swing voters are a distinct minority; research shows that most people who identify as "independent" are actually reliable partisans who don't want a partisan label. Much of the political conversation today is about base mobilization and turnout; it's not about whether you can convince people who don’t agree with you, but whether you can excite the people who already do. At the national level, places with reliable majorities are stamped either red or blue and left out of the discussion. Implicit in that treatment is the idea that the minds of the people in those places, and really everywhere, are beyond the reach of persuasion: people are where they are on the spectrum, and it would be a waste of time and energy for those on the left to try to reach rural voters in Wyoming, or for those on the right to try to reach urban voters in California. That overstates it, but only a little. Today, persuasion feels like a fantasy.
And yet, the greater delusion is that long-term progress toward anyone's goals is possible in a nation that has given up on persuasion. There are functional reasons to care about persuasion. It helps to find new ideas and fruitful compromises, and it leads to more stable political decisions; without it, after every election the winning side rams through as much of its program as possible until the opposition wins and reverses as much as it can, with no chance of reaching rough consensus on anything important. But there is a deeper reason. The act of persuading brings people together, bridges political divides, builds trust among communities. When you try to persuade me of something–and here I mean good-faith efforts at convincing, not haranguing or trolling–you show me that you think we share some beliefs or at least that you believe we can, that what I think matters to you, that it’s worth your time and energy to bring me to your side. That creates a connection that is profoundly important in a democracy, whether it happens at the family dinner table, in a text thread between friends, on social media, on the doorstep when a campaign volunteer knocks, or in any other forum, and it matters even if we don’t move an inch towards one another’s positions. Sustained democracy depends on our ability to engage with people with whom we disagree, and engagement is more than toleration or even understanding; it is the attempt to find whatever truth might be in the other’s position and any common ground we may share, even if sometimes the answer is “not much.”
What persuasion is
I think the full life view provides a path to bring back persuasion, among those who embrace it. To explain that, I first want to give a general sense of what I think persuasion is.
Each of us has a set of beliefs about ourselves and the world, any and all of which can be politically relevant. I see these as radiating out from a center, with each layer of beliefs building on the ones closer to the center. At the very center are our core beliefs, the things we believe most deeply and that are entwined with our sense of self. These might have to do with our relationship to religion or to family, with our fundamental sense of how the world works and who we are within it. At the outer edge are our incidental beliefs, which are not particularly important to us and which we’d easily change given new information or a new perspective. In between are layers of intermediate beliefs, that combine the more fundamental beliefs and apply them to increasingly specific questions. For example, imagine that you’re strongly opposed to the Affordable Care Act. Maybe one of your core beliefs is that everyone bears personal responsibility for their own lives. Building on that would be layers of intermediate beliefs: free markets work best and governments are inept, single-payer healthcare doesn’t work, Obamacare was a bad law and should be repealed, etc.
Persuasion happens when someone is convinced that a particular belief they hold is inconsistent with deeper beliefs of theirs. This is critical: the argument must be rooted in something the individual already believes, and it’s all the better if the person making the argument believes it too. If I’m a supporter of the ACA, I’m not going to persuade you that it’s good policy based on a right to healthcare because that isn’t a belief of yours, and may be in conflict with deeper beliefs you have. But, I may be able to persuade you by finding a different core belief and building a case from there, and it’s the excavation of one another’s beliefs to find a foundation on which to build an argument that binds the members of a political community together; the act of persuasion requires us to attempt to understand one another. At its best, this is a mutual effort: I’ve never been able to persuade anyone of anything meaningful unless I’ve been as open to their position as I hope they are to mine. Persuasion is not the coercive act of shaming someone into adopting (or pretending to adopt) your view, nor is it a matter of winning an argument (in my experience, people rarely change their minds because they lose an argument). It happens when we speak to one another with trust and humility, taking seriously each other’s points and accepting that our own minds might change.
It’s also possible that there’s no way I can convince you as long as you hold a certain set of core beliefs. Core beliefs can change, but it happens on a generational timescale as people evolve slowly, or as new generations enter and replace the old. Great social movements work on these beliefs and some have succeeded in moving them, but only with enormous patience and effort. It’s the intermediate beliefs that are the most interesting to ordinary politics. They can be changed with effort and engagement, and this is how majorities are built around candidates and policies that make real improvements to real lives. However, they can only be changed in an environment that allows for open dialogue and trust between people who disagree.
Making persuasion possible
Polarization is a well-recognized problem, and proposed solutions range from calls for more bipartisanship and moderate candidates, to increased interest in independent candidates, to new political parties. I hope collectively they make room for more dialogue, though I am personally uninspired. In general, the solutions I’ve seen lean too heavily on being “moderate” as the solution to polarization, but it’s difficult to find vision and purpose in what amounts to taking a political average. Compromise is essential, but it shouldn’t be an ethos.
Instead, I believe we need to find the deep beliefs shared by people from different points in the spectrum and use these beliefs to bring people together in a community of shared purpose. Among those who share these beliefs, there is a stronger possibility of constructive debate over how to put them into practice–in other words, there is space for persuasion. This project is an attempt to do that, by establishing a shared belief (Point 1) and expressly leaving open space for discussion and persuasion (Point 3).
Thanks, and more to come.
Nick