The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy, by Anand Giridharadas
Review by Dave Gamrath
One-liner: In The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy, author Anand Giridharadas provides a useful handbook for those actively working to change minds throughout the community, or just at the dinner table.
Book Review:
Democracy relies on the idea “that you can change things by changing minds – by persuading.” Yet, with the advent of the internet and social media, the art of honest persuasion has faced new challenges. One can invent endless falsehoods and disinformation, then watch it spread worldwide over social media. Russia has excelled at providing misinformation over social media to turn Americans against each other, and to undermine American democracy. Many others have followed suit, doing their best to widen existing divisions, lower faith in American institutions, create distrust, and blur the lines between fiction and reality. This toxic environment has brought enormous challenges to individuals and organizations trying to strengthen American democracy. In The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy, author Anand Giridharadas follows individuals who are hard at work at using the art of persuasion to enhance democracy, and in capturing their stories, addresses many hot-button topics in American society.
The activists Giridharadas follows are working to create coalitions towards expanding democracy and ending racism, poverty, and other societal harms. Giridharadas’ goal is to better understand their tactics and techniques towards persuasion, and how they overcome barriers that have been magnified online. One such barrier is “wokeness,” which describes the extent to which a person is aware of, understands, and potentially accepts their own part within harmful societal structures, such as systemic racism.
In discussing these dynamics, the activists Giridharadas follows stress that “callout culture” doesn’t build a coalition. People can be “called out” by others for perceived behavioral violations, and thus criticized and condemned. Giridharadas writes that the “left” often spends more time and energy calling out their “ideological cousins than the very real enemies of democracy.” This leads to smaller and smaller circles instead of expanding the ranks. When you are “excessively woke,” you create unneeded barriers. It’s much more effective to meet people where they are at. “Calling in,” where you hold people accountable, but do so with love, is more effective. When you dismiss people that don’t fully understand an issue, I.E., they aren’t yet “woke,” you’re dismissing potential allies.
Giridharadas attended multiple anti-racism trainings for white parents of children of color. Often parents entered training with the expectation that “it’s the job of the trainer somehow to challenge them and make them feel good simultaneously.” Though the anti-racism trainers strived to “call in” white parents during the trainings, and not use critical or blaming language, some parents became quite upset. One white anti-racism trainer referred to herself as a “recovering racist,” because she was taught racist thoughts at a young age, was raised in a racist atmosphere, and thus quite early on in life formed a paradigm of the world which includes racist ideas. In response to the phrase “recovering racist,” what some parents heard was “you’re calling me a racist!” This example shows the difficulty in the art of persuasion on such a hot topic. America’s “right” has seized on the notion that anti-racist training is all about calling white people racists, blaming and shaming them, and skipping the part that explains how although American society is systemically racist, it’s not one’s fault for having have been raised in this society. With this false narrative from the right, the willingness to learn and grow ends, and is replaced with anger and disgust aimed at “those people.”
Giridharadas then moves to explaining the persuasion style of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC). AOC excels at the “inside-outside game.” The outside game involves working with your grassroots supporters to maintain a constant, unbreakable connection, while the inside game involves effectively working for change with other members of Congress. Giridharadas describes AOC’s ability to turn small moments into big moments, and writes that this persuasion style has allowed AOC to become a “righteous and radical thorn in the side of her new colleagues,” while at the same time being able to successfully negotiate and partner.
Giridharadas’ chapter on The Art of Messaging was particularly interesting. Within it, Giridharadas contrasts the persuasion techniques between the right and the left. “The right deeply understands people.” They give people a reason for being, and provide them simple answers as to why they may be suffering. The right uses metaphors that underpin their views, and is expert at “ginning up white fear and perceptions of danger and violence and exploiting them to sell authoritarian rescue.”
Left messaging often plays into the hands of the right. The left lets the right frame the message, and tries to compete within Republican framing, only serving to strengthen their message, not to bring more voters to Democrats. The goal should be to have the conversation you want to have, not the conversation your opponent wants to have. The left gives people facts, figures and logic, which seldom change people’s minds. Democrats have failed for years in their efforts to court white working-class voters and the middle class. Giridharadas writes that trying to woo the middle is the Democrats “cardinal sin.” A better strategy is to avoid diluting the message to reach out to the middle. Rather, strive to “thrill your base,” while also intentionally angering “the people who aren’t going to vote for you anyway, but will do you the favor…of yelling your ideas all over town.” In other words, inspire the right to advertise the left’s message, and get them to discuss issues within the left’s narrative frame.
The left tends to be far too negative in their messaging, starting with a problem instead of a message of hope. It works better to “sell people on the beautiful tomorrow.” Giridharadas provides many examples of messaging that has been proven to be effective. Instead of “Defund the Police,” use “Fund Our Lives.” Instead of “abolish ICE,” use “let’s create a fair immigration process that respects all families.” Instead of just “working people,” it’s “working people, whether Black, white or brown.” We all want individual freedoms, not just Republicans, and these freedoms include the “freedom to vote.”
Giridharadas closes with a discussion regarding the extremism of today’s right, writing that many right extremists are living in a “fully baked alternative reality,” such as QAnon followers. Giridharadas writes that the growth of cults is a public health problem, a “pandemic of lost minds.” The art of persuasion is especially difficult when trying to bring people out of a cult. Facts and data will be of no help.
The Persuaders is a useful handbook for those actively working to change minds throughout the community, or just at the dinner table.
Reviewer Opinion:
I found Giridharadas’ writing style enjoyable.
Reviewer Rating of Book:
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