Front Burner - Can persuasion bridge the political divide?

Episode Date: November 25, 2022

In an era of polarization, is it still possible to change people's minds about politics? That's the question Anand Giridharadas sought to answer in his new book, The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy. The journalist noticed a crisis in the U.S. that he saw echoed around the world. In what Giridharadas describes as "the great write off," those who believe in liberal democracy are giving up on the idea that they can win people over and dismissing their political opposites as unreachable. In his book, Giridharadas speaks with experts on reaching people — organizers, activists, politicians, cognitive scientists, and even a cult deprogrammer — and takes a critical look at his fellow American progressives. If democracy stands a chance, he concludes, pro-democracy forces need to believe in the power of persuasion at least as much as anti-democratic forces do. Today on Front Burner, Giridharadas takes host Jayme Poisson through what he's learned about changing minds without diluting ideology, making ideas widely appealing, and why persuasion is so critical to maintain healthy democracies.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. In the polarized, inflammatory times we're living in, is it still possible to change people's minds about politics? That's the idea at the heart of Anand Giridharas' new book, The Persuaders.

In particular, he takes a critical look at his fellow American progressives and examines the ways that he believes the right is often doing a better job of bringing people into its movement than the left is. He thinks that the idea of changing minds without diluting your ideas to give them wider appeal is not only still possible, but crucial to maintaining healthy democracies. Anand Garidharas joins me today for a wide ranging conversation on all of this. Anand, thank you so much for being here. It's such a pleasure. Thank you for having me. So your last book, Winners Take All, was a criticism of billionaire philanthropists that really calls for this deep structural democratic change instead of leaving those changes up to the super rich, which I will say feels very pertinent lately. But let's talk about why you wrote this book, The Persuaders. What were you seeing in the world and the United States that

made you decide to write it? Well, you know, as I looked at my country, the United States, and I think I saw echoes of it around the world, heard echoes of it around the world, I sensed that there was this crisis of what I call the great write-off, where those of us who believe in liberal democracy more and expanded liberal democracy in a society that works for all, in many ways have been giving up on the idea of persuasion, giving up on the idea that we can win people over and kind of writing people off as, the idea that we can win people over and kind of writing people off as, you know, on the other side as being unreachable, deeply committed to the ideologies that may have touched them. And it seemed to me that if democracy is to have a chance in the United States, pro-democracy forces need to believe in persuasion at least as much as anti-democratic forces do. And so I kind of set out

to write about a group of organizers and activists and politicians and others much as anti-democratic forces do. And so I kind of set out to write about a group of organizers and activists and politicians and others on the pro-democracy side who are endeavoring to change minds in an age when many of us have given up on doing so and who show ways of doing it, of finding common ground, of reaching people in new ways that I thought the rest of us could learn from. Another theme and very related idea in the book touches on how the right is at times doing a better job of persuading than the left. And this feels, as you were saying, very relevant in America, but also elsewhere, as we see the ascendance of the right, especially in Europe recently. So what is it that you think the right broadly is doing better than the left when it comes to growing their movements? You know, I think when I studied these organizers and activists

and others, and I would say in particular, this is a book about organizers, right? There's a kind of, these are people outside the national limelight who are doing deep work in communities to try to build a bigger coalition for multiracial democracy. And I studied what they do that maybe the rest of us are not doing such a great job of. to run down a quick list. In this day and age, being able to command attention is incredibly hard in a fragmented media age and incredibly important, right? It doesn't matter how great your policy ideas are if you don't have a politics of attention and a theory of attention. This is an area where the right runs laps around the left in the United States, and I would argue not only in the United States. Second, a lot of these organizers talk about meaning making, which is not just asking for voters for votes every four years or not just asking them to donate money, but really being with voters through a 24-7, 365 process of making sense of the world. Jobs go away to China.

Are you explaining to them why that's happening and talking them through it? Men are being asked to kind of abandon old toxic ways of being a man and behaving these new ways. Are you walking with men and explaining to them why this is happening? White people are being asked to grapple with race and think about race and account for whiteness in a way that their parents and grandparents never were. Are you helping them process that or are you just leaving meaning making to the far right? Meeting voters where they are is another thing I learned from these organizers. Again, the right is often just great at like, come as you are into our movement.

And the political left sometimes has barriers to entry. If you don't know the right terms, if you don't understand this, if you don't understand that, you don't speak in the right way, you may feel unwelcome. I would say picking fights is another part of this playbook. You know, the right is very good at scapegoating and it does it with deception often. And the left is sometimes bad at picking generative fights, picking fights against, you know, billionaires who divide in order to conquer, picking fights against insurance company executives who deny three-year-olds the health care they need. Those are righteous fights worth picking that help educate and move people. And I would also say telling a story, the better story, right?

The right understands narrative. It understands emotion. It understands the importance of patriotic appeal. And the political left has often, you know, kind of left that terrain to the right. Another thing you write about is that it's just more fun, like in a way, right? There's more joy in some of these messages. Yeah, I don't mean to. I think of myself as a relatively serious person who thinks about politics in a relatively serious way

and studied the history of political thought in college and grad school. But I think at the end of the day, my basic political advice to anybody is that you should be throwing a more fun party than the other people. I think at the end of the day, a lot of voters are like standing outside two house parties,

deciding which one has better music, better drinks, more fun people, you know. And I think we need a political left that isn't just describing problems, isn't just narrating problems, isn't just telling people that the world is going to end because of climate and all these things, but that is just thrilling, fun, edifying, easygoing, chill, like easy to join. I heard you on a recent podcast, I think it was Climate One, and you talked about that in the context of climate, like instead of always talking about how we're kind of doomed, that we could talk about all the cool stuff that that could change our lives because of this transition right i think climate is like the most interesting application

of exactly this where think about what stories you associate with like all the discourse about climate like since you've been conscious and i would say for most of us, that discourse has been like things that are going to be taken away from you or things you can't do or things that are bad that you're doing or the whole vibe of climate change in general, is this terrible things happening, and you're gonna have to like sacrifice and have like an austere existence in order to save the planet. Okay, well, that's certainly one way of framing it. And I think, you know, I've spoken to a lot of young climate change, young of color, climate change activists who say, this was also a kind of messaging that appeal to affluent white liberals who are leading the movement in the 60s

and 70s and 80s, who had comfortable lives, and therefore kind of almost like fetishized sacrifice. For a lot of communities, a climate message centered on things we're going to take away from you or the fact that we're all going to have to sacrifice is just like not a very winning message. And it's not the only true thing to say about climate, right? Climate, like as Bill McKibben wrote in a great piece the other day,

like there's going to be blimps. Like we're going to have blimps again because we're going to have to do blimps to do cargo and other forms of transport. How come we're not telling people about blimps? Like the blimps are going to be fun. Like why are we not drawing the blimps? I really, I would love to ride in a blimp. Right. So you're like, you're going to be able to. How come we haven't talked about the fact that in the United States where there is so much ingrained physical infrastructure built along racist lines, that climate change is the first and perhaps only real opportunity we're ever going to have politically

to do racial repair and get public transit to Detroit, to an overwhelmingly black city in Detroit, in a way that without something like climate, there would never be political will to get transit in a place like Detroit. climate, there would never be political will to get transit in a place like Detroit. Why aren't we telling people that this is a incredible opportunity to pull together and build awesome things and have a healthier relationship to each other, to the planet, to our own history, right? It is a choice to frame climate as a Debbie Downer. And I think some of the most interesting young climate activists are really in the midst of a rethinking about how to frame this as a thrill. One of the organizers that you speak to in the book, Alicia Garza, a longtime civil rights activist, really impressive person, labor activist. She was one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter.

She's really critical of something she describes as purism that can come with social justice work that she finds counterproductive. And you talk to actually a bunch of organizers who say similar things. And you talk to me about what Garza is talking about there. I started this, the book with three activists who are, including Alicia, who are deeply steeped in their movements and incredibly credible in progressive and radical spaces. Kind of saying, look, our spaces are devoted to an agenda that is arguably the most kind of inclusive, broadly recognizing of humanity in the history of movements. But what Alicia and others warn is that these movements for radical inclusion

can, at a tactical level, feel quite exclusionary to people, right? Now, it doesn't mean it's always their fault. Some of this is ginned up and manufactured by the far right. Some of this is ginned up and manufactured by the far right. Some of it is self-inflicted wounds, but there is a problem of a political left that is so militant about fighting for these things, which it should be, that that militancy spills over into unkindness towards people who don't entirely get it,

but might want to be in your movement. And what Alicia says to me in the book is, look, when non-radical people are joining your radical movement, that's actually when you know you're winning. You should not turn your nose up at your own cause or at other people when they come on board with you. There are a lot of examples in your book that you go through, like a sexual assault survivor working to change the thinking of rapists, bridging those gaps, doing that outreach. It often requires the very people who are victims of the problem to be the ones extending that olive branch. Obviously, maybe a lot of people aren't going to want to subject themselves

to that. Yeah, I think most people probably should not. I'm not sure that I personally want to do some of the work that I describe in the book. As Loretta Ross, one of those other great activists says to me, do the work that works for you, right? So I want to really underscore this point because I'm glad you've raised it. I think one of the terms that has come into use now to describe what you just did is emotional labor, right? The idea that people of color would have to talk white people through racism or that women would have to talk men through their kind of discomfort living in an egalitarian world or so on and so forth. And I think there's no right to ask that of anyone. The people I'm writing about in the book all say very clearly, no one has to do this work. Most people will not want to do this work, and they are right

to stay away. However, some minority of us, who are the people I'm writing about in the book, want to do this work. And I would further go out on a limb as to say, I think some of us are going to need to do what we shouldn't have to do if our countries are to be whole. And let me underscore why. I think we don't fully appreciate sometimes that a lot of the incredible social progress that has been made in Canada, in the United States, in other places in recent decades, the progress of women, the demographic changes and progress and civil rights progress of black people and people of color, indigenous people, the psychological displacements of globalization, of manufacturing moving to China, of changes in technology, the economy, the structure of how opportunity and how people

get ahead, rising inequality. If you add up all these things we have lived through, they are big structural shifts, but they're also huge psychological shifts, right? If you think about the ways in which white people conceive of themselves, which white person living today, how many of your parents and grandparents 30 or 60 years ago were thinking about their whiteness? Very few, I can assure you, right? That's a big change. Like, it's going to take work to walk people through the psychological transitions of the age, the displacements of the age. And basically, I would argue, the right understands deeply what I just said. The right understands that the first fact of politics right now is that it's an age of fear, anxiety,

and people basically many people feeling like I don't know who I am in the new world that's coming. That could be because of technology, that could be because of trade, that could be because of race, it could be because of all of the above. And that feeling of I don't know who I am in the world that's coming is the most dangerous feeling in politics, the right gets it. And I basically want the left with the pro democracy side of things in the United States and elsewhere, to match and outcompete the right at understanding that people are living these fears and anxieties and almost building a politics on top of that basic emotional and psychological understanding of people. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection.

Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you.

Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. Another character who makes up a big chunk of this book

is Democratic House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and you describe her whole approach to politics as an example of what you're talking about, right? Building broader support for more radical ideas without watering them down. Can you talk to me about what she did with the Green New Deal and where you see successes there? Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez is at the heart of this book because she is someone who by my lights is one of the best persuaders, you know, that I've ever kind of witnessed in modern American politics, but someone who was seen as being kind of doctrinaire and strident and these kinds of things.

And I think it's so funny. A year ago, I was waiting tables in a restaurant, and it was literally easier for me to become the youngest woman in American history elected to Congress than it is to pay off my student loan debt. So that should tell you everything about the state of our economy and the state of quality of life for working people. So I write this chapter about AOC and her struggle to be as as Gen Z would put it to be all the things I think she is engaged in a in a defining struggle right now whose outcome is not clear can you be as she is trying to be inside the movement and in the halls of power at the same time can you be a radical and a member of the political establishment if

political establishment means you hold a office in Congress? Can you be someone who calls out your colleagues, excoriates them, and someone who works with them to get things done? Can you take your case to Instagram and work around these institutions and then also grind out legislative victories in the corridors of power? And for AOC, it goes back to her childhood. And this is a point that I think is actually a very interesting one in the book. I didn't plan it this way, but many of the persuaders I write about, first of all, many of them are women of color. And this is in many ways a book about women of color who are at the forefront of, I think, redefining how persuasion works. But many of them had really complex backgrounds.

Like virtually no one who I kind of uplift in the book is from a singular background, a kind of monolithic background, right? So AOC was in the Bronx and Westchester, one of the childhood back and forth, one of the richest and one of the poorest counties in the United States, which border each other, northernmost county of New York City, southernmost county of New York State outside of New York City. So a lot of the people I'm writing about, I think, themselves belong to multiple worlds. And what they are testing is, can you breach people by having an understanding of the different realities people inhabit and appealing to those different realities while standing, as AOC does, very firmly for what you believe? And, I mean, using the Green New Deal as an example, do you think she did that?

I think the Green New Deal was a remarkable story. For so long, our movement towards a sustainable future has been just about solar credits or this or that, but that was a whole of society mobilization against the climate crisis that had a plan for what do you do when all these oil workers are displaced, coal workers displaced? How do you give them a new life with a federal jobs guarantee? How do you transition this? How do you build things like transit in Detroit? How do you do racial reparations as part of upgrading the physical infrastructure of the country? And we decided to come together in sweeping legislation that not only rejects that notion, but creates a plan for 20 million union jobs in the United States of America to rebuild our infrastructure, to restore public housing, to make sure that we

expand our access not only to EV and EV infrastructure, but mass transit. It is going to be an all hands on deck approach. And we refuse to leave any community behind in the process. And, you know, it was dismissed as extreme. If you look at what happened since Joe Biden, a historical moderate, won the primary, became president, put AOC as a co-chair of his climate task force with John Kerry. Then his climate plans were heavily revised by the task force. Noam Chomsky said to me that Biden's climate proposals were better than anything that has come before, better than anything in history. It gets whittled down by the fact that he has some reluctant senators in his own party, but still they end up passing the biggest climate action history. And to me, this is the whole ballet of how persuasion works. She got a moderate president in office to push a scaled down but significant version of her ideas. And she got something done. And I think, you know,

one of the if you if you are mature enough in politics, I think she is to appreciate this. Sometimes you accept that the the form that your legacy may take or your success may take may not be you standing on the top of the mountain flexing about the, you know, getting the thing you want. It may be like AOC getting Joe Biden to be 10 times bolder on climate than he might have been. Maybe one of the most important things AOC ever achieves. And it's not to be it's not to be sniffed at, even though it may not be how she pictured it. She's also been criticized by a faction of progressives who wanted her, for example, and other House reps to withhold a vote on reelecting Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker until Pelosi agreed to bring Medicare for all to a vote. She's also angered progressives for not voting against funding Israel's Iron Dome defense system.

And like, are those fair criticisms that she's not using her insider place to push hard enough for those kind of changes? Because it's a fine line, right? Like, at what point have you kind of gone too far? Have you sort of sold out? That you're not standing firmly enough in your own convictions? standing firmly enough in your own convictions? I mean, I think AOC is one of the most progressive voting records and legislators ever to serve in that body. And I think, frankly, we often have a problem among progressives where we do not know how to count our victories. You know,

is she going to agree with the activist wing of the party on every single issue? No, I'm sure she's to the left of them on some issues, and they're to the left of her on other issues. Do I think she's sold out? No, I do not think she's sold out. I think she is trying to walk a line where, unlike the activist she used to be, the organizer she used to be, she is now in the halls of power. She has opportunities to deliver huge change potentially to this country as she did by helping to advance the idea of climate solutions. And does being a grownup who is in actually a position

of power mean that sometimes you bite your tongue for two seconds, sometimes you say a nice thing to someone to try to do a thing? Yeah. And I think one of the problems in our movements, frankly, that I write about in The Persuaders is that we don't abide by what I would call the orchestra principle. We don't recognize that, you know, it's someone's job to play the oboe, but it doesn't mean that they're insulting your oboe because they're playing the bassoon. Like, different people have different jobs. There is a role for people outside the movement, outside the streets in the movement to be yelling things.

There's a role for someone to be burning something in effigy. There's a role for an AOC to be straddling the movement and the halls of power. There's a role for a Joe Biden to be the kind of conservative guy, you know, conservative Democrat marketing radical policies to middle-of-the-road Americans and kind of reasonableizing them. There is a role for everybody. Again, as Loretta says, do the work that works for you. Everybody does not have to do identical work. You mentioned just now Loretta, who is one of my favorite characters in your book, actually, a Black feminist activist. She's in her 70s now. And I know that we've been talking about this in different ways throughout this conversation, but I just wanted to spend a bit of time delving a bit deeper into the actual art of persuasion. And Loretta talks about this,

her techniques for persuading people with diametrically opposed views to hers. Like in some cases, actually members of the KKK. And what did she tell you about what she's realized works to actually change people's minds. You know, one of her frameworks that I find really powerful is this notion of circles of influence. And she thinks about there being kind of these concentric circles of influence that you should have different strategies for. And so she says, you know, there's this group called your 90 percenters. These are people who agree with you on 90 percent of things, basically identical values to you. But they may attack a problem in a different way. They may work on the race issue angle of it. And you may work on

the class issue version of it. They may work on it, you know, on the ground, and you may work on it at the level of national politics or whatever. And the problem, she says, 90%ers is people often really fixate on that 10% that's different and get irritated. Why don't you work on the issue my way? How come you don't pursue it this way? And we need to have more grace towards our 90%ers and recognize that some people will pursue the same values in a different approach. Sort of what I was saying with AOC and her allies,

or should be allies. Then you got your 75%ers. They share broad strokes of values with you, but they're big areas where they don't, right? So don't let the 25% kill the things you can do together. Then you got your 50 percenters in her framework. These are people who, they share broad fundamental values with you, but ideologically, they're quite different. But they share values around freedom, around, you know, America being a country of opportunity for all these kinds of

things. And what you have to do there is really try to hook the vision of the world you want into the values they have instead of trying to impose your values on them. And finally, you know, there's the 25 percenters. And she says, those are quite hard to reach as people. You may not need them in many fights. You may only need some of your 50%ers to come on board. But the resource you have with your 25%ers is they want to be seen as good people. It's important to them to feel like good people. So I think whether you're someone who's active in politics or just a regular person listening to this, dealing with family and friends and colleagues, it's worth thinking about who are you actually dealing with? What is your level of alignment and not? Do you need them to become your clone or can you figure out the narrow band

of common ground where at least something can be done? And another technique that you write about is this idea of deplacing rather than replacing, right? Like instead of just throwing a bunch of facts at people, which I think the left is very good at, you really engage with them. You ask them questions that might sow seeds of doubt that make people question their own beliefs on their own. Yeah, it's such a, this idea of displacing versus replacing, to me was one of the most powerful kind of epiphanies I had listening to Loretta. And then I have to say, I think it came up again and again in other chapters, it comes up in my chapter on disinformation. But what I learned from Loretta is a kind of distinction between what we, most of us,

I think, do when we're encountering someone who thinks very differently, or particularly someone who is, you know, steeped in disinformation, is we go into a rebuttal mode, right? Which is basically... Here's a study, here's a study. Exactly. So you have a thing in your head. And what I'm basically trying to do is I'm trying to get that thing out of your head and put what's in my head in your head in the void that I've created by removing that thing from your head. Well, as you might imagine, people do not like that being done to them.

That's not a procedure anybody enjoys. Replacement does not work. It doesn't work to rebut people on disinformation. It just doesn't work. And if anyone listening to this has ever tried this with your climate denier uncle or name other person, it just doesn't work, right? And Loretta says instead, displace. Displace means create questions in that person, it just doesn't work, right? And Loretta says, instead, displace. Displace means

create questions in that person, create a little doubt in that person, unsettle the certainty that they feel. And that means just planting, you know, the thought that maybe it's not true, maybe another thing is true. That is a much more effective way to do it. And particularly for the folks that I write about later in the book who fight disinformation, they find this incredibly helpful. You cannot rebut QAnon conspiracy theories or George Soros conspiracy theories, but you can help people sometimes see that they may be being manipulated by very powerful people who benefit from their manipulation.

And sometimes, certainly not always, maybe not even most of the time, but sometimes enough people will come back from the brink if they realize that they are being conned. Before we wrap up, I did want to talk to you about one more character in your book and also come back to the Democratic Party, if it's OK. You talked to this really fascinating strategist, Annette Schenker Osorio. this really fascinating strategist, Annetchenko Osorio. And one of the things she talks about is how she thinks the Democratic Party fundamentally misunderstands moderates, who they are, what they want. And what does she say about that? You know, Annetchenko Osorio is such a star, she's the premier messaging consultant on the political left in the United States, and she works around the world as well. But someone who is still in many ways fighting a lonely insurgency against the most kind of powerful spaces in the Democratic

Party that still resist a lot of the best practices. And, you know, she really, in particular, this notion of rethinking what a moderate is, is so powerful. So I think when most people listening to this think about the word moderate, they will immediately have a, if I ask you to visualize a moderate, I'm guessing that many of you are visualizing someone in the middle, right? Someone like in between the two poles. It's almost like being a moderate is like a physical location, right? And we also use words like middle of the road or centrist. So there's a lot of language that is trying to make us think of the moderate as being in a kind of place in between. And what Anat says is being a moderate is a situation, not an identity, not a location, right? And the situation that a moderate is in is a situation of having unresolved,

an unresolved worldview. And so to be a moderate is in many cases, I mean, there are some people who are actually at the center, but it's not most moderates. Most moderates are people who kind of can toggle, as Anat tells me, into a very progressive understanding of the world, or can toggle into a very right wing understanding of the world, right? Depending on how compelling the candidate is, how fun the party is, as we were talking about before, how high inflation is, how fast the economy is growing, whether things feel abundant in their town or scarce, all these things can really shape a moderate sense of, am I okay? Is my town okay? Is the future going to be okay for my kids or not?

When you think about how you buy pants, no one listening to this buys pants based on analysis. No one calculates the temperature and the thickness of the material and the number of uses, wears per dollar of different pairs of pants. You sort of buy pants on vibes, right? You sort of go to the store and you're like, what's everyone else doing on pants these days, right? Are we doing loose?

Are we doing tight? Is Gen Z not doing skinny jeans anymore? Does that mean I should also not do skinny jeans? Are we cuffing? Are we not cuffing, right? You buy pants based on a kind of gut assessment of what everyone else is sort of doing, what's normative. And I basically one of the arguments of the book and certainly a not argument is that a

lot of political opinion formation is sort of similar to how people choose pants, right? Not for the most committed 20% on the left and 20% on the right. Maybe people listening to an hour-long podcast about these issues are probably in that space where they've thought a lot about these things. They have a deep worldview. But for that kind of 50%, 60% of folks in the middle, again, I should not even say in the middle, who are not committed to either of the kind of complete worldviews of the two sides. They're voting more on vibes. They're choosing pants when they pick an immigration policy. And so if that is the case, if Anat is right, what she says is you don't appeal to that 60 percent by splitting the difference between two kinds of pants. Right.

Or having one leg short and the other leg long. Like you, one leg loose, the other leg tight. You try to convince people that the kind of pant you're trying to sell them is the pant that everyone's wearing, that it's the normal pant. And so you try to encircle them with chatter, with message, with exuberant people telling the story of your argument, not by trying to cut what you want to do in half. Some of these messages have landed with the public, though, from the left.

They have been sort of sufficiently thrilling, right, and exciting, and communicated effectively and simply. For example, Biden campaigned on student debt forgiveness. We know Medicare for all is very popular. We know that gun control is very popular. These are catchy, simple, popular ideas. But the Democratic Party, for example, have not gone all the way with any of these policies. So how much of this is a problem of persuading the public? And how much is it about the party not actually getting this stuff done? It's all of the above. It's all of the above. I mean, there's no doubt in my previous book, Winners Take All was about the wealthy and powerful rigging the system to block even those things that most people want right but if you if you look at the things you just cited universal health care gun control etc i would argue and i think this is one of the core

suppositions of the book that even though we have a powerful enemy's problem on those issues we also have a lay public opinion problem. And sometimes there's a laziness that can creep into this work where just because you have a powerful enemy's problem makes you kind of assume that you're all good on the persuasion front and the public opinion front. I think it's often the case that the political left today has a powerful enemy's problem and a persuasion problem. Universal healthcare is popular, but if you actually go into the details of do you want to switch to single payer so that the kind of private insurance you have right now would be taken away.

I think we have an argument we can make to them. But I sometimes think you can get lazy saying it's our problem is only these powerful enemies like on gun control. You know, I absolutely do not think we've won the argument in terms of an organizing challenge on some of these things, background, you get 80% things still don't happen. And that's a real problem because of the influence of big money and power in the NRA, that is where that powerful veto is coming in. But on gun culture, more generally, this is a really contested thing in the United States. And people are not just doing the bidding of the NRA. Like there is a deeply seated view that I am not free if I can't, you know, have a assault rifle in my house, I think this is a barbaric view. But I think it is a widely held view among my fellow citizens. And I kind of think it's on me to persuade them otherwise. Like I at some level, there's no whining to the umpire in a democracy. You either have won the argument or you haven't. If you tell me 95% of Americans agree on getting rid of all these guns and we're still not

getting rid of them, then you have a very specific problem of needing to rise up and resist these powerful actors. I don't think that's the case. I think we are in an argument with our fellow citizens that we have not won. And I think we can win it. All right. Anand, thank you so much for this. It was so great to talk to you. Again,, thank you so much for this. It was so

great to talk to you. Again, the book is The Persuaders. It's a great read. So thank you so much for coming by. Thank you all so much. All right, that is all for today. FrontBurner was produced this week by Shannon Higgins, Imogen Burchard, Lauren Donnelly, Rafferty Baker, Derek Van Der Wyk, and Allie Janes. Our sound design was by Matt Cameron and Sam McNulty. Our music is by Joseph Chabison. Our executive producer is Nick McKay-Blocos. I'm Jamie Poisson.

Thanks so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.