Offline with Jon Favreau - Persuasion Isn’t Dead with Anand Giridharadas

Episode Date: October 23, 2022

For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

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So head to votesaveamerica.com to make sure that you're ballot ready. We're contradicted, as Beyonce says on her new album. But we deny, particularly in a polarized time, I think we forget or deny that people on the far side of us politically are just as complicated and full of doubt, frankly. And so we imagine ourselves to be kind of 60-40 on things, and we imagine them to be 100-0 on things.

And it's just very self-defeating. That's where you get to the irredeemable place, because you are forgetting that, like, there's a contest for their soul going on. And, you know, Donald Trump is winning it right now. But it's not a resolved final contest. It actually never is. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. My guest today is writer Anand Girdharadas. Anand caught my attention earlier this month when he wrote a piece in The Atlantic that had a very offline subtitle, What Russian Trolls Can Teach Us About American Voters, right in my wheelhouse. Anand argues that the success of Russia's 2016 influence

operation may actually be a cause for hope. He writes, quote, if those who seek to unravel our society can figure out what moves citizens in this fragmented and confusing time, so too can those who wish it well. If Americans can be manipulated, they can also be persuaded. This idea that in our polarized, extremely online era, persuasion isn't just still possible, but necessary, is the basis for Anand's new book, The Persuaders, which went on sale this week. I'm a big persuasion guy. I think it's the foundation of a functioning democracy. It's what I learned helping a black man with the middle name Hussein win two presidential elections. It's why we started Crooked Media. But I think somewhere along the line, probably after half the country voted for Donald Trump,

a lot of liberals and progressives, especially those of us who spend a lot of time online, started giving up on the idea that we can persuade our fellow citizens or that we need to. I get why people might feel that way, but I refuse to go there. I don't just think persuasion is still possible. I think it's our only way out of the crisis we're in right now. And that's why I'm so thankful for this book. Anand followed a number of progressive organizers and political leaders who still believe in doing the difficult work of persuasion, including Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. A lot of the people he spoke with are still frustrated with this moment,

but they're still finding success, and they shared their playbook with the rest of us. Like the last few conversations I've had on Offline, this one was full of hope. We talked about the ways that persuasion can serve as the antidote to fascism, how political persuasion is similar to marriage counseling, how progressives can reclaim patriotism from the right, and much more. As always, if you have comments, questions, or episode ideas, please email us at offline at crooked.com. And please take a moment to rate, review, and share the show. Here's Anand Girdharadas.

Anand Girdharadas, welcome to Offline. Thank you so much for having me. So you have written what I think is a desperately needed book about why the pro-democracy movement has to do a better job of persuading people and how it's possible. I have been yelling about this to everyone I know from every platform I have now for like the better part of I don't know how many years. So I'm like super excited to dig in. But I'd like to start with a very offline subtitle of the Atlantic piece that you wrote about the book. What Russian trolls can teach us about American voters. I thought that was a great subtitle. What can they teach us? You know, when people first got wind of this Russian operation,

the idea of intervention, the kind of initial narrative that developed was intervention to make Donald Trump president, right? And there was a little bit of that, like, Manchurian candidate, kind of questioning and, and like a kind of cloaks and daggers kind of thing. And there's, you know, obviously, like there was some preference on the part of the Kremlin to have Donald Trump do well. But when I think as a lot of people started to do deeper dives into what the Russian social media campaign in particular was trying to do, and I, for the book, did my own close read of a lot of these tweets, it's actually quite clear that

Donald Trump was not the only thing they were trying to signal boost. Trumpism was absolutely one. They were also signal boosting Black Lives Matter with equal fervor. And they were, you know, signal boosting, like gun culture, and they were signal boosting, like immigrant pride. And so I kind of started to look at these tweets very closely for the opening of this book and try to understand what is really the project here. As you know, having worked in government, you know, countries have a lot of tools available to poke at each other, right? This was a marquee effort on the part of the Russians. So why this? And when I started looking at the tweets and Instagram posts and other things, it seemed to me that the simple story about Donald Trump or the simple story even about anger and division

was too simple. What I read in the tweets was an effort to gin up contempt and dismissal, which I would say is different from anger and division, right? Anger and division is you and I being in different places on a thing and feeling a certain kind of way about it. I actually don't think that's, people may disagree. I don't think that's on its own particularly problematic in a democracy. Like democracy is about, we got a hundred bucks left. Should we help your kids or my aging parents first? Like it's going to get real.

It's like, it's literally a negotiation about life and death and who is helped first, how? So I think it's supposed to be tense and it's supposed to be contentious. Anger and division, okay. Contempt and dismissal are different. Contempt and dismissal are, that's just how John is. John is like that because John is X, Y, Z. John is never, I'm not going to bother with people like John. People like John are, or John will never understand someone like me. When you get to that place, as opposed to what I would distinguish anger and division from contempt and dismissal, when you get to that latter place, I actually think you are very close to the erosion of democracy in a dramatic way. And I wish I had thought about this when I was writing the book.

Other people in the last few days of talking about it publicly have said, like, this is the reigning theory in marital counseling and in studies of marriage. Anger and division, fine in marriage. Contempt is the beginning of the end. And so it was very interesting to me that the Russian weapon of choice was not taking out the power grid in Houston or any number of things that were in the toolkit. It was making us mutually contemptuous and ginning up the feeling that persuasion is not worth it. These

people are who they are. They will never change. They are X, Y, Z. Move on. Mobilize around them. Rally your own people. But give up on persuasion. And so I became interested in reporting the persuaders who said hell no to the Russian operation and to that we can live in a society in which we give up on the idea of changing minds or the idea of our own changeability. And I wrote about a bunch of people who are showing how it can be done and grappling desperately for how it can be done in a time when it seems so hard. Yeah, I always thought that the most damaging part of Hillary

Clinton's famous deplorables gaffe was not the use of the word deplorable, which I think is like a fine word to describe the behavior of a lot of Trump supporters. It was that she then called them irredeemable. I remember thinking like that is the deplorable part is not the bad part. The irredeemable part is what you do not want to say about other Americans, even if all of the reaching out in the world, all the persuasion world, even if it ends up not working, when you write people off as irredeemable, you just stop the conversation. I have literally said that same thing that you just said to so many people. And I think it's like a relatively niche point because

most people either like both those words or think both those words were a bad idea right yeah right and i and you and i are like doing trying to do like a split ticket thing here um and and by the way just to map it onto the thing i was saying earlier i think deplorable is like an anger and division word right irredeemable is a contempt and dismissal word for sure for. And I understand she was speaking offhandedly. But I actually think there was a profound difference that you're identifying in saying it is really bad. People are being bad, morally bad, to support XYZ in the fervent way they do. And the second point is not a moral judgment. It is a prediction.

To say irredeemable, you is a, you're making a prediction. You're not making a description. And it's actually, by the way, it's a prediction about you. It's not a prediction about them. You are saying to the world, I am in politics. I'm one of the most powerful political actors on the world stage. And I am telling you right now, I can't change those people's minds. And part of what I would say to that is, well, then maybe step out of the way for someone

who thinks they can. Well, and the point that you make about democracy and persuasion, I think is so important. And I first came to that point a couple of years ago. Towards the end of his time in the White House, Obama ended up doing these conversations with the writer Marilynne Robinson. And in one of their first conversations, she said, she's like, I think that democracy depends upon our ability to persuade each other. That's like at the core, that's the most fundamental part of any democracy. And it seemed like an obvious point, but it was really profound to me because I was like, yeah, once we stop trying to persuade each other, this is how

authoritarian regimes happen, right? Then we're all just saying like, well, then someone can rule us and that's it. That's right. And I think it's worth taking a second to like unpack why that is with a historical view, right? because it's not just like an aesthetic point or a moral point or like a kumbaya point so let's step back the human pattern for like 99% of our history is that our communities villages towns cities countries were ruled by very strong centralized authority powerful people one, because it was considered much harder for larger numbers of people to make any kind of group decision. That's just how we've been ruled through much of human history. You would say that's kind of

the law of how humans have been governed, except for this very brief period, starting in the 1700s, which America played a very significant role, in which we tried this other thing. And you could imagine at the time, although it's so normal to us, how weird it must have seemed at the time to say, hey, no, no, no, let's not have one guy make all the decisions that come into the community inbox every day. Let's do this thing where everybody in the society is constantly having a 24-7 argument all the time about everything. And then let's use that to like prep them to register formal preferences on issues or representatives every so often.

And then we'll just all make these decisions that land in the community inbox. Like, this must have seemed insane until it became totally normalized. And that basic culture of democracy that we now live in and take for granted is premised on the idea that the best way to choose the future is through talking. That's right. That's the premise of democracy, right? Voting is like what you do at the end. Like we all talk about voting a lot, right? But voting is what you do at the end. It is like a five second moment in four years of talking or two years of talking. And once we believe and succumb to the belief that talking basically is an ineffective, futile way to get another person to think that gay people are people if they don't think that now, or to think that we should have a different way for people to come into the country more humanely, or to think about what are the right

ways to soften the blow of someone who's displaced by trading with China. Like, once we think those decisions are basically not things that can be solved or resolved through talk, as you say, we have basically gone back and opened the door and said, you know what, let's just go back to how it used to be for most of human history. Let's just be ruled. It's easier. We can't figure it out, right? Last thing I'll say on that is I have two kids, four and a half and seven, right? The rule in our house, as in many houses, is when they're playing and doing art in their room, if you guys can figure it out, I'm not going to come in there and tell you what to do. You can't figure it out. I'm going to have a say, right? My power begins, right? My power begins when you all can't figure it out. And then neither of you is going to get what you want. And that's kind of where we are, where if we basically think

talk does not work, we're asking for political violence because then I just want to eliminate you. So you're not even a factor in the decision about what the community should do. Or I want to have a strong man take over because that's the only way I'm going to get my will. Yeah, and look, and I think even organizing mass mobilization protest, right? Because you could hear some people be like, well, why are we talking? We should go out in the streets and protest. But that's still, at the end of the day, it still requires you to convince someone else, whether it's through your protest, whether it's through sitting down and talking with them, whether it's through a speech, whatever it may be, it is still trying to figure

out a way to persuade your fellow citizens, the people that we share this country with, to believe what you want to believe. And if you can't do that, the only other way is violence. And by the way, like, everything you just said, those are all, that's what I mean by talking. Talking is not just like, like gentle dialogue in which we're not, everything's talking. Like, and I, you know, at the risk of like, some of your listeners may disagree with me, you know, in a world in which the planet may not be habitable by the end of this century. I personally would include maybe throwing tomato soup at a painting, you know, I wouldn't do it, but like, it is part of that world of talk, right? It is part of like, you know, you can say it's a good tactic, bad tactic. We can argue about whether it was productive relative to their goals.

But like, you know, that's not violence against a person. That is people who feel powerless trying to make the entire world talk about something for 24 hours, which if you're trying to save the planet, maybe something in the ecosystem of talk that you need to do, feel you need to do. So talk broadly defined, persuasion broadly defined is the antidote to authoritarianism. It's the antidote to civil war. It's the antidote to kind of political violence. And I was desperate. I didn't feel like I had the, in my own heart, the answer to how we get back on the road to persuasion. So I went out and tried to find people who did. What did the people you talked to say that liberals and progressives and just the pro-democracy side writ large are doing wrong?

A lot of things. My last book was about billionaires who are trying to, you know, hijack and suffocate the future of humanity for their own profit. And that was a book of really strident criticism of a distant, powerful force. This is like a work of loving intervention, right? This is like when you take a sibling or a loved one aside. And I think the people I write about, all on the political left at different phases of it, a lot of them progressives, I would say. I think that they were issuing a couple warnings to their own fellow travelers, and I'm issuing that warning as well because it's my book. But it's often their voices. I think one warning is that there is, first of all, this kind of false mantra

that people can't change. People can't change. Anti-vaxxers will never get the vaccine. Not true. A whole bunch of last year's anti-vaxxers are this year's vaxxed people, as the data show. People voted for Trump will never change.

Not true. If you haven't checked, Trump is not president anymore because some of them did change. You know, people will never turn on Trump's criminality while January 6th hearings had quite a powerful effect in shifting opinion on certain things. So it's an empirical lie that people's minds don't change. They change all the time. I mean, I don't think you and you and i when we were children would have anticipated the revolution of consciousness around lgbt rights and marriage and family structure i mean it's just like who had that on their bingo card it's remarkable right to think of how intolerant our ancestors were

in every society on earth virtually on those issues. And quickly, quickly, in many, many places on earth, maybe most places on earth, we have just realized we were all totally wrong about that and changed it. Don't discount that. That was utterly remarkable. So this happens. We move, we evolve, we grow. Things that seem outlandish become settled. We've lived through this many times. So it is just empirically false. I think a second thing that a lot of the people I'm writing about, the persuaders in the terms of the book, are trying to tell us that our view, our kind of reflexive view of people on the other side of the issue. Our mental model of them is fundamentally flawed in this way. I think we all recognize that we are internally complicated and contradicted, right?

You have your outward stances. I have my outward stances, what you tweet, what you say on this show. But there's often like a B-side to our opinions and sentiments, right? As you know, there's B-sides to what administrations stand for in the world. There's arguments that are kind of narrowly lost and administration may be known for X, but like the other thing, almost the opposite thing, almost one, right?

And I think people are actually like that. We know that about ourselves. We're contradicted, as Beyonce says on her new album. But we deny, particularly in a polarized time, I think we forget or deny that people on the far side of us politically are just things, and we imagine them to be 100-0 on things. And it's just very self-defeating. That's where you get to the irredeemable place, because you are forgetting that, like, there's a contest for their soul going on, and, you know, Donald Trump is winning it right now.

But it's not a resolved final contest. It actually never is. And I'm not talking about everybody. There's some people for whom it's an absolutely resolved final contest, but there's just other people who are voting on vibes, who are joiners more than vanguards, who felt that there was something exciting here, who felt like smash the system, you know, all this stuff that, you know, the people who voted for your former boss twice and then like thought Trump kind of offered, you know, equally interesting vibes. Yeah.

That's real. And you talk to those people and the explanations you get are wild. It's all over the place. I remember I talked to a bunch of Obama Trump voters in Milwaukee last year, year before, whenever, for the Wilderness, this other podcast I do. And they sit there and they're like, you know, Obama was change and Trump felt like change. And you're sitting there like, what? What? That's crazy. But I'm like, no, that's that's their lived experience. Like so we can either we can be mad at it and we can say that's fine. We can be outraged and then we can decide to give up on those people. But if we decide to give up on those people

for good, well, then we're going to have a hard time finding a lot of other votes. Correct. And and first of of all, like you can, you can kind of judge it or you can not judge it. But my sense as a, someone who's done voter interviews for a really long time, my impression is more people are sort of like that than, than the other kind of person, which is someone whose,

whose stances are based on a tremendous amount of reading. Yeah. Most people are not like us. Correct. Thank God. Or the people on the far right that we see on Twitter and cable and everywhere else. Most people are not like us or them. Most people are just sitting in the middle, not paying as much attention to all this shit. Correct. And that's one of the core suppositions of the book and one of the core suppositions that these persuaders taught me. And once you go to that place and say, OK, people are complicated, then you start to say that slightly silly juxtaposition of stances or kind of moral frames you hear in that person. That's not just laughable. Like, that's your opportunity. That's the whole thing. And let me give you some real examples in the book that come up. Right. I've read about this

experiment called deep canvassing in Arizona. They're working on particularly white people's attitude to immigration in Arizona. Well, a lot of people are hostile to, you know, undocumented people living in their state in Arizona. We know that we know the politics that grows out of that. Is that the only thing going on in those people's hearts? No. So what are some examples of the other things? A lot of Americans, as you know, and I think it's a particularly

American thing, like have an underdog thing. Right? See themselves as people who like underdogs. Right? They support the Mets or whatever. Right? So that's just like grist for the mill there if you're a persuader a lot of people you know maybe religious people all like to conceive of themselves as as good people as people who do the right thing right who put you know put humanity first

that's another seedling of a thing a lot of people know some immigrants who their personal relations with them suggest that some of their abstract views about immigrants in general, there's tension, right? And what the persuaders I reported on do differently than frankly what I do and differently from what I think a lot of folks on the left do is that they are relentlessly seeking not to implant like a microchip of their opinion in these people, but to play up these seedlings of other views in these people, to play up their own dissonances, to make them a little bit more at war with themselves. And I think an observation I would make here, the term that a lot of organizers use to me in the book is meaning making. Like this work is meaning making, right? Asking for a vote or asking for five bucks

is not meaning making. It's like a political transaction, right? Meaning making is being with voters and all those other moments in between the donations and the votes where you're saying, how are you thinking about your town's changing? How are you thinking about that? What story do you ascribe to your town changing? You see things. You see there's all these Spanish-speaking cashiers at your Walgreens now. They didn't used to be Spanish-speaking cashiers there. What's going on? People don't go from the one of Spanish-speaking cashiers to the 10 of an alien invasion is ruining America. People don't go to that by themselves. Someone is helping them make meaning, right? People don't go from,

my kids came home and said some weird things about America, like whether America is like a good country or bad country. People don't go from the one of that stimuli to the 10 of CRT is a radical Marxist, you know, Soros project to destroy America. There's a ladder of consciousness. And the right, as I'm sure you'd agree, is very good at building that ladder for people. The right knows the stimuli in your life that is raising those things for you. And then Tucker and Trump, all these people, they're building that ladder to take you from that one to that 10. And if you look at our side, broadly defined, I would argue, no offense to anybody, that we're

not even engaged in that work. I don't think we're bad at it. I don't even think we're doing it. But here's, I found out about your book from the Atlantic piece. And like, I've even seen like you before on Morning Joe or on Twitter. And and like i would think that your worldviews is more strident than you let on in the book right or in the in that atlantic piece for sure but i feel like that's probably what people think of me that's probably what people think of a lot of the persuaders that you talk about in this book i mean you spend a lot of time with aoc you talk to linda sarsour you talk to our friend anot who's been on all of our You talk to Linda Sarsour. You talk to our friend, Anant, who's been on all of our podcasts. Talk to Alicia Garza. Like none of these people are people that anyone would

mistake for centrist moderates. But like, I feel like there's this fear. This is where I get to sort of the theme of this podcast, which is like being too online, there is this fear sort of because of the way we interact with each other now, which is through social media, that if you try to persuade, if you try to empathize with us, if you try to bring them along, you know, you're either labeled as a moderate or a centrist, or you're accused of being blinded by privilege based on race or gender identity. You're accused of being soft and weak and naive when Republicans are supposed to be tough and shrewd and or you're ignoring the base for the mythical swing voter, right? Like all of these actions and it becomes like it's not

worth it. So I'm not going to talk about it. I'm not going to get into that conversation. And I wonder to what extent you think social media and the internet contributes to progressives problem in trying to persuade? Yeah, I want to step back because I think what you said there is actually so important. And it actually helped me understand why I wrote this book in a way that I hadn't thought of until you said exactly those words. Like, there's a lot a book cannot do. And then there's like some limited things a book can do successfully that I've seen. I think I wrote this book to basically create a permission structure for the people I'm talking about to go do that without facing that pushback that you just described.

That to me is actually the clearest sense of my own mission with this book that I got, right? And that goes for both the moderates and like there's different critiques leveled, right? But you're right that there's a kind of flack of all kinds that you just named all the different sort of arguments for why that's not appropriate to do. And I thought I'm gonna write this thing

that actually flips that on its head and said, why are you not doing that? And so the choice of people is interesting. My goal is not only to help progressives. The reason I focused the book the way I did, I wanted the most unimpeachable people. Yeah, and you got them. That's why I thought it was so helpful i i wanted the people who nobody could say well you're just some mushy milquetoast middle no one's thinking linda sarsour is a neoliberal shill right you're just a sucker for you know white working class people in pennsylvania they always make you swoon um these are people who are as credentialed. I mean, I am not right. Like this couldn't come from me and it's not, I mean, I'm a reporter. Like this, this is coming from people who want

the big ambitious thing, right. Who want the radical thing in many cases, who want big change in this country, who are focused on structural change. None of this is about, you know, a kind of like Bill Clinton-y, like, I'm going to offer you pathos in exchange, like for substantive structural policy. But what they're all saying is, if we don't have this movement be relentlessly small evangelical, if it's not a missionary movement, what is it doing? And that you're not like complicit in people's baggage to try to reach them. They're complicit in their baggage. You're not complicit in their baggage by trying to talk to them. Right.

And you saw this so up close. I think the reigning Democratic Party, in particular, theory of persuasion was, has been persuade through dilution. Start with a kind of like ambitious moral frame, but then actually dilute the thing you're trying to do, the actualute the thing you're trying to do, the actual substance of what you're trying to do in the hope of reaching people in the middle who are more wary of you. And my book is an attempt, I think, to flip that upside down, because what often happens there is that those people you are trying to woo,

who are calling you a communist, they end up still calling you a communist, even after you add a lot of water to the recipe and the gruel is now more thin, and they still think you're a communist and they still hate you. And now the people who really are passionate about that philosophical project that you're pursuing, they're now a little cold and sad, right? And so you kind of end up a little bit homeless. I think the people I'm writing about, and in a way what you're arguing for in the setup, is actually a theory of persuasion where you do a better job of standing firmly

and bravely for big things and stick kind of non-negotiably to the substance of really big demands, but then do much better than a lot of folks on the left do at outreach, right? So it's not fight climate by doing like a pro-business corporate climate policy. It's fight climate by doing something like the Green New Deal, but let's do a lot better job of talking to coal miners about how the Green New Deal is actually totally oriented to helping people like them transition to a better way of life. That is a sales pitch that has completely failed to be made, even though it's in the idea, actually. But the pitch hasn't been made. Let's help people see themselves in Medicare for all. I would call it freedom care. I think it's ridiculous that it's called Medicare for all. Why is it named after a government program instead of a widely held American value? That would be an example of sticking to the ambitious demand, but saying, what are some other ways of talking about it? A language of freedom is a much more resonant language in this country. Healthcare is a human right, is something that people, progressives often say

about Medicare for all. Well, that's actually not a particularly resonant frame in America, because it's not like the people who don't like universal healthcare also don't like human rights, right? What I think universal healthcare would be, in truth, would be a massive expansion of human freedom in this country. Like, I don't want my boss dictating whether my kid gets care if, heaven forbid, my kid gets cancer. Do you want your boss having that decision over you? I don't want to not pursue my business idea because I have to stick to a stupid job for healthcare. It's amazing to me how little progressives speak in this kind of language of personal liberty around this stuff. That's the kind of persuasion that I think the characters I'm writing about are interested in. You mentioned deep canvassing. I tend to think that people who knock on doors and talk to voters,

regardless of where they fall on the ideological spectrum, have a better sense of how to persuade and organize and bring people in and get voters than people who spend most of their days posting online and yelling at each other and condemning the other side and feeling like moral clarity because we were righteous and we said, you know, fuck you, you're wrong. And they never learn to like build the muscle of persuasion in the way that organizers do. And particularly like, you know, like you said, you talked to Linda and Garza and AOC. I mean, AOC at one point says to you that the left can't just be about finger wagging and nagging and shaming people into positions, which made me think basically

my old boss, who we interviewed Friday for Positive America, basically said the same thing about the Democratic Party, said the Democratic Party can be a buzzkill. And, you know, you had a lot of people who were like, oh, he's just moderate or he's too old now or he's neoliberal. And of course, you know, the right picked it up and Fox and The Post and they're like, oh, Obama rails against cancel culture. And there's something about the way we're all talking right now in the public square, which is the internet, which just shaves everything down and simplifies it and makes

everything about contempt, you know, and I just I wonder if we either have to get offline to have these conversations or how do we have these kind of conversations online if that's the dominant form of interaction and communication right now? No, I think you're absolutely right. Two things there. I think in retrospect, we can look at a particular culture that has flourished over the last decade or so online that is, you know, with the help of these Russian trolls and with the kind of, with the amplification really of those Russian trolls. We were doing it to ourselves. That is a very particular kind of online culture

of calling out rather than calling in, of contempt rather than discussion. You know, even just like these very online phrases like imagine thinking that, right? Just like you start something that way. By the way, I do this. None of this is holier than thou. No, I know. I've written that tweet a million times, right? Yes. You start something that way. By the way, I do this. None of this is holier than thou.

No, I know. I've written that tweet a million times, right? Yeah, plenty of my tweets are bad. Most of my tweets are bad. What imagine thinking that is like a classic thing of like a person thinks differently from you, right? And it's just like so anti-persuasive.

It's just like treating different opinions from you as like a museum piece that should be just looked at through the glass it's like no no like get in there like difference of opinions are like your opportunity to get the kind of society you want right it's it's it's all it's all of the twitter it's do better do better just an order to someone to do better why what did they do wrong don't care i'm right you're wrong do better just leaving this What did they do wrong? Don't care. I'm right. You're wrong. Do better. Just leaving this here. Oh, just leaving it where? Why? Is it obvious? So you're trying to tell me that your opinion about something is so obvious, so obviously correct, that you don't even have to

bother taking the time to tell me why it's correct. It's basically theological, right? It's politics as theology. And it doesn't work, right like it's like tweets are not encyclicals you know but i also want to say something about what president obama said to you all um at full disclosure i didn't i've seen like the couple minutes clip i didn't see the you know half an hour before and half an hour after so i'm participating in the same problem here i think what he said was important and i agree with a lot of it. I think the thing that it's worth saying at the same moment, and he knows this as well as anyone, although with power and influence,

he's more protected from it than regular people. A lot of where the buzz killing comes from, that kind of calling out the more inflammatory thing. A lot of it, not all of it. Some of it is just like Rupert Murdoch and like bad incentives of platform. But another part of it is a growing culture of accountability around more marginalized people. Yeah. This was his wind up. This is the part that didn't make it into the clip. Yeah, this was his wind up okay this is the part that didn't make it into

the close yeah this was his wind up yeah of course like a whole bunch of women are now saying what it's actually like to work in workplaces with men and like it was still bad 20 years ago they just weren't saying it in a bunch of avenues and so yeah has that added inflammation to the discourse absolutely is it good also absolutely like absolutely. Like, you know, a bunch of people of color, right? Like I was bullied in school because of race and like, there was no language for that, right? Today, if you're 10 and what was happening to me is happening to you, there's all this language and you can, you know, go on TikTok and it could become a thing where everyone's ragging on stuff, right? So. Yeah. Police departments literally got away with murder for decades with no one saying anything about it.

Correct. Or not enough voices saying enough. I think that's what makes it hard. Otherwise, it would be easy to not be the buzzkill. And I'm glad that was in his windup. is the left has a challenge of both needing to stand up for all these people that are being degraded and denigrated by the other side. That's become the fundamental project of the other side,

to degrade. And so you do need to say things like, trans lives matter and black lives, you need to say these, it becomes more and more and more important to say these things. And at the same time, you're being sometimes pulled into

this like constant protection of groups and assertions of the dignity of different communities instead of saying speaking in the broadest most kind of... Universal, accessible language. Correct. You know? And it's not an easy challenge. It's not an easy challenge. You show this really well in the book. The actual work of persuasion is incredibly difficult work.

And I think what our online culture has also done is it's made us more susceptible to just wanting shortcuts to everything because our attention spans are so short these days. And so if we can't persuade someone, we fall on the shortcut of like, oh, well, forget about persuading people. We just need to turn out our base. Can someone like just spend them, spend a bunch of money investing in turning our race? Well, it's like, you know what? Actually, there's not enough people in our base. And number two, the people who are non-voters who might look like us and look like Democrats and should go their vote. They're not voting for a reason. And yes, some of that reason is voter suppression. But some of the reason is just that they're not paying attention to politics, and they don't want to vote. And persuading them to vote is going to be just as difficult as persuading a Trump voter to come over to the Democratic side. You just you cannot take a

shortcut around the necessary work of persuasion as much as we would like to. Correct. I think what I guess bothers me at the deepest level about that strategy you just described, and you hear it so much, I hear it so much, I think at the most visceral level, like there's a question of is it a bad strategy, right? That's like one concern. I think my highest level concern, the thing that really like makes me upset,

is that it's a kind of surrender that is in a way telling the public that you don't think the idea of America you have to sell is broadly appealing. Like I think at some level, it feels confessional. At some point, going back to the Hillary Clinton thing, it starts as a statement about them, but I think it's an autobiographical statement. I think you are saying, I am not sitting on a message, a program, an agenda that I can reasonably tell you is appealing to more than about half the country. And that is an incredible self-defeating surrender. And I think if you do feel that way, it may be that you are not telling the right story about this country. And I think in particular,

and this is at the heart of the book as well, there is a failure. So Obama talked about the buzzkill. I think what's even more interesting is like, what's the alternative, right? And he was very good at that in his time, in his way. Are we telling a story about America that is thrilling, galvanizing, magnanimous, relentlessly devoted to kind of converting and pulling in souls?

Are we rooted in communities? You know, that there is basically no IRL offline infrastructure for the democratic party anywhere. Like I've never been invited all those email lists. I've never been invited to a location for anything ever go to Fort Queen park, 2 PM drum circle, the celebrate immigrants in light of the present former president's terrible comments about them. Never. Have you ever been invited once to anything? They know your zip code. They know your address.

They know how much you gave. They know how much your neighbor gave. What is your theory of history? What is your reading of history if there's like no place for belonging and collective coming together and song and dance and communion of any kind? So I actually think I have a lot of hope. It doesn't sound that way, but it would be very bad news if you and I were having this conversation and agreeing that these things are important, having a strategy for belonging, telling this kind of better story about America, embracing patriotism, getting involved in this meaning making effort. If you and I were saying

persuasion is important, these activities I'm laying out are important, and the Democrats are attempting all of them, and doing them pretty well. Yeah. And, and we're at 4646 against fascism. Then I would say to you, John, we are fucked and you better get that portuguese you know citizenship a lot of people are starting to try to get um as you know i don't i here's the good news i don't think we're really seriously attempting any of those things like is there a serious belonging strategy in the democratic party is there a head of like community i i like i know but it's the problem is the further you get up the party uh it's like all sanded down sort of language that's been made talk about meaning making has been made meaningless because politicians have used it so often you know

just to the obama point something that he did so successfully starting when he gave that speech in 2004 in Boston is he reclaimed the idea of patriotism from the right by redefining patriotism and he did this and I think an even more mature way in the Selma speech which is like actually the most patriotic people in this country have been the marginalized and downtrodden and dispossessed and subjugated who like over the course of 200 years believed in this country so badly that they fought for it, even when this country didn't believe in them and didn't fight for them. Yes. And what makes this country great is that we can continually perfect this country that is imperfect and has been imperfect since the founding documents.

And I feel like sometimes on the left, and this is more in the activist, online activist space, there is this fear of expressing this pride in what this country can be, even if this country is not there yet. And that we're sort of throwing out the whole thing. And this idea of a common identity, that we all have our own identities, but there's also common threads that pull us together is now so out of vogue because we look at the other side and think they're so fucked up and awful that maybe we don't have anything in common and we just gotta you know we just gotta win by subjugation i i deeply agree with that i i personally think this is a very ripe moment for the left to reclaim the flag,

you know, the American flag, the red, white and blue one, since the right seems determined right now to not use the red, white and blue one. The right is right now turning against the American flag and is generally using this police flag as the new flag of right wing people. If you drive around this country, what's a great moment for the left to say, we believe in the American flag, actually, we should we should be flying it outside our houses, right? I bet a lot of you and my friends do not do that, and we should. I think it's a matter absolutely, as you say, of claiming that authentic patriotism. I think what President Obama did was tell an autobiographical story at the beginning that was the patriotism of a place where only this was possible, right?

The history is only possible here. It's now been, you know, some years. I think the context today for that story is we are attempting to do a thing right now that is one of the hardest high jumps any great power in history has ever attempted, which is to, by democratic means, choose to become this country alloyed of the whole world, a country made of people from every country, every language, to do so without common blood, common heritage, common skin color, common religion, right? And the part that I think is missing from the story, if it's told at all, is that we've actually come quite a long way to doing this.

Like, you go to Europe, as I'm sure you do. Like, no, those are all white countries with a minority population that is kept very neatly in the 10 to 25 percent zone right india and china great places not nations of immigrants you can't become chinese you can't really become indian most countries are more like india and china in that regard or germany and france in that regard they are like us we are attempting to do an awesome thing yeah and by and by the way the countries that we can look to that do have really great social safety nets pretty white the idea of having a good social safety net and a multi-racial democracy all at once you don't see it a lot of places to sharpen your point they have good safety

nets because they are mostly white, right? Yeah. And a bunch of oil offshore. Correct. And it was a layup for them. Like, let's give ourselves actually a little credit. of more mutuality, a stronger safety net, et cetera, the program of the Democratic Party, more solidarity to greater and varying levels depending on where you are in the party. But broadly, that is the agenda of everyone in the party.

Attempting to do it in the context of what is becoming a majority, headed to be a majority minority country, a superpower of color. Broadly speaking, there is a pretty wide consensus, even now, on the idea of people being able to become American. Hundreds of thousands of people become American every year. They didn't stop under Trump, right? Even Donald Trump did not stop that, right? The position you can take is stop border crossings, illegal border crossings, right? Like Donald Trump did not shut down the naturalization of hundreds of thousands of people a year that is consensus that is not consensus in France and Germany as you know um and when you tell the story of this awesome thing we're doing that's kind of unprecedented then having set the

table you say okay so now let me explain to you why we got this little insurrection over there right these people are doing this because a small faction of Americans, by the way, the same people who put dogs on people in the 60s, the same people who wanted to preserve slavery. It's the same faction. That faction has concluded that they would rather break the country than share it. They're not most of us. There's some of us. They've always been here.

We've beaten them again and again and again and added more and more people to the circle. Now we got to beat them again. And we can and we will. And here's why. Here's what we're trying to do. Here's the beautiful tomorrow we're trying to live in. And here's what we got to do to beat this revolt against the future so we can go live in it. To me, that feels both more empathetic about what's going on and why those people are flaring up the way they are, and more determined and resolute to not let them get an inch, and more clear in what you're offering people a tomorrow, a promised land that they can see themselves in. I don't think anyone on the left is doing all of that. Some people are emphasizing like America's great, right? And progressives are

talking about maybe some of the sins and whatever. Like I'm talking about doing it all in a package in a way that feels thrilling, galvanizing, inviting. The last question on this, the organizers you spoke to and political leaders sort of gave you something of a playbook that progressives should and pro democracy forces should use going forward. Can you just sort of sum up some strategies that they have found effective in their work? Yeah. And I'll give you the six that I kind of drew on for the New York Times op-ed that grew out of the book. First, command attention, right? The right is extraordinary at commanding attention,

making moments. We need a attention strategy and we need to stop being so high-minded. It's not a base behavior to command attention. Second is make meaning. We talked about that. That's both politicians. I mean, there's no reason Joe Biden should not be doing fireside chats on TikTok, YouTube, whatever, Instagram, like every week.

Like, why is he not talking America through this moment? Easy. Like, lay up. Go do that. Meet people where they are, right? Like, people telling you they care about gas prices and inflation and crime. And you're saying, as Democrats so often do. Sorry. Screw you.

Sorry, John. John, you have false consciousness. Those are not, in fact, issues that you should be scared of. Right. But I'm not who you talk to says this all the time is that you cannot argue people out of their feelings. Yeah, correct. So so so meet people where they are is third. Provide home, belonging, like just have a plan for collective experience, transcendent experience, like t-shirts, picnics, clubs, like actually the kind of politics of people who actually know each other and meet offline. Tell the better story about this country. I think it's incredibly important. We talked about that. And lastly, I would say pick fights. With all due respect to Michelle Obama, I think that when they go low, we go high may not be suited all these years later for the they that we are now up against. I think when it's fascism, it may cause a revision of the statement. I wouldn't be surprised if she would revise her own statement in the light of what we face now. And I think there needs to be more of a comfort and a willingness to generatively scapegoat, to name names, to pick fights. And I think when Democrats do that, you see Gavin Newsom doing it a little bit. You see others doing it from time to time. People love it. People respond. I think there's a way in which Americans feel like they're in a household where there's a kind of abuser on the loose and their leaders, like the parental figures in the house, are not protecting them. And that's a very, very dangerous emotion in a family. And I think it's a very dangerous emotion in a country. And I think people want

to feel protected. Yeah, it's interesting. I always think that Michelle Obama's line there was ended up being misunderstood. And I say this not to like be defensive about it, but only because I think when she talked about low versus high, and she's talking about high, she was really talking about sort of the vision that you've been speaking about and writing about in the book of an aspirant, and AOC talked to you about this, this aspirational vision that brings people in. I thought one of the best things that AOC said is, and this was in a speech that she gave for Bernie Sanders, she said, we're not divided, we're disconnected. And if we're disconnected, then the antidote to that is to connect people

and to connect people, you have to bring them in, right? What they're trying to do is set us against each other. They are trying to set us against each other and have us have contempt for each other. What we're trying to do, the progressive vision here is this multiracial democracy where we might not always agree all the time, but we can live together in relative peace and prosperity and respect one another. Yeah, I get that. That makes a lot more sense to me. I think it was often misunderstood. Yeah. To be, we always have to keep it classy no matter what's coming at us. No, yeah, no. And like the Obamas did that.

That's not where we are now. Right. But the Obamas did that and they were the first black family in the White House and maybe they had no choice but to do that. But I think for a lot of people it it has come to feel like a an impossible standard when you're dealing with a kind of barbarian politics look and and and to your last book that you wrote i mean one of the things we did in the 08 campaign and especially the 12 campaign is like some of the fights that you want to pick are with the billionaire elite class that is sort of causing so many of the fucking structural problems in our country and our world right now, right?

It's a good fight to pick. It's a very good one to pick, and there's many good fights to pick, and I hope we get better at picking them and better at doing all the other things about bringing people together and bringing them in. I really hope everyone reads this book, picks it up. Persuaders, it's a fantastic book. Anand, your Dada, thank you so much for joining Offline and for writing this book and doing this work. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me. I really, really appreciate this conversation. I feel like we're

deeply like-minded on this. Yeah. No, as I was reading the book, I was like, yes, yes. So I'm glad we get to talk. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illich-Frank is our associate producer. Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor. Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vassilis Fotopoulos sound engineered the show.

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