I'm a fan of treating everyone with dignity, but this list feels a bit like a "Motte and Bailey" where I'm being asked to treat you reasonably but then a lot of the examples are about meeting you where you're at instead of everyone meeting in the middle.
I think it's a bit odd for you to take so little responsibility for "your" own bad rhetoric while charging "me" for mine, given that neither of us (I assume) are the bad actors! It's not difficult to scold either Democrats or Republicans for being mean and rude and partisan right now, because there are a lot of mean and rude partisans in both parties.
Again, I do think many of the items on your list represent failures to communicate. I think many of the items on your list are also extraordinary special-cased requests for half of a conversation made up of millions to shape up.
First, I’m favorably inclined toward anyone who uses “Motte and Bailey”—one of my favorite metaphors, and of quite recent and identifiable vintage.
The reason I don’t take responsibility for “my” bad rhetoric is because I’m an observer, not an advocate. This essay originally included a sentence that seems to have been edited out along the line—that in all of 2024, not once in writing or in private did I offer anyone advice on how to vote in a Trump-Biden or Trump-Harris race.
If I use “bad” rhetoric it’s usually because I’m being deliberately provocative—and I’m fairly even-handed in the cheeky taunts department. (At my own Substack, I just posted three consecutive pieces railing against President Trump’s tariff policies; in one, I suggested that the likeliest explanation for those policies is that his economic advisors are using methamphetamine.)
Bottom line on this piece, however, is that I’m offering unsolicited advice to Democrats and not Republicans because it is Democrats who are losing badly and whose persuasive powers seem absent. Whatever you think of Trump and the Republicans, they have successfully persuaded millions of Democrats to switch sides and, in so doing, swept all the swing states and retained both houses of Congress. Not sure they’re open to advice on how to improve their powers of persuasion.
I love that you are trying, but the comments so far (universally some version of 'yeah, but Those People are stupid and evil, so we should force them, not persuade them') make it seem as if you are wasting your time. Still cheering you on.
Thanks! My essay suggests how the left might open up productive discourse with that thin but decisive sliver of the right. My unsolicited advice is similarly aimed at some hopefully decisive (but possibly thin) sliver of the left that is open to more civil standards of discourse.
It’s a list of how not to offend your Trump-positive relatives who can’t be persuaded of anything anyway, but dignifies a lot of positions that don’t deserve it, which is how Trump attracted low information swing voters. Civility has great virtue, but a lot of this just moves the window. That the left is awful does not make the right any less awful. If conduct is beyond the pale, it should be treated as beyond the pale regardless of the actor.
I agree with much of what you say. but, as I noted to another commenter, like them or not, Trump and Republicans have succeeded spectacularly at persuading millions to come their way, and Democrats have failed miserably over the past decade in that respect. That’s an observation on rhetoric, not on the content of the conversations. Notice that my essay said almost nothing about which policy positions might persuade me. As for “Trump-positive relatives,” I’d remind you that millions of them voted for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and, in dwindling numbers, for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. I do argue—and have written—that Kamala Harris might well have been the least persuasive major-party nominee in modern history. And yet Democratic leaders (e.g., those who ran for party chair) blame racism and sexism rather than Harris’s lack of clarity on policy and her breathtaking rhetorical shortcomings. I suspect that a Trump-Shapiro or Trump-Whitmer or Trump-Klobuchar or Trump-Torres race would have had a very different dynamic.
“low information” is typical of elitist ( keep it up and Trump may we’ll get a another term)
“who can’t be persuaded of anything anyway” looks like that’s a reflexive remark.
“That the left is awful does not make the right any less awful.” I hear statements similar but said by children—“Well he did it too.” The reply by a parent to children used to be “Two wrong don’t make a right.”
Sad and this type of response will keep the Republicans in office forever.
The article is spot on in the art of persuasion. The author must be an Aristotelian.
In writing my response to Derek, I somehow missed the "low information voter" reference. My piece said "To sway voters to your side, you must ask yourself, sincerely and sympathetically, why a decent, well-informed voter would vote the other way." Assume your adversaries are "low-information" and you'll sink. Some awfully intelligent Democrats endorsed Trump.
Thanks for the "Aristotelian" comment. Nice compliment. My teaching method has been described as Socratic. :)
If all you do is recoil at the notion that some voters are not “well informed” and focus on whatever minute percentage of “awfully intelligent Democrats” endorsed Trump, I think you are focusing on a fairly minute and inconsequential group to draw conclusions about the groups that might make a difference.
Also, conflating “intelligence” with being informed is a revealing error. There are a lot of brilliant people who—believe it or not—do not share your interests in following politics closely. Intelligence is not synonym for wisdom, knowledge, or understanding. Another error is assuming that if someone has made their political beliefs a core component of his or her identity is persuadable, while ignoring that people who are persuadable will tend to be those who do not take political debate as personally.
Has there been a political movement (in the real world) that has succeeded with a coddling, “well, I hear you and respect that, but” approach to campaigning? If there actually was a cadre of well-informed, persuadable, non-ideologue voters who deliberatively chose Trump, the most boorish, confrontational major candidate in 100 years, but were put off by the shrillness of Democrats, I would love to see data on that. But it sounds like an invention.
Not uncommon in these circles to accuse anyone who criticizes ignorance (which, again, is NOT the same as stupidity) of “elitism.” If we have to pretend that most swing voters are extremely well-informed and deliberative, we are willfully ignoring the immense challenges of the current information environment.
If you believe well-informed and/or intelligent people constitute "a fairly minute and inconsequential" portion of the millions who have flipped from Democratic to Republican in the Trump era, your success at persuasion will be profoundly limited. (Might be a hit on TikTok, however.) And, I think the “well, I hear you and respect that, but” style of rhetoric has enjoyed substantial success in the past. In my lifetime, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan were certainly exemplars. To a lesser extent and to varying degrees, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama could exhibited that tendency.
If you want to talk more generally about informed swing voters, if anything the Democratic coalition of the hard left and the more technocratic center was stretched thin ideologically, dropping voters at either end, with a sprinkling of inflation losing the “mandate of heaven.” We will simply have to disagree that the reason any significant number of Democrats drifted to Trump has much to do with loud criticism of Trump or his most ardent supporters. I am not sure why those same voters would be perfectly happy with the smashmouth politics of Trump. The proposition has to be that a true choice in tone would make the difference for a significant number of voters. I emphatically disagree. I am not happy with that, but it seems to be the way of things today.
As between the policies and professed beliefs of the critical theory/identity politics-suffused left and their tone, I don’t think they are a handshake and a muffin away from getting alienated centrists back. The far left would have to fundamentally change core beliefs about America.
You’re turning up your nose at “TikTok”—I’m not a fan, but that is a key information space right now. Maybe Eisenhower-era discourse can mount a comeback in something of a reaction to/recoil from influencer America/ubiquitous AI slop, but I have trouble seeing that anytime soon.
Maybe a.little helpful - mostly things not to say and arguments not to make to not close the ears and minds of the possibly persuadeable people. very little on how to articulate an alternative positive vision. But one low hanging fruit - there are many statements democrats attribute to Trump as evidence of unfitness (fine people on both sides; injecting bleach; etc) that republicans have looked into and decided he didn't say or are so out of context as to be bad faith. Ds can pick up these meme/event stories perfectly innocently and then be dismissed when they mention them. It would be good.to get these out of our vocabularies.
Your opening is spot-on correct! As I noted to the previous commenter, I deliberately focused this essay entirely upon rhetoric and completely omitted the harder job of crafting policies that sell. My purpose here was to lay out de minimis rules for starting the conversation. Once those have been adopted as S.O.P., the “alternative positive vision” emerges from civil discourse with the potentially persuadable segment of the electorate. But if you cancel them, insult them, belittle them, ignore them, etc., they’re never going to tell you which policies might persuade them. Great comments, thanks.
If you argue that white non-college voters are racist, homophobic, xenophobic I ask you to look at the attitudes reported in social surveys since 1996 where the white non college voter has become dramatically more liberal on those issues. And over the same period their vote for Republicans increased dramatically. Something else is going on.
I’d like to finish with a point that is perhaps controversial and unoriginal but needs to be hammered home; it should now be crystal clear that Democrats are steadily alienating male voters – mostly white ones, but increasingly many who are nonwhite. This is dismissed as “misogyny” by many Democrats and there is certainly plenty of that. But when one gender and one race is singled out as the source of all that is evil and nothing that is good in a nation that they themselves were instrumental in building (to say the least), members of that group can become disheartened. No one wants to be a member of a party that considers him the enemy. I must say that I share this feeling (I have never oppressed anyone). For me, no amount of frustration with Democrats would ever make me vote for human beings as despicable as Donald Trump and his brownshirts. But clearly, tens of millions of men -- white, black and brown – overcame whatever distaste for Trump they might have had and did just that.
-- She had served in four offices for over twenty years and yet one was hard-pressed to name any accomplishments or memorable statements (in a good way) during those years. She was a miserable presidential candidate in 2020; the press wanted desperately to anoint her as the female Obama, but she crumbled to dust in the first debate and was sent packing by donors and others. During her four years in the vice presidency, there was a steady stream of articles about Democrats trying to find ways to get rid of her. (Appointing her to the Supreme Court was a recurring fantasy.)
-- As Biden melted after his 2024 debate, Obama and others tried desperately (and briefly) to find another candidate. Her staff hid her from interviews because she is incapable of sustained, coherent conversation. In the "60 Minutes" interview, she failed to give coherent answers to even the the fluffiest, most obvious softball questions.
-- Had the Democrats nominated, say, Josh Shapiro, Mark Kelly, or Amy Klobuchar, I doubt that your charts would be relevant.
As for your comment above, I think you do your own persuasive powers great disservice with using a phrase like "human beings as despicable as Donald Trump and his brownshirts." "Brownshirts" is a synonym for "Nazi," and readers otherwise open to your arguments will reject you out-of-hand because of your use of that slur.
Thanks so much for your thoughtful response. A couple of points:
1. If my article in any way implied that Kamala Harris was a qualified candidate then I am deeply, deeply mortified. She was a pathetic joke. I thought the part where she would rather cavort with Beyonce than engage with voters was sufficient. My objective was not to assess her qualifications, but to consider the one issue that I am convinced turned the tide against her. The problems with the Democrats go far deeper than Kamala. I am not sure that the Democrats are capable of nominating a competent candidate. Maybe Klobuchar, who is a woman, or Buttigieg , who is gay. (He would be my choice. I live in PA and really like Shapiro, but I'm not sure a Jewish male has a chance. Maybe in three years things will be different.)
2. I am 99.9% confident in my economic analysis. I would be EXTREMELY grateful to see anything that might refute it or refine it.
3. I can see how you might object to my use of the term Brownshirts. But I think that Trump is every bit the danger to the US that Hitler was to Germany. Thankfully, Trump is much older and totally unfocused. But morally, they are the same. I think that if he could, Trump would establish concentration camps for his critics in a heartbeat. I am writing a piece now on his economic policies.
Question: Do you think Trump will succeed in preventing mid term elections in 2026?
I appreciate your polite, thoughtful response, Just what I hope for.
1) No, your essay didn't suggest that Kamala was competent, but you suggest that failure to present the economy was their biggest problem. Dancing with Beyonce was probably the most effective campaign tactic available to the profoundly untalented Kamala Harris.
2) If I had lots of time, I would go over your economic analysis with a fine-tooth comb and go point-by-point. I don't have the time. I'll just say that Trump's first term saw lots of positive growth, temporarily crushed by COVID, and returning impressively before he left office. I blame Biden's inflation on Biden (and an accommodating Fed) and believe his giant spending extravaganzas, energy shutdowns, EV mandates, etc. did large and lasting damage.
3) When I see concentration camps rising, I'll try to send a "You were right" note. Until that day, I think it's irresponsible invective. By way of constructive criticism, I'll say that, given that rhetoric on your part, I would never consider subscribing to your Substack, despite the fact that you clearly have interesting things to say.
A while back, I wrote: "Shortly before the 1948 Truman-Dewey election, a New York Times multi-tiered headline declared, in part: 'PRESIDENT LIKENS DEWEY TO HITLER AS FASCISTS’ TOOL … DICTATORSHIP STRESSED … TRUMAN SAYS GOP PERILS U.S. LIBERTY.' Dewey, of course, was a milquetoast, liberal Republican instrumental in elevating Dwight Eisenhower to the presidency four years later." Dewey, Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 43 were also Nazis whose brownshirt supporters were poised to establish concentration camps. It's a tiresome argument, and it invalidates anything else you have to say. Even if you believe it, it's best to keep it to yourself for purely pragmatic reasons.
This post is delightful. Mr. Graboyes neatly and amusingly captures many of the Democrats’ worst habits of thought and communication.
A red thread running through these bad Democratic Party habits is an elitism and lack of respect for voters so automatic and complacent that they can’t see their elitism or recognize that the people deserve respect.
Not that Republican elites have any greater respect for the people. But at least they know they should pretend to not believe the voters are children.
How can we explain this difference between the parties - the difference between feigning respect and not even seeing that respect should at least be feigned?
I think it flows from the asymmetric impact of campaign fundraising on the two parties. As the campaign spending arms race accelerated from the 1980s on, Democrats were compelled to abandon their identity and core principles in a death of a thousand cuts.
Once the party of civil rights, organized labor, and economic fairness, the Democrats gradually morphed into Republican Lite, their transformation complete no later than Clinton’s neoliberal trade policy and the declared end of big government.
Since then the party stands for little more than “a slightly less bad result than you get from the GOP.”
Their chief compensation for this loss of purpose has been affirming their imagined moral and intellectual superiority. The voters’ lack of enthusiasm for them is most easily rationalized away as the voters’ fault. Standing only for technocracy rather than a compelling moral vision, they pin their hopes on voters being “smart” and “enlightened” like themselves.
The money chase damaged the GOP just as badly, but in different ways - for more please visit my Substack and website.
"Not that Republican elites have any greater respect for the people. But at least they know they should pretend to not believe the voters are children."
I think your characterization is quite correct. My personal acquaintances are not necessarily a representative sample of the American population. But I do note empirical regularities within those acquaintances. The less charitable Democrats view Republican voters as unintelligent, evil, misinformed, uneducated, inattentive, etc. The less charitable Republicans view Democratic voters as intelligent, determined, assholes. Both views are uncharitable, but one is condescending and the other merely disdainful. If someone calls me an asshole, I might want to argue with them. If someone calls me unintelligent, I have no use for them.
Thank you, Robert! Thats a wonderfully concise characterization of how the two parties disrespect the voters, but in different ways.
Political scientists who opine on polarization often present it as driven by the GOP, mainly or even exclusively. Exhibit A is Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die. As best I recall, Mann and Ornstein, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, takes a similar stance.
If you’re talking only about the obstructionist behavior of Congressional Republicans there’s merit to that argument.
But looking at how the parties stereotype and perceive their opponents’ voters, what Democrats do is more provocative, indeed positively enraging, because they are dismissive.
Like you, when someone calls me an asshole I may not like it, but at least they’re engaging with me. When someone thinks my ideas are unworthy of their notice or engagement, I become homicidally angry. (Just kidding! 🤣)
I am in general agreement with every point except for this one:
"If you psychoanalyze your adversaries, you won’t persuade me."
When a major public figure such as a President (be it Trump or Biden) displays obvious signs of a mental impairment, it's fair game to talk about that. Maybe, as you indicate, such points are unlikely to substantially influence an average person's opinion. But they are still very much a factor to seriously consider.
I'll keep that point in, but (at least in this comment) add an asterisk that the case of Joe Biden adds a layer of complication. If I were writing a longer piece on this point (and I might do that at some point), I might say that the problem lies with the frequency with which the accusation are issued, the evenhandedness with which they are issued, and their accuracy in hindsight. The boy-who-cried-wolf problem. Right now, Democrats are aiming this particular tic at one of their own--John Fetterman. In 2022, when he was clearly, obviously, and seriously disabled by his stroke, any mention of that by Republicans was viciously attacked as unethical, ableist, incorrect, etc. Today, when Fetterman seems fully functional--and certainly is able to carry his own in discourse--he is being attacked by fellow Democrats as disabled. To me, it's clear that the reason is that he is regularly apostate on various issues--especially Israel vs Hamas. At the same time, until the roof caved in, Democrats were viciously attacking anyone who mentioned the obvious about Biden's mental state.
So I'm happy to concede that for me, including "stop psychoanalyzing" in my list is not a general, eternal, absolutist principle. It is me saying, "Dear Democrats, at least since my long-ago childhood, you have deigned to psychoanalyze your adversaries with great regularity, you have often been wildly inaccurate in your pronouncements, and you have been breathtakingly uneven in your use of this technique. Given this sordid history, you ought to remove that arrow from your quiver till the stain of your prior excesses has faded."
In sum, you raise a fine objection, but with these qualifications, I'll defend my inclusion of this point. Thanks.
Thank you for your timely thought provoking article.it’s been a struggle to understand what motivates some of my neighbors to vote for Trump three times. I would not dare to try to persuade them. They reject your 12 points.
I hope we can a government for all the people and by all the people one day. I think most people when confronted with reality will make the right decisions. (Aye, there’s the rub. Informed. Plato nailed that one.) But you offer yourself with personal guidelines and examples for persuasion and address the reader directly with your rules of engagement. They are good rules. Your examples weren’t the best to make your point nevertheless Miss Manners approves.
For the sake of discussion:
In defense of the politicians (#1), they are not there to persuade but to rally and since the country is so large and diverse there is room for all types from Shumer’s embarrassing attempts to shout to Sander’s actual shouting. AOC doesn’t shout. That’s just her little girl voice Explaining.
I am trying(#2) but I do not know what a “legitimate” point is. It’s subjective. We could get down to it and draw up a chart and list all the ways the Jan 6th attempt to overturn an election is equivalent to the protests around the justices residences and ways they were different. It would need to be an honest effort to understand one another’s viewpoint. Might be tedious but worth doing. Really dig in. Lay it out. Do these two events actually carry the same weight? We need a scale and a deep discussion.
(#3) When people act like that they are not trying to persuade. They are bullies. They’ve written you off as hopeless. Sometimes it’s ignorance. Sometimes just mean. There are alarming parallels to the 1930s-40s and to the 1850s-60s. We Americans have a lot of unsettled business.
(#4) Hypocrisy is a real turn-off. Absolutely. The reaction to Brian Thompson’s murder was shocking and terrible. Applying empathy: It was a spontaneous cry of outrage from all the people who have struggled with and lost loved ones to our profitable health care system. At the very best we live with constant anxiety. It was a howl of pain that drowned out an actual murder. I can’t imagine what his family must still be going through. What if that were my father? Or yours? MLK Jr was right, but practicing nonviolence is hard, especially when violence has been done to you. It got worse when our leaders supported it. I literally shrank in shame for some of them. I condemn the violence and understand it. We failed on that one for sure. Where is Gandhi when we need him? Never mind that. Pakistan and India are at it again.
(#5) Pop-psychology is a racket. Sorry. I just broke a rule. It’s just my opinion and I offer no proofs, but they could be found. But when people tell me who they are I believe them. I don’t need Mary Trump to elaborate.
(#6) I can’t separate everyday life from political life. It’s not academic. My survival depends on my union, a pension, Medicare and many public funded services from the USForest Service to FEMA to literally everything from the library to the Pentagon. It’s our government. But it would be a bore to remind people of that. They know.
(#7)Injecting bleach seems so long ago. We’ve moved on to Habeus Corpus and ghouls like Stephen Miller.
Memes are usually shallow platitudes (#8) though Shakespeare made some pretty good ones and oligarchy is really a thing. There’s a lot of name-calling going on from Both Sides, or so I hear. I don’t tweet, etc.
(#9) I agree. Cherry picking is another failed tactic of persuasion.
(#10) Empathy is absolutely essential and takes courage to go where others fear to tread. I have an empathy story to share. My late husband was a beautiful and extreme embodiment of empathy. Even in the midst of bloody battle during WW2 on Guadalcanal he mourned all the dead alike, Japanese included. He wept over them all. He could not talk about it without tears. Empathy can be painful but it is what makes us a human form of animal.
I am surprised at Haidt (#11) and want to learn more about that experiment. I have listened with astonishment to a Trump voters tell me, a liberal, what liberals are. I think the outcome of the experiment would depend a lot on education.
Note to your note: My conservative Uncle Henry wasn’t disinvited to Thanksgiving because of his political opinions but because he broke all 12 of your suggestions and was so fierce no one dared to speak. I suspect there are a lot of Uncle Henry’s out there. They’d be welcome if they behaved.
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I am not a nominee (#12) and have never successfully persuaded anyone to vote a particular way. I don’t wrestle with pigs either. Missionaries should have enough respect to leave people alone. A candidate must persuade. That’s their job.
I believe in the greater good of humanity. Even now. We have a power imbalance and are in danger of tipping over. Money is power. So are information, education, access.
This is so interesting. I know many Republicans but no Trump voters. Together we are constantly trying to understand them and we talk about it a lot. I expect I am as mistaken about them as they are about me. We come from such different cultures even while speaking the same language.
Your essay is thought provoking and the advice is sound.
People are persuaded by their own experiences, information, up-bringing and culture. Persuasion is only appropriate for saving lives. (You really should evacuate NOW.) Which brings us to the subject of corruption. We are in danger and the power of persuasion may be all we have to save ourselves.
I’ve mentioned somewhere that not once in 2024 did I try to persuade a soul how to vote (or not vote) in a Trump-Biden or Trump-Harris contest. Better to mow the lawn or vacuum the rugs—activities where there’s a chance of positive results.
The Republic that Plato envisioned was one of enlightened despots. He thought that one’s educational level governed how much power they ought to have in the republic. Long ago, a snobbish colleague of mine said that in an ideal society, the number of votes an individual had would depend on his level of education. I said that I agreed but wasn’t sure that PhDs would agree to have zero votes.
We’ll never have “a government for all the people and by all the people” for the simple reason that we’ll never all agree what that even means. Which is why I lean toward the minimalist in terms of what I’d like the government to do.
You said “politicians (#1 … are not there to persuade but to rally.” Many view it that way, but I disagree. We’ve had a number of president who were magnificent persuaders.
You said “I am trying(#2) but I do not know what a ‘legitimate’ point is. It’s subjective.” Precisely! In a recent piece (https://graboyes.substack.com/p/of-trumpets-and-trump) I wrote that the avalanche of gratuitous Trump-related sequiturs that people include in emails and social media posts: “are never offered as hypotheses, opinions, or topics for discussion. Rather, they are always stated as Euclidean postulates—self-evident Truths that we surely agree upon and which warrant no discussion.”
(#4) Regarding Luigi Mangione. People lose loved ones in every healthcare system, public or private. It is inevitable. We do remarkably well here with ours. As for Mangione’s “manifesto,” it was a dimwitted, ill-informed, badly written parroting of demagogic social media hot takes.
(#6) “I can’t separate everyday life from political life.” I can. And do. I avoid politics at family get-togethers and other social occasions where it would cause rancor. I don’t throw little random political references into my emails. I don’t walk outside and start complaining about Joe Biden to left-leaning neighbors who like him.
If you’re Shakespeare, by all means go for the memes. 😊
Beautiful story about sentiments from your late husband. And lovely that you can carry that memory.
I agree that more details on Haidt’s on argument would be interesting. Intuitively, I believe what he says. In the present era, a conservative student at a university must navigate intolerant left-wing professors, whereas the opposite is rarely true. Wasn’t always that way.
I would disinvite the conservative uncle you describe, as well, or at least make clear that political discussion would not be tolerated.
If you know zero Trump voters, I can probably narrow down the geography of where you live to a relatively small portion of US territory. I’ll guess Coastal California or the Acela Corridor. 😊
Thank you for your thought provoking article. It is timely. It’s been a struggle to understand what motivates some of my neighbors to vote for Trump three times. I would not dare to try to persuade them though. I just want to know why.
I hope we can achieve a democracy one day. I think most people when confronted with reality will make the right decisions. (Aye, there’s the rub. Informed. Plato nailed that one.) But you offer yourself and personal guidelines and examples for persuasion and address the reader directly with your rules of engagement. They are good rules. Your examples weren’t the best to make your point nevertheless Miss Manners approves.
For the sake of discussion:
In defense of the politicians (#1), they are not there to persuade but to rally and since the country is so large and diverse there is room for all types from Shumer’s embarrassing attempts at shouting to Sander’s actual shouting. AOC doesn’t shout. That’s just her little girl voice Explaining.
I am trying(#2) but I do not know what a “legitimate” point is. It’s your point. Or my point. It’s subjective. QAnon and I disagree on “legitimate”. Or we could get down to it and draw up a chart and list all the ways the Jan 6th attempt to overturn an election is equivalent to the protests around the justices residences and ways they were different. It would need to be an honest effort to understand one another’s viewpoint. Might be tedious but worth doing. Really dig in. Lay it out. Do these two events actually carry the same weight?
(#3) When people act like that they are not trying to persuade. They are bullies. They’ve written you off as hopeless. Sometimes it’s ignorant. Sometimes just mean. History doesn’t repeat itself, but humans do. There are alarming parallels to the 1930s-40s and to the 1850s-60s. We Americans have a lot of unsettled business.
(#4) Hypocrisy is a real turn-off. Absolutely. The reaction to Brian Thompson’s murder was shocking and terrible. Applying empathy: It was a spontaneous cry of outrage from all the people who have struggled with and lost loved ones to our profitable health care system. It was a howl of pain that drowned out an actual murder. I can’t imagine what his family must still be going through. What if that were my father? Or yours? MLK Jr was right, but practicing nonviolence is hard, especially when violence has been done to you. It got worse when our leaders supported it. I literally shrank in shame for some of them. I condemn the violence and understand it. We failed on that one for sure. Where is Gandhi when we need him? MLK Jr?Never mind that. Pakistan and India are at it again and Americans are waging war on the civil rights movement.
(#5) Pop-psychology is a racket. Sorry. I just broke a rule. It’s just my opinion and i offer no proofs. But when people tell me who they are I believe them. I don’t need Mary Trump to elaborate and if i want a therapist I'll pay for one.
(#6) I can’t separate everyday life from political life. It’s not academic. My survival depends on my union, a pension, Medicare and many public funded services from the USForest Service to FEMA to literally everything from the library to the Pentagon. It’s our government. But it would be a bore to remind people of that. They know.
(#7)Injecting bleach seems so long ago. We’ve moved on to Habeus Corpus and ghouls like Stephen Miller.
Memes are usually shallow platitudes (#8) though Shakespeare made some pretty good ones and oligarchy is really a thing.
(#9) True. Cherry picking is another failed tactic of persuasion.
(#10) Empathy is absolutely essential and takes courage to go where others fear to tread. I have an empathy story to share. My late husband was a beautiful and extreme embodiment of empathy. Even in the midst of bloody battle during WW2 on Guadalcanal he mourned all the dead alike, Japanese included. He wept over them all. He could not talk about it without tears. Empathy can be painful but it is what makes us a human form of animal.
I am surprised at Haidt (#11) and want to learn more about that experiment. I have listened with astonishment to Trump voters tell me, a liberal, what liberals are. I think the outcome of the experiment would depend a lot on education.
Note to your note: My conservative Uncle Henry wasn’t disinvited to Thanksgiving because of his political opinions but because he broke all 12 of your suggestions and was so fierce no one dared to speak.
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I am not a nominee (#12) because I have never successfully persuaded anyone to vote a particular way. I don’t wrestle with pigs either for the same reason. I would lose.
I believe in the greater good of humanity. Even now. We have a power imbalance and are in danger of tipping over. Money is power. So are information, education, access. The truth could set us free.
This is so interesting. I know many Republicans but no Trump voters. Together we are constantly trying to understand them and we talk about it a lot. I expect I am as mistaken about them as they are about me. We come from such different cultures even while speaking the same language.
Your essay is thought provoking and the advice is sound. I am responding at length because your offering is so candid and personal.
People are formed by their own experiences, information, up-bringing and culture. Persuasion is only appropriate for saving lives. (You really should evacuate NOW.) Which brings us to the subject of corruption. We are in danger and the power of persuasion may be all we have to save ourselves.
Your response is l ... o ... n ... g (as mine are at times). So I'll review it slowly and respond later. My quick glance suggests that you make a lot of interesting points.
I spent 40+ years as a management consultant and workplace trainer. My clients were individuals who were employed by the smallest to the largest organizations in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, and geographically in the most rural to the most urban settings across the United States.
And every issue you listed represents what most theories of conflict management and communication warn against abstractly, and in my personal experience, what happens concretely.
Okay, I admit to confirmation bias. Your list applies in many situations. I wish I had it years ago to share with my clients when I was still out there in workplaces teaching skills related to what I called "Making it easy to allow the other person say 'Yes'."
For the record, I am a libertarian, and a slightly tweaked version of your list applies to my fellow travelers as well. I often wince when I hear them trying to convince others about why the individual is important.
I made sure I saved your list. Although I am retired - I like to call it "reset" - I still find myself in situations where these ideas apply. Thank you!
Interesting article and helpful reminders for many people. My perspective: As a lawyer, my job is to persuade judges. I would follow all of these tips in doing that job. Judges, like the author, are highly educated people who spend a lot of time evaluating arguments. They are exhausted by lame cliches and want an intellectual approach with bespoke, measured, evidence-based points. And every good lawyer knows it is important to embrace (maybe even flatter) the decisionmaker. Here, Robert is saying, "I am the decisionmaker (voter), and if you want my vote, you should speak to me in a manner that could win my vote."
Notice that all the points end in "you won't persuade me [the college-educated author]." One question I have is whether Robert's advice would apply equally to people who do not have five degrees, including a PhD. Trump's rhetoric seems to suggest that his approach works reasonably well or well enough, anyway, with voters who do not have a college degree. I hope it is fair to say that Trump insults people constantly. Why did his approach work so well in 2024, when Robert is reminding us how important it is not to rub the decisionmaker the wrong way? Apparently, many people enjoy the insults and it's just a question of who is the target audience.
Donald Trump has said that immigrants are "vermin" who are "poisoning the blood" of the nation. He has referred to his political opponents as "the enemy within" who are a greater threat to the nation than any foreign adversary.
Mr. Graboyes wants us to understand that to call that fascist is to exhibit "a staggering ignorance of history and a disgraceful predilection for demagoguery".
So don't leave us hanging, Mr. Graboyes -- enlighten us! What's a better word for it?
Fascism was a particular flavor of corporatism. The notion that production ought to be managed through quasi-independent entities under heavy supervision by government. Fascism was an offshoot of socialism, which wanted the central government to control the means of production directly. (Mussolini had been a socialist before reconfiguring his beliefs.)
To put it in present-day terms, socialists wanted producers to be government agencies. Fascists wanted producers to be NGOs. Last Fall, I wrote, "Quick summary: Fascism was a variant of Socialism. Orthodox Socialism seeks to exert iron control over society and all its individuals via a centralized, corporate HQ model (like In-N-Out Burger); Fascism seeks to do the same thing using a franchise model (like McDonald’s). Neither Trump nor Biden nor Harris has the organizational vision or wherewithal to do either." (https://graboyes.substack.com/p/the-thrill-of-victimy-the-agony-of)
I don't defend Trump's rhetorical excesses and sloppiness. But your description is caricature. Trump's wife is an immigrant, as was his mother. Trump has created the "Gold Card" program to bring skilled immigrants to the U.S. His daughter Tiffany is married to the son of an Arab-American immigrant who helps Trump with Arab outreach. He has at various times sung the praises of legal immigrants and their accomplishments.
See, your comment is exactly what my essay was about. There are thousands of legitimate criticisms one can raise about Donald Trump. You chose to caricature and exaggerate. And that weakens your capacity to persuade.
In this particular case, you have also twisted my words in several ways. My comment about "a staggering ignorance of history and a disgraceful predilection for demagoguery" referred specifically to the gratuitous use of "Nazi"--not "Fascist." Had you read more carefully, you might have realized that. And you are implying that I somehow connected Fascism and immigration, which I did not.
You are correct, however, that I would consider it inappopriate to label xenophobia or xenomisia as "Fascism." The word "Fascism" has been misappropriated to mean "mean people" or "people I don't like." But it is, as I said before, a very specific political/economic philosophy.
1. It is a quirky definition of fascism to reduce it to corporatist dirigisme while airbrushing out the authoritarianism, blood and soil ethnonationalism, and territorial expansionism.
2. You say I chose to "caricature and exaggerate". I believe I was quoting. That might still qualify as caricature or exaggeration if the quotes were clipped so as to distort their meaning, or were atypical outliers. They are neither.
You have a point, of course, that the task of persuasion is different from the task of comprehending. But the latter must precede the former. Pretending that what is going on is "rhetorical excesses and sloppiness" rather than a frontal assault on the rule of law won't get us there.
1. It is a considerably quirkier definition of fascism to ignore the corporatist dirigisme and focus entirely upon the perceived authoritarianism, ethnonationalism, and expansionism. Why not call it "authoritarianism, ethnonationalism, and expansionism'/ then you don't run up against nitpickers like me who say, "You don't seem to understand the quintessence of fascism and simply use the term as a synonym for mean, rude people."
2. If you say Trump is anti-immigrant, you are caricaturing and exaggerating. I provided you with a series of pro-immigration quotes by Trump that you fail to mention. Why not say, "He's unduly harsh with undocumented immigrants who have been here for years, have worked hard, have paid taxes, and have harmed no one else." I realize that it doesn't fit well on a bumper sticker affixed to your EV (sorry, some anti-fascist incinerated your EV, so the bumper sticker burned up, too.)
I went to a couple AI platforms asked for lists of Republicans who have been labeled "fascist." There were links; I checked enough links to be confident that the lists are mostly accurate. The names included Tom Dewey, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Donald Trump, Pat Buchanan, J.D. Vance, Marjorie Taylor, Jim Jordan, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, Thomas Massie, Andy Biggs, George W. Bush, Mitch McConnell, Bob Dole, Mitt Romney, Mike Johnson, Kevin McCarthy, Steve Scalise, Tom Cotton, Lindsey Graham, Mike Lee, Marsha Blackburn, Rick Scott, Dan Crenshaw, Chip Roy, Greg Abbott, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Pence, Sean Hannity, Glenn Youngkin, Kristi Noem, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Brian Kemp, Byron Donalds.
You may be the exception to the rule, but in general, "fascist" is a label applied by lazy, angry, intellectually slovenly, half-educated, malcontent, incel-adjacent dilettantes. And if you use the term, it will be widely assumed that you fit that definition. And I, for one, will not waste my time investigating whether you are the prescient exception to the rule. Just choose words that aren't overused, and people like me will listen to you.
I'm a fan of treating everyone with dignity, but this list feels a bit like a "Motte and Bailey" where I'm being asked to treat you reasonably but then a lot of the examples are about meeting you where you're at instead of everyone meeting in the middle.
I think it's a bit odd for you to take so little responsibility for "your" own bad rhetoric while charging "me" for mine, given that neither of us (I assume) are the bad actors! It's not difficult to scold either Democrats or Republicans for being mean and rude and partisan right now, because there are a lot of mean and rude partisans in both parties.
Again, I do think many of the items on your list represent failures to communicate. I think many of the items on your list are also extraordinary special-cased requests for half of a conversation made up of millions to shape up.
First, I’m favorably inclined toward anyone who uses “Motte and Bailey”—one of my favorite metaphors, and of quite recent and identifiable vintage.
The reason I don’t take responsibility for “my” bad rhetoric is because I’m an observer, not an advocate. This essay originally included a sentence that seems to have been edited out along the line—that in all of 2024, not once in writing or in private did I offer anyone advice on how to vote in a Trump-Biden or Trump-Harris race.
If I use “bad” rhetoric it’s usually because I’m being deliberately provocative—and I’m fairly even-handed in the cheeky taunts department. (At my own Substack, I just posted three consecutive pieces railing against President Trump’s tariff policies; in one, I suggested that the likeliest explanation for those policies is that his economic advisors are using methamphetamine.)
Bottom line on this piece, however, is that I’m offering unsolicited advice to Democrats and not Republicans because it is Democrats who are losing badly and whose persuasive powers seem absent. Whatever you think of Trump and the Republicans, they have successfully persuaded millions of Democrats to switch sides and, in so doing, swept all the swing states and retained both houses of Congress. Not sure they’re open to advice on how to improve their powers of persuasion.
I love that you are trying, but the comments so far (universally some version of 'yeah, but Those People are stupid and evil, so we should force them, not persuade them') make it seem as if you are wasting your time. Still cheering you on.
Thanks! My essay suggests how the left might open up productive discourse with that thin but decisive sliver of the right. My unsolicited advice is similarly aimed at some hopefully decisive (but possibly thin) sliver of the left that is open to more civil standards of discourse.
It’s a list of how not to offend your Trump-positive relatives who can’t be persuaded of anything anyway, but dignifies a lot of positions that don’t deserve it, which is how Trump attracted low information swing voters. Civility has great virtue, but a lot of this just moves the window. That the left is awful does not make the right any less awful. If conduct is beyond the pale, it should be treated as beyond the pale regardless of the actor.
I agree with much of what you say. but, as I noted to another commenter, like them or not, Trump and Republicans have succeeded spectacularly at persuading millions to come their way, and Democrats have failed miserably over the past decade in that respect. That’s an observation on rhetoric, not on the content of the conversations. Notice that my essay said almost nothing about which policy positions might persuade me. As for “Trump-positive relatives,” I’d remind you that millions of them voted for Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and, in dwindling numbers, for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. I do argue—and have written—that Kamala Harris might well have been the least persuasive major-party nominee in modern history. And yet Democratic leaders (e.g., those who ran for party chair) blame racism and sexism rather than Harris’s lack of clarity on policy and her breathtaking rhetorical shortcomings. I suspect that a Trump-Shapiro or Trump-Whitmer or Trump-Klobuchar or Trump-Torres race would have had a very different dynamic.
“low information” is typical of elitist ( keep it up and Trump may we’ll get a another term)
“who can’t be persuaded of anything anyway” looks like that’s a reflexive remark.
“That the left is awful does not make the right any less awful.” I hear statements similar but said by children—“Well he did it too.” The reply by a parent to children used to be “Two wrong don’t make a right.”
Sad and this type of response will keep the Republicans in office forever.
The article is spot on in the art of persuasion. The author must be an Aristotelian.
In writing my response to Derek, I somehow missed the "low information voter" reference. My piece said "To sway voters to your side, you must ask yourself, sincerely and sympathetically, why a decent, well-informed voter would vote the other way." Assume your adversaries are "low-information" and you'll sink. Some awfully intelligent Democrats endorsed Trump.
Thanks for the "Aristotelian" comment. Nice compliment. My teaching method has been described as Socratic. :)
If all you do is recoil at the notion that some voters are not “well informed” and focus on whatever minute percentage of “awfully intelligent Democrats” endorsed Trump, I think you are focusing on a fairly minute and inconsequential group to draw conclusions about the groups that might make a difference.
Also, conflating “intelligence” with being informed is a revealing error. There are a lot of brilliant people who—believe it or not—do not share your interests in following politics closely. Intelligence is not synonym for wisdom, knowledge, or understanding. Another error is assuming that if someone has made their political beliefs a core component of his or her identity is persuadable, while ignoring that people who are persuadable will tend to be those who do not take political debate as personally.
Has there been a political movement (in the real world) that has succeeded with a coddling, “well, I hear you and respect that, but” approach to campaigning? If there actually was a cadre of well-informed, persuadable, non-ideologue voters who deliberatively chose Trump, the most boorish, confrontational major candidate in 100 years, but were put off by the shrillness of Democrats, I would love to see data on that. But it sounds like an invention.
Not uncommon in these circles to accuse anyone who criticizes ignorance (which, again, is NOT the same as stupidity) of “elitism.” If we have to pretend that most swing voters are extremely well-informed and deliberative, we are willfully ignoring the immense challenges of the current information environment.
If you believe well-informed and/or intelligent people constitute "a fairly minute and inconsequential" portion of the millions who have flipped from Democratic to Republican in the Trump era, your success at persuasion will be profoundly limited. (Might be a hit on TikTok, however.) And, I think the “well, I hear you and respect that, but” style of rhetoric has enjoyed substantial success in the past. In my lifetime, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan were certainly exemplars. To a lesser extent and to varying degrees, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama could exhibited that tendency.
If you want to talk more generally about informed swing voters, if anything the Democratic coalition of the hard left and the more technocratic center was stretched thin ideologically, dropping voters at either end, with a sprinkling of inflation losing the “mandate of heaven.” We will simply have to disagree that the reason any significant number of Democrats drifted to Trump has much to do with loud criticism of Trump or his most ardent supporters. I am not sure why those same voters would be perfectly happy with the smashmouth politics of Trump. The proposition has to be that a true choice in tone would make the difference for a significant number of voters. I emphatically disagree. I am not happy with that, but it seems to be the way of things today.
As between the policies and professed beliefs of the critical theory/identity politics-suffused left and their tone, I don’t think they are a handshake and a muffin away from getting alienated centrists back. The far left would have to fundamentally change core beliefs about America.
You’re turning up your nose at “TikTok”—I’m not a fan, but that is a key information space right now. Maybe Eisenhower-era discourse can mount a comeback in something of a reaction to/recoil from influencer America/ubiquitous AI slop, but I have trouble seeing that anytime soon.
This is an obnoxious response and you should be ashamed of it.
Maybe a.little helpful - mostly things not to say and arguments not to make to not close the ears and minds of the possibly persuadeable people. very little on how to articulate an alternative positive vision. But one low hanging fruit - there are many statements democrats attribute to Trump as evidence of unfitness (fine people on both sides; injecting bleach; etc) that republicans have looked into and decided he didn't say or are so out of context as to be bad faith. Ds can pick up these meme/event stories perfectly innocently and then be dismissed when they mention them. It would be good.to get these out of our vocabularies.
Your opening is spot-on correct! As I noted to the previous commenter, I deliberately focused this essay entirely upon rhetoric and completely omitted the harder job of crafting policies that sell. My purpose here was to lay out de minimis rules for starting the conversation. Once those have been adopted as S.O.P., the “alternative positive vision” emerges from civil discourse with the potentially persuadable segment of the electorate. But if you cancel them, insult them, belittle them, ignore them, etc., they’re never going to tell you which policies might persuade them. Great comments, thanks.
If you argue that white non-college voters are racist, homophobic, xenophobic I ask you to look at the attitudes reported in social surveys since 1996 where the white non college voter has become dramatically more liberal on those issues. And over the same period their vote for Republicans increased dramatically. Something else is going on.
Agreed
I'm a big sinner here--in a contrarian direction. And I'm taking this to heart.
Delighted! Feel free to share any examples or anecdotes that come of it.
A little late, but readers might be interested in this selection from my substance post
https://charles72f.substack.com/p/why-kamela-lost-in-nine-simple-charts
I’d like to finish with a point that is perhaps controversial and unoriginal but needs to be hammered home; it should now be crystal clear that Democrats are steadily alienating male voters – mostly white ones, but increasingly many who are nonwhite. This is dismissed as “misogyny” by many Democrats and there is certainly plenty of that. But when one gender and one race is singled out as the source of all that is evil and nothing that is good in a nation that they themselves were instrumental in building (to say the least), members of that group can become disheartened. No one wants to be a member of a party that considers him the enemy. I must say that I share this feeling (I have never oppressed anyone). For me, no amount of frustration with Democrats would ever make me vote for human beings as despicable as Donald Trump and his brownshirts. But clearly, tens of millions of men -- white, black and brown – overcame whatever distaste for Trump they might have had and did just that.
Thanks. Your piece is well worth reading and raising some good points. I'll disagree with a good bit of it, however.
-- I think some of your arguments about the economy are dubious--but one could certainly have a good debate with you on the points you raise.
-- In my view, the fundamental problem with Kamala Harris is that she was the single most incompetent, unimpressive presidential nominee in modern times. (https://graboyes.substack.com/p/kamala-harriss-oakland-problem)
-- She had served in four offices for over twenty years and yet one was hard-pressed to name any accomplishments or memorable statements (in a good way) during those years. She was a miserable presidential candidate in 2020; the press wanted desperately to anoint her as the female Obama, but she crumbled to dust in the first debate and was sent packing by donors and others. During her four years in the vice presidency, there was a steady stream of articles about Democrats trying to find ways to get rid of her. (Appointing her to the Supreme Court was a recurring fantasy.)
-- As Biden melted after his 2024 debate, Obama and others tried desperately (and briefly) to find another candidate. Her staff hid her from interviews because she is incapable of sustained, coherent conversation. In the "60 Minutes" interview, she failed to give coherent answers to even the the fluffiest, most obvious softball questions.
-- Had the Democrats nominated, say, Josh Shapiro, Mark Kelly, or Amy Klobuchar, I doubt that your charts would be relevant.
As for your comment above, I think you do your own persuasive powers great disservice with using a phrase like "human beings as despicable as Donald Trump and his brownshirts." "Brownshirts" is a synonym for "Nazi," and readers otherwise open to your arguments will reject you out-of-hand because of your use of that slur.
Thanks so much for your thoughtful response. A couple of points:
1. If my article in any way implied that Kamala Harris was a qualified candidate then I am deeply, deeply mortified. She was a pathetic joke. I thought the part where she would rather cavort with Beyonce than engage with voters was sufficient. My objective was not to assess her qualifications, but to consider the one issue that I am convinced turned the tide against her. The problems with the Democrats go far deeper than Kamala. I am not sure that the Democrats are capable of nominating a competent candidate. Maybe Klobuchar, who is a woman, or Buttigieg , who is gay. (He would be my choice. I live in PA and really like Shapiro, but I'm not sure a Jewish male has a chance. Maybe in three years things will be different.)
2. I am 99.9% confident in my economic analysis. I would be EXTREMELY grateful to see anything that might refute it or refine it.
3. I can see how you might object to my use of the term Brownshirts. But I think that Trump is every bit the danger to the US that Hitler was to Germany. Thankfully, Trump is much older and totally unfocused. But morally, they are the same. I think that if he could, Trump would establish concentration camps for his critics in a heartbeat. I am writing a piece now on his economic policies.
Question: Do you think Trump will succeed in preventing mid term elections in 2026?
I appreciate your polite, thoughtful response, Just what I hope for.
1) No, your essay didn't suggest that Kamala was competent, but you suggest that failure to present the economy was their biggest problem. Dancing with Beyonce was probably the most effective campaign tactic available to the profoundly untalented Kamala Harris.
2) If I had lots of time, I would go over your economic analysis with a fine-tooth comb and go point-by-point. I don't have the time. I'll just say that Trump's first term saw lots of positive growth, temporarily crushed by COVID, and returning impressively before he left office. I blame Biden's inflation on Biden (and an accommodating Fed) and believe his giant spending extravaganzas, energy shutdowns, EV mandates, etc. did large and lasting damage.
3) When I see concentration camps rising, I'll try to send a "You were right" note. Until that day, I think it's irresponsible invective. By way of constructive criticism, I'll say that, given that rhetoric on your part, I would never consider subscribing to your Substack, despite the fact that you clearly have interesting things to say.
A while back, I wrote: "Shortly before the 1948 Truman-Dewey election, a New York Times multi-tiered headline declared, in part: 'PRESIDENT LIKENS DEWEY TO HITLER AS FASCISTS’ TOOL … DICTATORSHIP STRESSED … TRUMAN SAYS GOP PERILS U.S. LIBERTY.' Dewey, of course, was a milquetoast, liberal Republican instrumental in elevating Dwight Eisenhower to the presidency four years later." Dewey, Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 43 were also Nazis whose brownshirt supporters were poised to establish concentration camps. It's a tiresome argument, and it invalidates anything else you have to say. Even if you believe it, it's best to keep it to yourself for purely pragmatic reasons.
This post is delightful. Mr. Graboyes neatly and amusingly captures many of the Democrats’ worst habits of thought and communication.
A red thread running through these bad Democratic Party habits is an elitism and lack of respect for voters so automatic and complacent that they can’t see their elitism or recognize that the people deserve respect.
Not that Republican elites have any greater respect for the people. But at least they know they should pretend to not believe the voters are children.
How can we explain this difference between the parties - the difference between feigning respect and not even seeing that respect should at least be feigned?
I think it flows from the asymmetric impact of campaign fundraising on the two parties. As the campaign spending arms race accelerated from the 1980s on, Democrats were compelled to abandon their identity and core principles in a death of a thousand cuts.
Once the party of civil rights, organized labor, and economic fairness, the Democrats gradually morphed into Republican Lite, their transformation complete no later than Clinton’s neoliberal trade policy and the declared end of big government.
Since then the party stands for little more than “a slightly less bad result than you get from the GOP.”
Their chief compensation for this loss of purpose has been affirming their imagined moral and intellectual superiority. The voters’ lack of enthusiasm for them is most easily rationalized away as the voters’ fault. Standing only for technocracy rather than a compelling moral vision, they pin their hopes on voters being “smart” and “enlightened” like themselves.
The money chase damaged the GOP just as badly, but in different ways - for more please visit my Substack and website.
www.savedemocracyinamerica.org
"Not that Republican elites have any greater respect for the people. But at least they know they should pretend to not believe the voters are children."
I think your characterization is quite correct. My personal acquaintances are not necessarily a representative sample of the American population. But I do note empirical regularities within those acquaintances. The less charitable Democrats view Republican voters as unintelligent, evil, misinformed, uneducated, inattentive, etc. The less charitable Republicans view Democratic voters as intelligent, determined, assholes. Both views are uncharitable, but one is condescending and the other merely disdainful. If someone calls me an asshole, I might want to argue with them. If someone calls me unintelligent, I have no use for them.
Thank you, Robert! Thats a wonderfully concise characterization of how the two parties disrespect the voters, but in different ways.
Political scientists who opine on polarization often present it as driven by the GOP, mainly or even exclusively. Exhibit A is Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die. As best I recall, Mann and Ornstein, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, takes a similar stance.
If you’re talking only about the obstructionist behavior of Congressional Republicans there’s merit to that argument.
But looking at how the parties stereotype and perceive their opponents’ voters, what Democrats do is more provocative, indeed positively enraging, because they are dismissive.
Like you, when someone calls me an asshole I may not like it, but at least they’re engaging with me. When someone thinks my ideas are unworthy of their notice or engagement, I become homicidally angry. (Just kidding! 🤣)
I’ll be in touch.
I am in general agreement with every point except for this one:
"If you psychoanalyze your adversaries, you won’t persuade me."
When a major public figure such as a President (be it Trump or Biden) displays obvious signs of a mental impairment, it's fair game to talk about that. Maybe, as you indicate, such points are unlikely to substantially influence an average person's opinion. But they are still very much a factor to seriously consider.
I'll keep that point in, but (at least in this comment) add an asterisk that the case of Joe Biden adds a layer of complication. If I were writing a longer piece on this point (and I might do that at some point), I might say that the problem lies with the frequency with which the accusation are issued, the evenhandedness with which they are issued, and their accuracy in hindsight. The boy-who-cried-wolf problem. Right now, Democrats are aiming this particular tic at one of their own--John Fetterman. In 2022, when he was clearly, obviously, and seriously disabled by his stroke, any mention of that by Republicans was viciously attacked as unethical, ableist, incorrect, etc. Today, when Fetterman seems fully functional--and certainly is able to carry his own in discourse--he is being attacked by fellow Democrats as disabled. To me, it's clear that the reason is that he is regularly apostate on various issues--especially Israel vs Hamas. At the same time, until the roof caved in, Democrats were viciously attacking anyone who mentioned the obvious about Biden's mental state.
So I'm happy to concede that for me, including "stop psychoanalyzing" in my list is not a general, eternal, absolutist principle. It is me saying, "Dear Democrats, at least since my long-ago childhood, you have deigned to psychoanalyze your adversaries with great regularity, you have often been wildly inaccurate in your pronouncements, and you have been breathtakingly uneven in your use of this technique. Given this sordid history, you ought to remove that arrow from your quiver till the stain of your prior excesses has faded."
In sum, you raise a fine objection, but with these qualifications, I'll defend my inclusion of this point. Thanks.
Thank you for your timely thought provoking article.it’s been a struggle to understand what motivates some of my neighbors to vote for Trump three times. I would not dare to try to persuade them. They reject your 12 points.
I hope we can a government for all the people and by all the people one day. I think most people when confronted with reality will make the right decisions. (Aye, there’s the rub. Informed. Plato nailed that one.) But you offer yourself with personal guidelines and examples for persuasion and address the reader directly with your rules of engagement. They are good rules. Your examples weren’t the best to make your point nevertheless Miss Manners approves.
For the sake of discussion:
In defense of the politicians (#1), they are not there to persuade but to rally and since the country is so large and diverse there is room for all types from Shumer’s embarrassing attempts to shout to Sander’s actual shouting. AOC doesn’t shout. That’s just her little girl voice Explaining.
I am trying(#2) but I do not know what a “legitimate” point is. It’s subjective. We could get down to it and draw up a chart and list all the ways the Jan 6th attempt to overturn an election is equivalent to the protests around the justices residences and ways they were different. It would need to be an honest effort to understand one another’s viewpoint. Might be tedious but worth doing. Really dig in. Lay it out. Do these two events actually carry the same weight? We need a scale and a deep discussion.
(#3) When people act like that they are not trying to persuade. They are bullies. They’ve written you off as hopeless. Sometimes it’s ignorance. Sometimes just mean. There are alarming parallels to the 1930s-40s and to the 1850s-60s. We Americans have a lot of unsettled business.
(#4) Hypocrisy is a real turn-off. Absolutely. The reaction to Brian Thompson’s murder was shocking and terrible. Applying empathy: It was a spontaneous cry of outrage from all the people who have struggled with and lost loved ones to our profitable health care system. At the very best we live with constant anxiety. It was a howl of pain that drowned out an actual murder. I can’t imagine what his family must still be going through. What if that were my father? Or yours? MLK Jr was right, but practicing nonviolence is hard, especially when violence has been done to you. It got worse when our leaders supported it. I literally shrank in shame for some of them. I condemn the violence and understand it. We failed on that one for sure. Where is Gandhi when we need him? Never mind that. Pakistan and India are at it again.
(#5) Pop-psychology is a racket. Sorry. I just broke a rule. It’s just my opinion and I offer no proofs, but they could be found. But when people tell me who they are I believe them. I don’t need Mary Trump to elaborate.
(#6) I can’t separate everyday life from political life. It’s not academic. My survival depends on my union, a pension, Medicare and many public funded services from the USForest Service to FEMA to literally everything from the library to the Pentagon. It’s our government. But it would be a bore to remind people of that. They know.
(#7)Injecting bleach seems so long ago. We’ve moved on to Habeus Corpus and ghouls like Stephen Miller.
Memes are usually shallow platitudes (#8) though Shakespeare made some pretty good ones and oligarchy is really a thing. There’s a lot of name-calling going on from Both Sides, or so I hear. I don’t tweet, etc.
(#9) I agree. Cherry picking is another failed tactic of persuasion.
(#10) Empathy is absolutely essential and takes courage to go where others fear to tread. I have an empathy story to share. My late husband was a beautiful and extreme embodiment of empathy. Even in the midst of bloody battle during WW2 on Guadalcanal he mourned all the dead alike, Japanese included. He wept over them all. He could not talk about it without tears. Empathy can be painful but it is what makes us a human form of animal.
I am surprised at Haidt (#11) and want to learn more about that experiment. I have listened with astonishment to a Trump voters tell me, a liberal, what liberals are. I think the outcome of the experiment would depend a lot on education.
Note to your note: My conservative Uncle Henry wasn’t disinvited to Thanksgiving because of his political opinions but because he broke all 12 of your suggestions and was so fierce no one dared to speak. I suspect there are a lot of Uncle Henry’s out there. They’d be welcome if they behaved.
.
I am not a nominee (#12) and have never successfully persuaded anyone to vote a particular way. I don’t wrestle with pigs either. Missionaries should have enough respect to leave people alone. A candidate must persuade. That’s their job.
I believe in the greater good of humanity. Even now. We have a power imbalance and are in danger of tipping over. Money is power. So are information, education, access.
This is so interesting. I know many Republicans but no Trump voters. Together we are constantly trying to understand them and we talk about it a lot. I expect I am as mistaken about them as they are about me. We come from such different cultures even while speaking the same language.
Your essay is thought provoking and the advice is sound.
People are persuaded by their own experiences, information, up-bringing and culture. Persuasion is only appropriate for saving lives. (You really should evacuate NOW.) Which brings us to the subject of corruption. We are in danger and the power of persuasion may be all we have to save ourselves.
I wish I were better at it.
Your advice is excellent.
Sincerely
Mary Bardmess
I’ve mentioned somewhere that not once in 2024 did I try to persuade a soul how to vote (or not vote) in a Trump-Biden or Trump-Harris contest. Better to mow the lawn or vacuum the rugs—activities where there’s a chance of positive results.
The Republic that Plato envisioned was one of enlightened despots. He thought that one’s educational level governed how much power they ought to have in the republic. Long ago, a snobbish colleague of mine said that in an ideal society, the number of votes an individual had would depend on his level of education. I said that I agreed but wasn’t sure that PhDs would agree to have zero votes.
We’ll never have “a government for all the people and by all the people” for the simple reason that we’ll never all agree what that even means. Which is why I lean toward the minimalist in terms of what I’d like the government to do.
You said “politicians (#1 … are not there to persuade but to rally.” Many view it that way, but I disagree. We’ve had a number of president who were magnificent persuaders.
You said “I am trying(#2) but I do not know what a ‘legitimate’ point is. It’s subjective.” Precisely! In a recent piece (https://graboyes.substack.com/p/of-trumpets-and-trump) I wrote that the avalanche of gratuitous Trump-related sequiturs that people include in emails and social media posts: “are never offered as hypotheses, opinions, or topics for discussion. Rather, they are always stated as Euclidean postulates—self-evident Truths that we surely agree upon and which warrant no discussion.”
(#4) Regarding Luigi Mangione. People lose loved ones in every healthcare system, public or private. It is inevitable. We do remarkably well here with ours. As for Mangione’s “manifesto,” it was a dimwitted, ill-informed, badly written parroting of demagogic social media hot takes.
(#6) “I can’t separate everyday life from political life.” I can. And do. I avoid politics at family get-togethers and other social occasions where it would cause rancor. I don’t throw little random political references into my emails. I don’t walk outside and start complaining about Joe Biden to left-leaning neighbors who like him.
If you’re Shakespeare, by all means go for the memes. 😊
Beautiful story about sentiments from your late husband. And lovely that you can carry that memory.
I agree that more details on Haidt’s on argument would be interesting. Intuitively, I believe what he says. In the present era, a conservative student at a university must navigate intolerant left-wing professors, whereas the opposite is rarely true. Wasn’t always that way.
I would disinvite the conservative uncle you describe, as well, or at least make clear that political discussion would not be tolerated.
If you know zero Trump voters, I can probably narrow down the geography of where you live to a relatively small portion of US territory. I’ll guess Coastal California or the Acela Corridor. 😊
Thanks for the fine comments.
Dear Professor
Thank you for your thought provoking article. It is timely. It’s been a struggle to understand what motivates some of my neighbors to vote for Trump three times. I would not dare to try to persuade them though. I just want to know why.
I hope we can achieve a democracy one day. I think most people when confronted with reality will make the right decisions. (Aye, there’s the rub. Informed. Plato nailed that one.) But you offer yourself and personal guidelines and examples for persuasion and address the reader directly with your rules of engagement. They are good rules. Your examples weren’t the best to make your point nevertheless Miss Manners approves.
For the sake of discussion:
In defense of the politicians (#1), they are not there to persuade but to rally and since the country is so large and diverse there is room for all types from Shumer’s embarrassing attempts at shouting to Sander’s actual shouting. AOC doesn’t shout. That’s just her little girl voice Explaining.
I am trying(#2) but I do not know what a “legitimate” point is. It’s your point. Or my point. It’s subjective. QAnon and I disagree on “legitimate”. Or we could get down to it and draw up a chart and list all the ways the Jan 6th attempt to overturn an election is equivalent to the protests around the justices residences and ways they were different. It would need to be an honest effort to understand one another’s viewpoint. Might be tedious but worth doing. Really dig in. Lay it out. Do these two events actually carry the same weight?
(#3) When people act like that they are not trying to persuade. They are bullies. They’ve written you off as hopeless. Sometimes it’s ignorant. Sometimes just mean. History doesn’t repeat itself, but humans do. There are alarming parallels to the 1930s-40s and to the 1850s-60s. We Americans have a lot of unsettled business.
(#4) Hypocrisy is a real turn-off. Absolutely. The reaction to Brian Thompson’s murder was shocking and terrible. Applying empathy: It was a spontaneous cry of outrage from all the people who have struggled with and lost loved ones to our profitable health care system. It was a howl of pain that drowned out an actual murder. I can’t imagine what his family must still be going through. What if that were my father? Or yours? MLK Jr was right, but practicing nonviolence is hard, especially when violence has been done to you. It got worse when our leaders supported it. I literally shrank in shame for some of them. I condemn the violence and understand it. We failed on that one for sure. Where is Gandhi when we need him? MLK Jr?Never mind that. Pakistan and India are at it again and Americans are waging war on the civil rights movement.
(#5) Pop-psychology is a racket. Sorry. I just broke a rule. It’s just my opinion and i offer no proofs. But when people tell me who they are I believe them. I don’t need Mary Trump to elaborate and if i want a therapist I'll pay for one.
(#6) I can’t separate everyday life from political life. It’s not academic. My survival depends on my union, a pension, Medicare and many public funded services from the USForest Service to FEMA to literally everything from the library to the Pentagon. It’s our government. But it would be a bore to remind people of that. They know.
(#7)Injecting bleach seems so long ago. We’ve moved on to Habeus Corpus and ghouls like Stephen Miller.
Memes are usually shallow platitudes (#8) though Shakespeare made some pretty good ones and oligarchy is really a thing.
(#9) True. Cherry picking is another failed tactic of persuasion.
(#10) Empathy is absolutely essential and takes courage to go where others fear to tread. I have an empathy story to share. My late husband was a beautiful and extreme embodiment of empathy. Even in the midst of bloody battle during WW2 on Guadalcanal he mourned all the dead alike, Japanese included. He wept over them all. He could not talk about it without tears. Empathy can be painful but it is what makes us a human form of animal.
I am surprised at Haidt (#11) and want to learn more about that experiment. I have listened with astonishment to Trump voters tell me, a liberal, what liberals are. I think the outcome of the experiment would depend a lot on education.
Note to your note: My conservative Uncle Henry wasn’t disinvited to Thanksgiving because of his political opinions but because he broke all 12 of your suggestions and was so fierce no one dared to speak.
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I am not a nominee (#12) because I have never successfully persuaded anyone to vote a particular way. I don’t wrestle with pigs either for the same reason. I would lose.
I believe in the greater good of humanity. Even now. We have a power imbalance and are in danger of tipping over. Money is power. So are information, education, access. The truth could set us free.
This is so interesting. I know many Republicans but no Trump voters. Together we are constantly trying to understand them and we talk about it a lot. I expect I am as mistaken about them as they are about me. We come from such different cultures even while speaking the same language.
Your essay is thought provoking and the advice is sound. I am responding at length because your offering is so candid and personal.
People are formed by their own experiences, information, up-bringing and culture. Persuasion is only appropriate for saving lives. (You really should evacuate NOW.) Which brings us to the subject of corruption. We are in danger and the power of persuasion may be all we have to save ourselves.
I wish I were better at it.
Your advice is excellent.
Sincerely
Mary Bardmess
Your response is l ... o ... n ... g (as mine are at times). So I'll review it slowly and respond later. My quick glance suggests that you make a lot of interesting points.
I spent 40+ years as a management consultant and workplace trainer. My clients were individuals who were employed by the smallest to the largest organizations in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, and geographically in the most rural to the most urban settings across the United States.
And every issue you listed represents what most theories of conflict management and communication warn against abstractly, and in my personal experience, what happens concretely.
Okay, I admit to confirmation bias. Your list applies in many situations. I wish I had it years ago to share with my clients when I was still out there in workplaces teaching skills related to what I called "Making it easy to allow the other person say 'Yes'."
For the record, I am a libertarian, and a slightly tweaked version of your list applies to my fellow travelers as well. I often wince when I hear them trying to convince others about why the individual is important.
Thank you.
Thanks! Your comment makes my day.
I made sure I saved your list. Although I am retired - I like to call it "reset" - I still find myself in situations where these ideas apply. Thank you!
Interesting article and helpful reminders for many people. My perspective: As a lawyer, my job is to persuade judges. I would follow all of these tips in doing that job. Judges, like the author, are highly educated people who spend a lot of time evaluating arguments. They are exhausted by lame cliches and want an intellectual approach with bespoke, measured, evidence-based points. And every good lawyer knows it is important to embrace (maybe even flatter) the decisionmaker. Here, Robert is saying, "I am the decisionmaker (voter), and if you want my vote, you should speak to me in a manner that could win my vote."
Notice that all the points end in "you won't persuade me [the college-educated author]." One question I have is whether Robert's advice would apply equally to people who do not have five degrees, including a PhD. Trump's rhetoric seems to suggest that his approach works reasonably well or well enough, anyway, with voters who do not have a college degree. I hope it is fair to say that Trump insults people constantly. Why did his approach work so well in 2024, when Robert is reminding us how important it is not to rub the decisionmaker the wrong way? Apparently, many people enjoy the insults and it's just a question of who is the target audience.
Donald Trump has said that immigrants are "vermin" who are "poisoning the blood" of the nation. He has referred to his political opponents as "the enemy within" who are a greater threat to the nation than any foreign adversary.
Mr. Graboyes wants us to understand that to call that fascist is to exhibit "a staggering ignorance of history and a disgraceful predilection for demagoguery".
So don't leave us hanging, Mr. Graboyes -- enlighten us! What's a better word for it?
Fascism was a particular flavor of corporatism. The notion that production ought to be managed through quasi-independent entities under heavy supervision by government. Fascism was an offshoot of socialism, which wanted the central government to control the means of production directly. (Mussolini had been a socialist before reconfiguring his beliefs.)
To put it in present-day terms, socialists wanted producers to be government agencies. Fascists wanted producers to be NGOs. Last Fall, I wrote, "Quick summary: Fascism was a variant of Socialism. Orthodox Socialism seeks to exert iron control over society and all its individuals via a centralized, corporate HQ model (like In-N-Out Burger); Fascism seeks to do the same thing using a franchise model (like McDonald’s). Neither Trump nor Biden nor Harris has the organizational vision or wherewithal to do either." (https://graboyes.substack.com/p/the-thrill-of-victimy-the-agony-of)
I don't defend Trump's rhetorical excesses and sloppiness. But your description is caricature. Trump's wife is an immigrant, as was his mother. Trump has created the "Gold Card" program to bring skilled immigrants to the U.S. His daughter Tiffany is married to the son of an Arab-American immigrant who helps Trump with Arab outreach. He has at various times sung the praises of legal immigrants and their accomplishments.
-- "Trump ad-libs that he wants legal immigrants in ‘the largest numbers ever’" https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/05/trump-state-of-the-union-legal-immigration-1148629
-- "If adopted, our plan will transform America’s immigration system into the pride of our nation and the envy of the modern world. Our proposal builds upon our nation’s rich history of immigration, while strengthening the bonds of citizenship that bind us together as a national family." https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-modernizing-immigration-system-stronger-america/
-- "“On the other hand, many fabulous people come in from Mexico and our country is better for it. But these people are here legally, and are severely hurt by those coming in illegally.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/07/06/donald-trumps-lengthy-and-curious-defense-of-his-immigrant-comments-annotated/
-- "“As I’ve said before, we will resolve the DACA issue with heart and compassion – but through the lawful Democratic process.”" https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/statement-president-donald-j-trump-7/
See, your comment is exactly what my essay was about. There are thousands of legitimate criticisms one can raise about Donald Trump. You chose to caricature and exaggerate. And that weakens your capacity to persuade.
In this particular case, you have also twisted my words in several ways. My comment about "a staggering ignorance of history and a disgraceful predilection for demagoguery" referred specifically to the gratuitous use of "Nazi"--not "Fascist." Had you read more carefully, you might have realized that. And you are implying that I somehow connected Fascism and immigration, which I did not.
You are correct, however, that I would consider it inappopriate to label xenophobia or xenomisia as "Fascism." The word "Fascism" has been misappropriated to mean "mean people" or "people I don't like." But it is, as I said before, a very specific political/economic philosophy.
Two quick responses:
1. It is a quirky definition of fascism to reduce it to corporatist dirigisme while airbrushing out the authoritarianism, blood and soil ethnonationalism, and territorial expansionism.
2. You say I chose to "caricature and exaggerate". I believe I was quoting. That might still qualify as caricature or exaggeration if the quotes were clipped so as to distort their meaning, or were atypical outliers. They are neither.
You have a point, of course, that the task of persuasion is different from the task of comprehending. But the latter must precede the former. Pretending that what is going on is "rhetorical excesses and sloppiness" rather than a frontal assault on the rule of law won't get us there.
1. It is a considerably quirkier definition of fascism to ignore the corporatist dirigisme and focus entirely upon the perceived authoritarianism, ethnonationalism, and expansionism. Why not call it "authoritarianism, ethnonationalism, and expansionism'/ then you don't run up against nitpickers like me who say, "You don't seem to understand the quintessence of fascism and simply use the term as a synonym for mean, rude people."
2. If you say Trump is anti-immigrant, you are caricaturing and exaggerating. I provided you with a series of pro-immigration quotes by Trump that you fail to mention. Why not say, "He's unduly harsh with undocumented immigrants who have been here for years, have worked hard, have paid taxes, and have harmed no one else." I realize that it doesn't fit well on a bumper sticker affixed to your EV (sorry, some anti-fascist incinerated your EV, so the bumper sticker burned up, too.)
I went to a couple AI platforms asked for lists of Republicans who have been labeled "fascist." There were links; I checked enough links to be confident that the lists are mostly accurate. The names included Tom Dewey, Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Donald Trump, Pat Buchanan, J.D. Vance, Marjorie Taylor, Jim Jordan, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, Thomas Massie, Andy Biggs, George W. Bush, Mitch McConnell, Bob Dole, Mitt Romney, Mike Johnson, Kevin McCarthy, Steve Scalise, Tom Cotton, Lindsey Graham, Mike Lee, Marsha Blackburn, Rick Scott, Dan Crenshaw, Chip Roy, Greg Abbott, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Pence, Sean Hannity, Glenn Youngkin, Kristi Noem, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Brian Kemp, Byron Donalds.
You may be the exception to the rule, but in general, "fascist" is a label applied by lazy, angry, intellectually slovenly, half-educated, malcontent, incel-adjacent dilettantes. And if you use the term, it will be widely assumed that you fit that definition. And I, for one, will not waste my time investigating whether you are the prescient exception to the rule. Just choose words that aren't overused, and people like me will listen to you.
What a crock of hair splitting
Exhibit A ↑