Don’t let the title fool you.
I’m not saying that all Trump supporters are indelibly wedded to their current hero, incapable of changing their minds or walking away from him or the ideology to which he has given voice.
After all, I am friends with several people who were once overt white supremacists, even Neo-Nazis, but who have turned their lives around and now fight against racism as hard as they once fought for it.
And if white power skinheads can move from the sickness of Nazism to a genuine belief in pluralism, surely MAGA folks can break free from the political personality cult in which they find themselves.
However — and this is the caveat that informs the title above — spending any significant time trying to be the source of their conversion is a waste of energy.
As for those friends of mine who used to throw up Heil Hitler salutes and now are working to undo the damage they caused? They’ll be the first to tell you that what changed them wasn’t some fact-based dialogue with a liberal.
Instead, it was usually a combination of some act of kindness from someone in one of the groups they hated — which they had no right to demand or expect — and specific life events, like having a child and worrying about the legacy they were building for their offspring, being arrested, or coming to see how the violence they preached and practiced was coming back on them.
In no instance was it due to a well-crafted essay, speech, online post, or deep conversation over a couple of beers.
They’ll also be the first to tell you that helping others get out of the movement — which all of them work to do — isn’t scalable in the long run.
Oh sure, they’ll try and do it, partly out of a sense of obligation to bring other people out of that life, much as former gang members sometimes do. But as for defeating the larger white supremacist movement? That, they would all agree, will take more than one-on-one conversion efforts.
It takes policy, and creating a pro-democracy movement whose narrative is more compelling than the one offered by racial hatred.
…
With MAGA folks, the same is true.
Might you be able to flip your Trumpy uncle at Thanksgiving? Maybe.
And you can surely deploy techniques that turn down the temperature at the holiday table, allowing for a respectful conversation and perhaps some personal growth for all involved.
But if that’s how progressives decide to meet the moment, with attempts to convert the Trumpian heathen, we’re going to be mightily frustrated.
Especially if we’re trying to do it with facts, data, or evidence that we think will finally open their eyes to his corruption, racism, or authoritarian tendencies.
Political conversion doesn’t work that way.
Research has found that when people are deeply invested in a political stance — and the MAGAverse is — presenting counter-evidence to their existing beliefs not only fails to persuade; it makes them double down.
They experience it as a threat to their identity.
And this is especially true when the cause to which they have allegiance is being criticized as immoral or un-American, as authoritarianism is.
In that case, the psychological desire to deny the evidence presented is particularly strong.
No one wants to admit that they fell for a would-be dictator or racist. To do so is to accept that one might also be a fascist, bigot, or at the very least, stupid.
No wonder it’s hard to get people to turn against extremist candidates once they’ve invested their votes in them.
What defeating David Duke in Louisiana can teach us about defeating Trump and Trumpism
This is why David Duke retained 93 percent of his voters from his 1990 U.S. Senate run to the 1991 Louisiana Gubernatorial race. Once everyone had seen the evidence that Duke was a Nazi (which, by the second race, everyone had), expecting his prior voters to turn on him meant expecting people to admit they had voted for a Nazi.
Unless you’re a Nazi, you won’t be too excited about acknowledging that.
So how did we beat Duke that second time? (I say we because I was deeply involved in the anti-Duke effort).
Simple. We focused less on converting his committed supporters and more on two things: mobilizing those opposed to his racism and inoculating those susceptible to it.
Mobilization
When it comes to politics, we often spend more time trying to flip our adversaries than mobilizing our own side.
In 1990, we made that mistake when David Duke ran for the U.S. Senate.
We overpaid a bunch of high-priced consultants (looking at you, Mark Penn) to do focus groups with folks predisposed to vote for Duke.
And then, surprise, surprise, they concluded that telling these folks Duke was a Nazi would be less effective than telling them he had paid his taxes late or dodged the draft in Vietnam.
Of course, they concluded that.
If you were already leaning towards Duke, to admit he was a Nazi would require you to accept that you were actually thinking about voting for a Nazi!
But to admit he cheated on his taxes or dodged the draft would be safer as a reason for jumping off the Duke train. It was new information. And it would require less self-blame for having almost fallen for him.
Meanwhile, the consultants didn’t think about what kind of message mixing anti-racism with random attacks on Duke’s taxes and military non-service would send to the larger electorate, including more progressive-minded people and Black voters.
They took for granted that these folks would flock to vote against Duke, but they didn’t. The message that Duke was a Nazi was sublimated and muddled by other messages, causing less urgency to be felt even among voters who didn’t like Duke. So many stayed home, and Duke ended up with 44 percent of the vote.
By the Governor’s race in 1991, we had junked the consultants and learned to trust our own instincts.
We focused exclusively on Duke’s ongoing extremism and ties to Nazism.
We cut commercials with people across the political spectrum intoning that Louisiana was better than this, and we had to stand up for multicultural and pluralistic democracy on principle.
The result? Turnout was through the roof. Sure, Duke kept 93 percent of his original voters. He even gained votes, ultimately receiving 75,000 more than in the Senate race.
But Black turnout surged, as did white liberal and center-left turnout. In the end, even with those extra 75,000 votes, Duke’s share of the overall vote fell from 44 percent to 39.
Inoculation
Next, we focused on inoculation. We knew that we wouldn’t be able to shift large numbers of voters’ thinking on some of the subjects Duke made centerpieces of his campaign, like welfare or affirmative action.
Instead of responding to his attacks on these things with simple fact-based rebuttals, we stressed how Duke used the issues as dog whistles to gain votes.
Regardless of how a voter might feel about cash aid to the poor or affirmative action in state contracting, we explained that these things were not the reason for the state’s economic problems or their personal ones.
Duke, we explained, was scapegoating Black people for problems they hadn’t created rather than offering actual plans for fixing the fundamental problems of working people, white, Black, and otherwise.
And, we noted, once you go down the road of racial scapegoating, it ultimately leads to extremism and white supremacy — the place Duke already resided and where he hoped they would join him.
By giving undecided voters and soft partisans an option to stand for democracy and against extremism without having to necessarily change their conservative views on certain subjects, we hoped to — and apparently did — inoculate them against the siren song of Duke.
…
The same strategies can work to defeat Trumpism.
Make the effort less about flipping MAGA folks and more about crafting a message that can appeal to progressives, undecideds, and soft partisans too.
That’s not likely to be a message about specific public policy options.
Go too far left on policy, and you mobilize your base but lose other key voters.
Go too far to the center, and you mobilize the others but tamp down turnout with the base.
But one message might work across all these groups: a message about the importance of defending democracy from those who have made clear their desire to corrupt or overturn it.
It’s a message about the importance of standing up to the bullies who seek to overturn elections, ban books, control women’s health decisions, attack government buildings, agencies, and lawmakers, and threaten violence (or even civil war) when they don’t get their way.
It’s about standing up for the continuation of the American project, however flawed and incomplete.
That’s progressive enough for the left but unifying enough for many undecideds and soft partisans.
If some MAGA folks jump ship when exposed to that message, so be it.
Some might.
But they can’t be the focus.
We simply don’t have the time to try and steal parishioners from the church of Trump and sit them in the pews of our own tabernacle.
We need to be taking communion, so to speak, with the ones already here.
Or at least the ones who occasionally walk by and look in the windows.
—
This post was previously published on timjwise.medium.com
***
You Might Also Like These From The Good Men Project
—
Photo credit: Gage Skidmore on Flickr under CC License