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The fiendish thing about the iron cage is that the harder you try to escape, the harder that gets. The cage, after all, is the way you think. So the more you try to think your way out, the more surely you lock yourself in.
A case in point: The Democratic Party recently paid $20 million to study how to talk to men.
When I heard about that, my first thought was “It’s as if they see them as members of a strange, distant culture.”
And apparently they do, according to this reporting in the New York Times:
Democratic donors and strategists have been gathering at luxury hotels to discuss how to win back working-class voters, commissioning new projects that can read like anthropological studies of people from faraway places.
The prospectus for one new $20 million effort, obtained by The Times, aims to reverse the erosion of Democratic support among young men, especially online. It is code-named SAM — short for “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan” — and promises investment to “study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces.”
If Democrats are alienated from men, it might just be because they see them as objects of study, as opposed to human beings they actually know. If you know someone, you probably don’t need to study their “syntax, language, and content“ or learn about these other “spaces“ they inhabit.
And it’s not just men who are becoming strangers to the Democratic Party. It’s black, Latino, Asian, and female voters too. Many are members of the party’s former, blue collar base. In recent decades the non-college educated share of the Democratic vote has shrunk from 55 to 25 percent.
“We are losing support in vast swaths of the country, in rural America, in the Midwest, the places where I’m from,” says Democratic Colorado Representative Jason Crow.
“People that I grew up with who now support Donald Trump, who used to be Democrats. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t have the support of these folks, other than we have pushed, in so many ways, these people away from our party.”
It is possible that the $20 million spent on studying how men talk will prove to have been worth every penny.
But I doubt it. Studying the problem is the problem. Studying it more makes it worse.
Today’s highly educated, stuck-in-their-heads Democrats study politics instead of practicing it. They analyze voters instead of connecting with them.
They commission polls, conduct focus groups, convene seminars, and yes, pay for an expensive research project called SAM, presumably because that sounds like a regular guy kind of name.
But who knows? Not us, until we do the research.
The results will join petabytes of data Democrats have already collected at huge cost — that’s part of what’s being paid for by that endless flood of fundraising texts you’re getting. They will mine their data, once more, to try to devise a message that surely, this time, will work.
But again, I doubt it. Yes, if you want to talk to people, especially if you want to persuade them of something, it’s a good idea to learn about them first. That’s why advertisers invest in market research. But effective advertisers know that data alone can’t tell you how to talk to people: how to reach and move them. That’s why the best advertisers also invest in the best creative talent they can find.
But so many Democratic campaigns seem to have been designed by the research department, not the creative department: all data all the time, one list of policy points after another, addressed not to people, but to demographics — “black voters,“ “Latino voters,” “LGBTQ voters,“ etc., etc., etc.
And even if they do hire more and better creatives, let’s remember: most people don’t like advertising, no matter how good it is. Democrats are failing to meet a standard they need to exceed.
When voters listen to a candidate, they want to at least believe they’re hearing more than a marketing message. But Democratic Party leaders will announce each new message, and even explain how they and their consultants came up with it, thereby drawing maximum attention to how artificial it is.
I think they can’t help themselves. A literal-minded focus on the mechanics of everything is typical of life in the iron cage, where only the mechanics are real.
Like the mechanics of syntax, language, and content, instead of actual connection with living, breathing humans.
Let’s say I become an expert in the syntax, language, and content used by the French. That would allow me to speak with French people. But could I really connect with them, the way I might if I had actually been living among them? Could I win a French election?
After I failed at that, let’s say I tried harder, say by learning some of the latest French slang and wearing new French styles. When you encounter foreign visitors to your country doing that, how often does it fool you?
How well has this approach been working for Democratic candidates, bouncing along in a tank, wearing brand new hunting clothes, or droppin’ their g’s in a blue-collar bar?
James Carville famously said, “It’s the economy, stupid.” And the economy does matter, a lot. But Bill Clinton didn’t win because he was an economist. His gift wasn’t that he understood how the economy worked, although he certainly did. His gift was that he understood how the economy felt.
Lots of smart Democrats get the first part. Too many seem oblivious to the second part.
It’s the alienation, stupid.
But how do you get unalienated? How do you escape your own mind?
Not by thinking the same old way, but harder. You can learn to think in a different way.
A good place to start is with the Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. It’s based on decades of experiments he conducted with his late research partner Amos Tversky.
The book overturns previous assumptions about how people make decisions, including political ones. That’s seldom through slow, careful analysis of their options, which means a whole lot of Democratic communication is wasted. No, we make most decisions via fast shortcuts, in the form of biases and heuristics.
For example, the heuristic of salience: whatever sticks out in our awareness. A single, emotionally intense experience will loom over endless expanses of data.
Consider Jaws, the original summer blockbuster. Fifty years after its release, countless swimmers, me among them, still have an irrational fear of sharks, even though the risk of a shark attack is minuscule. The drive to the beach is literally millions of times more dangerous.
But the image is overpoweringly salient: a lone, vulnerable girl suddenly pulled below the waves by a 35-foot great white. So is the lethally efficient shark theme by John Williams: two notes on a cello, evoking pure terror rising from the depths of our psyches.
Sleazy salespeople and demagogic politicians love salience. Trump, who is both, lives by it.
His actual record in business is one of incompetence and serial bankruptcy. But what’s salient in the minds of his supporters is the image of the brilliant mogul he played in two works of fiction: The Apprentice and The Art of the Deal.
The actual record of immigrants in our country is resoundingly positive. Aside from their many contributions, immigrants — including the dark-skinned ones Trump is constantly warning about — are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans are. This means that if your neighborhood sees an immigration influx, the per capita crime rate is probably going to go down.
Trump doesn’t care. All he needs on any given day is one vivid story of a bad crime by an immigrant, even if he has to make one up.
Democrats run on immigration statistics. Trump runs on “They’re eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs!”
Seeing how readily so many people fall for such scams, it’s tempting to conclude that Plato was right: Most people are stupid.
All of us could stand to be humble about our brain power. But we don’t think fast because we’re stupid.
We do it because it helped our species survive this long. In our earliest days, thinking fast or slow was a matter of life or death.
Consider a rustle in the tall grass. Or rather, don’t consider it — there’s no time.
Decoding the meaning of that rustle — life-giving opportunity or lethal threat — requires instantaneous intelligence. Under such circumstances, slow thinking is stupid thinking,
If we stop to carefully consider the odds of one outcome versus the other, we are going to end up eaten instead of eating.
So evolution designed us to think slowly and rationally only when it’s worth it, and only when it’s safe. Which is why sleazy sales people and demagogues are constantly trying to scare us into thinking fast.
But it’s possible to appeal to people’s fast minds without being sleazy. And it’s possible to use your own fast mind to connect with theirs at the speed connection happens, moment to moment.
Like Obama did.
Obama understood that you campaign in poetry and govern in prose, as Mario Cuomo once said. Obama had detailed policies ready to address every aspect of being president. And if you wanted to know about them, they were on the website.
An Obama campaign event was about how it felt to be there, and the promise that the future could feel like that too. That’s why it was driven not by policy points but by stories, images, and Obama’s intuitive ability to connect across all the dimensions of connection, most of which are non-verbal.
The event was designed to answer the most important question voters have. That question is not, “What’s your policy on issue X or Y?”
It’s “Can I trust you?” Can I trust you to do this job, trust you to look out for me and my family, and trust you to take care of X, Y and all that other stuff.
You establish trust by connecting with people emotionally, not intellectually.
Rationalists have traditionally deprecated emotions because they see them as interfering with thought. That’s how Plato saw them, as have most rational thinkers since.
And emotions do interfere with thought — rational thought. See above re sleazy salespeople and demagogues.
But recent findings show that emotions are essential to a different kind of thought. It’s the kind of thought we use to make most decisions — even the slow ones, in the end.
Around the same time Kahneman and Tversky were challenging conventional wisdom on how we think, so was a young neuroscientist named Antonio Damasio. Damasio suspected that reason and emotions are not separate from each other. Neither are the mind and body, an assumption dating at least to 1637, when René Descartes declared “I think, therefore I am.”
Damasio’s suspicion appeared to be confirmed when he met a patient he calls Elliot, whose life was falling apart. Elliot had undergone surgery to remove a tumor impinging on parts of his brain that enabled the experience of emotions. Damasio tells the story in his book Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain:
The surgery was a success in every respect, and insofar as such tumors tend not to grow again, the outlook was excellent. What was to prove less felicitous was the turn in Elliot’s personality. The changes, which began during his physical recovery, astonished family and friends. To be sure, Elliot’s smarts and his ability to move about and use language were unscathed. In many ways, however, Elliot was no longer Elliot.
Consider the beginning of his day: He needed prompting to get started in the morning and prepare to go to work. Once at work he was unable to manage his time properly; he could not be trusted with a schedule. When the job called for interrupting an activity and turning to another, he might persist nonetheless, seemingly losing sight of his main goal. Or he might interrupt the activity he had engaged, to turn to something he found more captivating at that particular moment. Imagine a task involving reading and classifying documents of a given client. Elliot would read and fully understand the significance of the material, and he certainly knew how to sort out the documents according to the similarity or disparity of their content. The problem was that he was likely, all of a sudden, to turn from the sorting task he had initiated to reading one of those papers, carefully and intelligently, and to spend an entire day doing so. Or he might spend a whole afternoon deliberating on which principle of categorization should be applied: Should it be date, size of document, pertinence to the case, or another? The flow of work was stopped. One might say that the particular step of the task at which Elliot balked was actually being carried out too well, and at the expense of the overall purpose. One might say that Elliot had become irrational concerning the larger frame of behavior, which pertained to his main priority, while within the smaller frames of behavior, which pertained to subsidiary tasks, his actions were unnecessarily detailed. His knowledge base seemed to survive, and he could perform many separate actions as well as before. But he could not be counted on to perform an appropriate action when it was expected. Understandably, after repeated advice and admonitions from colleagues and superiors went unheeded, Elliot’s job was terminated.
It may not be fair to compare Elliott to today’s Democrats. But it’s hard to resist.
Like Elliott, most Democratic politicians are smart people who know lots of things. But, also like Elliott, many struggle with making decisions and sticking with them — decisions like “What do I stand for?”
The tempting correlation is that both Elliott and alienated Democrats have become cut off from their emotions.
And as Damasio’s research indicates, people need emotions in order to make decisions.
If you don’t have ready access to your emotions, being smart can make your decisions harder. You can consider all kinds of options, but you can’t pick one. To do that, you need to feel that one option is better than others.
Damasio writes, “The powers of reason and the experience of emotion decline together.”
Obviously, alienation isn’t the same as brain damage. And I don’t mean to suggest that alienated Democrats have no feelings at all: they cry and laugh like anyone else. But so much of what they say is so affectless. the pain and joy of life transmuted into abstract concepts.
A notorious example was provided by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer after Trump slashed grants to Harvard University, including money for vital medical research affecting millions of lives. Asked what Democrats were going to do about it, Schumer said, “We sent him a very strong letter just the other day asking eight very strong questions.”
That’s just so weirdly bloodless, and hormoneless.
The good news is, lots of Democratic voters noticed, and made their emotions clear.
Maybe that’ll show up in the data.
Or maybe more Democratic leaders, including some new ones, will show they don’t need data to know how to talk.
More on that next time.