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Last time, we explored music as an example of how it’s possible to think meaningfully without thinking rationally. The meaning of a piece of music can make us shiver, cry, exult, or even change how we live our lives. And yet even great musicians struggle to explain that meaning.
That’s not because the meaning doesn’t exist. It’s because it exists beyond explanation, outside the dimensions of rational thought. To become a good musician, you have to learn to think in a different way, within other dimensions.
So it is with politics.
If you only think rationally about music, you can produce music theory, but not music. If you only think rationally about politics, good luck winning elections. A theory is a description, not the thing being described. The map is not the territory.1
But today’s hyper-rational, alienated liberals practice politics as if it were as flat as a map. On a map, there are only two dimensions: latitude and longitude. The kind of politics I’m talking about also has just two dimensions: facts and logic.
What’s the best argument? The one based on the best facts and logic. How do you persuade people of that argument? Show them the facts and logic.
And how well does that work?
Hardly at all.
Political battles are fought in a territory of not two but countless dimensions, of perception, intuition, emotion, memory, culture, and more. And yes, among them are the dimensions of facts and logic. But as we’ve seen in previous chapters, what happens in those two dimensions plays only a partial or even insignificant role in how people actually make decisions.
And yet it’s within those two dimensions that liberal politicos fight, losing battles they should be able to win.
To see what that means in practice, let’s look at a battle that has lost them millions of formerly Democratic voters: the long struggle over access to abortion.
It can be hard to imagine, but abortion wasn’t always one of the most divisive and decisive issues in American politics. It is now because leaders on the right worked for decades to make it that way.
And Democrats helped them.
Until the end of the 1960s, abortion was hardly an issue at all, except for those trying to make it legal. Organized resistance was largely confined to the Catholic Church, but Catholics were a minority. There was little talk about abortion among Protestants, even among the fundamentalists who drive the opposition now. In a 1970 poll, most Southern Baptist pastors said they supported legal abortion in some cases. Support spanned the political parties too.
In 1973, Roe vs. Wade made abortion opponents care a lot more than they had when legalization was just a possibility. But so did an organized campaign by Republican and religious leaders, who saw an opportunity to reverse a long losing streak against Democrats.
Historian Daniel K. Williams tells the story in his book God’s Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right:
The GOP was a minority party in the 1970s. In order to win, Republicans had to siphon votes from the Democrats, and the Republicans’ political strategists believed that a shift to the right on social issues would be the easiest way to do that. The Democrats at the time were becoming a more secular party by embracing culturally liberal stances on abortion, feminism, and gay rights, which alienated some of the conservative Catholics and southern evangelicals who had once been loyal members of the New Deal coalition. In response, Republican leaders of the 1970s decided that adopting more conservative positions on abortion and other cultural issues would be a wise strategic move. Such a move seemed to make sense for a party that had already succeeded in attracting social conservatives through the public support of religion in the 1950s and an endorsement of a school prayer amendment in the 1960s. But what began as a temporary political ploy quickly became irreversible…
Republicans didn’t just siphon religious votes from the Democrats; they caught a wave. American politics would be transformed. Between then and now, Democrats went from being perennial winners to perennial underdogs to the subjects of the perennial question, “How are they going to blow it this time?”
They do it by alienating voters. It’s what you do when you’re alienated from voters.
So it’s been with abortion.
The liberal argument for abortion rights is rational: The Constitution says all people have equal rights. Few rights are more fundamental than the right to choose what happens to your own body. Therefore women, like all people, must have the right to make that choice.
It seems to make perfect sense. And yet tens of millions of Americans find it horrifying. The fact that it’s so rational only makes it worse.
For them, the core of the issue isn’t any rational argument. It’s an image: the image of an unborn child.
Anti-abortion advocates knew what they were doing when they chose that phrase, and when they decided to call themselves Pro-Life.
Let the other side be Pro-Choice. Let them make their rational arguments about rights. They won’t spark the rational debate they expect. We’ll make sure that in millions of minds, there will only be an image: of a child who might be killed.
Pro-choice advocates responded with science: “It’s not a child, it’s a collection of cells!”
Thereby making their problem worse.
Some religious believers reconcile faith with science. But fundamentalists are taught that the Bible is the literal, inerrant Word of God. Many of them blame science and its materialism for the fallen state of the modern world. So if you challenge God’s truth with science, it doesn’t make them see you as more persuasive, it makes them see you as more frightening.
Even secular abortion opponents equate an embryo with a child, because that’s what it will become. Their logic can be challenged, but logic is likely to backfire here too.
Like so many political issues — and more than most — abortion is a moral question. And as recent research shows, people decide moral questions on feelings first. Moral reasoning comes later, and seldom changes those feelings.
But classical liberalism was based on a purely rational conception of morality, which is still dominant among many liberals of the left. It comes from Enlightenment sources such as John Locke’s theory of natural rights, a foundation of pro-choice politics.
Such moral reasoning has helped us make enormous moral progress since Locke’s day, when colonial conquest, slavery, and the subjugation of women were seen as morally justified. But that progress wasn’t made by reason alone. Outside of philosophy classes (and maybe not even inside them), people don’t make moral decisions purely or even mostly rationally.
The idea that they do is a “rationalist delusion.” So says the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, a leading researcher on moral thinking. This is from Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind:
Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning.
Haidt likens the relative power of non-rational and rational thought to an elephant and its rider:
The rider is our conscious reasoning—the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99 percent of mental processes—the ones that occur outside of awareness but that actually govern most of our behavior.
Experiments support Haidt’s thesis. Some are designed to elicit moral disgust at the violation of a taboo. Subjects are asked to explain why they think the action was morally wrong. Experimenters then challenge those explanations with exhaustive, rational counter-arguments which many subjects finally admit are valid. And yet they stick to their initial intuition, typically explaining that they just “know it’s true.”
Think of the mountains of evidence about Donald Trump’s character, or lack thereof. And yet his committed followers say they just “know” he’s a good man and a great leader.
Many liberals conclude it’s because all those Trump followers are stupid. That’s a classic mistake made by people who think rational thought is the only thought. As a group, liberals do tend to be well-educated. But the research shows they make decisions non-rationally too, like everyone does.
Haidt’s depiction of the non-rational mind is similar to what Carl Jung called the unconscious.
Based on observations of his patients, Jung concluded that people are not influenced by objective facts but by “facts felt and experienced.” Logical arguments, he said, “simply bounce off.”2
Jung likened the unconscious mind to the mystical, mythical world of the Homeric Greeks or the Biblical Hebrews, full of gods, demons, heroes, villains, omens, curses, and miracles. Whether or not we believe in such things consciously, they still exist and influence us in the form of symbols.
Examples abound in politics, where the power of symbols shapes history. Consider the symbol of the god-king who dies and returns, like the Messiah of the Abrahamic religions. He reappears throughout Western culture from King Arthur to Siegfried to Elvis to Tupac.
A week after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy asked Theodore White, a sympathetic reporter, to come to the family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. There she and White wrote the myth of a new Camelot, borrowing from the hit musical that was then playing in Broadway: “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief, shining moment that was known as Camelot.”
The near-assassination of Donald Trump appeared to his followers to fulfill explicit comparisons with Jesus that they and he had already been making. That helps explain how they can believe in him as both all-powerful ruler and eternal victim. He’s both a god and a sacrificial lamb, constantly betrayed and crucified for his people, only to rise again.
The image of the unborn child is another such symbol, which Trump, a former abortion rights supporter, is equally happy to exploit.
I’m confident he’s no student of cultural history or moral psychology, but Trump is a master of the power of symbols: So are many politicians on the right, in contrast to so many on the left.
CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl learned the power of political symbols from Dick Darman, a Reagan administration official. She told the story in a 1989 interview with Bill Moyers:
I did a piece where I was quite negative, to be honest with you, about Reagan. And yet the pictures were terrific, and I thought they’d be mad at me, but they weren’t. They loved it. And the official outright said to me, “They didn’t hear you. Didn’t hear what you said. They only saw those pictures.”
In the same interview, Reagan alumnus Michael Deaver explained further:
The problem with it was that she had to put on during her piece all these wonderful visuals that we created. And if you really believe that the visuals are going to outlast the spoken word in the person’s mind, then we were delighted with it. We’d gotten one more shot of all the things that we created that we wanted on television.
Liberal politicos know about symbolism too, of course. But most only seem to know it intellectually, not in their bones. They can speak the language, but not like natives. Hence the many consultant-driven Democratic campaign images that feel so false. Think of Michael Dukakis in a tank, or Hillary Clinton in a soul food restaurant, pulling hot sauce from her purse.
The art of influence is ancient: the Greeks were the ones who named it rhetoric. The Sophists were its first teachers. But among modern liberals, rhetoric is usually mentioned with disdain, as is sophistry. Liberals think of rhetoric as something you cut through to get to the substance.
But in politics, rhetoric is the substance. Politics is the art of persuading people. If you can’t persuade them, you can’t get anything done.
That doesn’t mean you have to lie to them.
Yes, Donald Trump uses rhetoric, like all con artists. But so did Barack Obama, like Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, and Cicero did. All saw rhetoric as a tool for moral work. Ask any veteran of Obama’s campaigns and they’ll tell you that nothing he said in his soaring speeches was betrayed backstage.
You can speak poetically and still speak truth — deeper truth, if you do it well.
But liberals seem to want to speak more like Plato, who mistrusted poetry, and hated the Sophists. He believed both individuals and society should be ruled only by reason.
You can do political science that way, but not politics.
Politics is much more art than science. It has to be, because most of human communication, like most of human experience, is aesthetic.
Aesthetic is another ancient word that’s been demoted by modern hyper-rationalists. It’s associated now with insubstantial style. But its original Greek meaning referred to perception — all of perception. Most of which is felt, not computed.
Liberals lost so many arguments over abortion because they focused on proving they were right. Being right, even if you can be sure you are, doesn’t help, and harping on it hurts your cause.
In politics, you have to start by building trust.
And to trust you, people have to feel you.
Image: Cicero Denounces Catiline in the Roman Senate, via Wikimedia Commons