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Who Do Our Arguments Persuade?
On the member feed, Benjamin Glaser has a post titled “You Want to Know Why Ted Cruz Can Win?” that discusses the senator’s new campaign ad and the shocked reaction at its high quality from the Washington Post. It’s an eye-catching and powerful ad … to me. Big deal. But I was going to vote Republican anyway.
I keep wondering what will convince the people who don’t agree with us, but might be convinced. I don’t know the answer to that but, over on NR’s Postmodern Conservative blog, Peter Spiliakos has an interesting point of view. His conclusion: it’s is time to move past the Baby Boomer model of persuasion:
We are in a different place now [than we were in the 1980s]. Rove wasted $300 million in the 2012 cycle trying to get general election voters to oppose Obama. Murphy is in the process of wasting over $100 million trying to get Republican primary voters to support Jeb Bush.
The old political shorthand no longer works. It means nothing to Millennials. It means nothing to voters who immigrated to the US post-1980 and it means nothing to those voters’ children. That doesn’t mean that these voters are on the left. Many of them might be skeptical of tax increases, and they might start with the presumption that late-term fetuses are human beings, but they have no connection to the old political clichés. Cutting taxes to revive the economy is something that rich people say – and only about cutting taxes on rich people. The locution “culture of life” is something they have never heard from anybody they know. The old conservative political shorthand is immediately tuned out.
He continues:
… We need to slow down. We can no longer assume that people know what we are talking about. The voters that we need might have partially overlapping policy preferences with conservatives, but they don’t know it, and the language we use (even the language of establishment Republicans who can’t shut up about how inclusive they are) is repellent.
After reading the post, I went back and watched the ad to see what popped. First, Cruz’s use of the terms “mainstream media,” “economic calamity.” Second, its proposal for three actions: tripling the Border Patrol, building a wall that works, and securing the border.
I know what he means, I like that he gave specific actions to take. But, again, he doesn’t have to persuade me. How do these terms and actions fit with the NR post?
Published in Politics
You make a fair point. I went to public schools my whole life, including the notoriously liberal University of California at Berkeley, and I turned out a conservative.
Some of us have a confounding habit of thinking for ourselves.
This is it. I keep saying we have a leftist culture, and that’s the reason for leftward drift. The schools are leftists, the same with the media, the entertainment industry, even sports become lefty. So it doesn’t matter how often we elect guys an R next to their names, the country will continue moving left. We have to change the culture, take back the schools. Leftist indoctrination starts in preschools.
And you chose UC Berkeley. No one imposed the school on you.
One of the top computer science schools in the world, and a bargain at in-state tuition rates. I’m proud of my alma mater. Go Bears!
I think what will persuade this generation is the same thing that persuaded my generation, and it is not rhetoric. They will graduate from college, get a job, and find out that the real world doesn’t work the way the leftists promised. They will find out what it means to work hard for a paycheck, and see the government take half of it. They will notice that the Democrats, the party of “tolerance” and “science,” are anything but tolerant or scientific. (Hat tip to #BLM for giving us a head start on that.) They will have kids, and will want those kids to attend a good and safe school. Most importantly, they will finally notice that their tax dollars are being wasted on ridiculous leftist programs that don’t work. Don’t work at all. In fact, programs that make the problem worse.
The left has a lock on the rhetoric. I admit it. But we still have the facts, and facts matter. Eventually.
Cruz’s advertisement, does not work on many. It is seen, like Cruz, as a bit to clever. He is a master of debate rhetoric, not persuasion. Everyone sees him coming – his windup and faux genuiness is pretty practiced.
We are dealing with emotions before we are dealing with reason. That is why the Cruz ad works with a base (many of us – and I love it!!), but not all voters by any means find it convincing. Humans are emotionally programmed differently. The react first and then justify. Many see this ad as a trick – a slight of hand – and they are not persuaded. When you think about it, it does not address the problem – rather it attacks the media and others.
That is the same problem Rove and those who advertise always encounter. Negative ads fire up the base and it works. The Cruz ad is a negative ad. Persuasion (what Rove also tried) is more difficult and more subtle. Romney made the same mistake for the most part. Unlike Romney, Cruz lacks the charisma, style and reputation to be persuasive except with those who already believe in Cruz and that is not enough to win a general election. It may be enough to win the Iowa primary with 30%- a nice accomplishment, but hardly a strong indicator of success in the general election.
However, what is happening is those on the left are beginning to see these ads and listens to debates. They are waking up to Bernie, Ted and Donald – they are beginning to understand why white, high school educated males and young people (in the case of Bernie) are stirred by the anti-establishment message. So after 9 months, the Washington Post, Atlantic Magazine and New York Magazine have carried numerous articles which show for the first time some empathy with the “stagnant wages, lost jobs, limited future, lost country, family grasping, besieged faithful, broken promise victim, and ridiculed” middle of America. Frankly, I was surprised to be reading what I am reading in these liberal journals after so many pundits dismissed the Trump phenomena and anti-establishment movement.
Problem: where does anti-establishment go when it must become the establishment. The Tea Party wilted in 2012 (with some help from Lois Lerner), and again in 2014. Most in the Freedom Caucus have voting records that are not the highest scores on ACA and Heritage Foundation scales of Conservativism. Rubio’s conservative voting scores generally beat the Freedom Caucus and everyone in the GOP Presidential field except Cruz, who only has 2 years of voting record. Point: Freedom Caucus and Tea Party people vote for corporate welfare (ethanol, farm subsidies, oil credits, bailouts, and aid) just like all the rest when they finally get into the ‘establishment.’ They do what is good for the sugar, drilling, leasing, soy bean, and banking industry that is in their districts. They just keep it quieter.
School choice doesn’t mean that all schools will be conservative. Jewish schools trend liberal, just as Christian schools trend conservative. Secular schools would vary based on all sorts of factors. You’d still have people of all political persuasions, but what we wouldn’t have is across-the-board liberal indoctrination at state-run institutions.
Sadly true.
I think Spiliakos had a good part of the answer toward the end of his piece, to the effect that we’d be better served by trying harder to provide conservative answers to contemporary concerns. We do this a lot in commentary, but it (generally) doesn’t seem to make it to the candidates. There are conservative/free market answers to concerns over global warming, education, and health care that don’t sound like they were written on a typewriter at the Heritage Foundation in 1972.
We need to play those ideas up.
Yes, but again, that’s not my point. I am not suggesting that we will create competing indoctrination centers (like Trump is the anti-Obama), but that the quality of our education will go up. Simply because conservatives can and do emerge from liberal schools, and liberals can and do emerge from conservative ones, doesn’t mean that we ought to have the situation as it currently exists. Ridding ourselves of teachers’ unions and allowing schools to be a competitive field would be a good thing that could only benefit conservatives. The reason I still believe it is the most important, though, is sheer volume. Joseph, you came out of public school and UC Berkeley conservative. You’re also staunchly religious. How many of your peers turned out the same? Largely, students buy into the nonsense, especially at a young age.
It is something I have been saying for a long time. Low-information voters, especially millennials, have been brainwashed by the Democrat Media Complex into believing that Republican was synonymous with Conservative, and Conservative Republican was shorthand for “hates gays, hates blacks, hates Hispanics, and wants to outlaw sex.”
The Republican Party has been a poor apologist for Conservatism because the Republican Party is not, at its core, conservative, nor does it exist to advance conservative values.
The add takes a complex thought, at least for liberals, “the increase in supply of workers impacts wages and salaries and that in turn affects their attitudes about the policies that caused the increase in supply.” It also attacks the “fat cats” for hypocrisy and self serving indifference. It addresses the border without criticizing Hispanics or raising amnesty issues. It’s a good add aimed at the blue collar folks who are likely to be Democrats or independents.
@Ryan(can’t quote from phone) in response to #67:
Yes, but there was some degree of conservative “indoctrination.” One teacher was a former advisor to George HW Bush and even ran for Congress as a Republican, and he would openly talk about the “harm” that Progressivism caused. Another teacher made The Fountainhead a reading assign over the course of the entire school year. On a smaller scale, Ayn Rand’s Anthem was required reading by everyone in the 10th grade. These measures go beyond open contempt for Obama, and yet they still could not produce conservatives.
Perhaps there is a problem with Conservatism beyond its messaging and introduction to newcomers.
Ayn Rand is not exactly a mainstream, typical conservative. Some conservatives and libertarians love her, but her underlying philosophy (atheism, Objectivism, the virtue of selfishness) runs contrary to what many of us believe.
Regardless, I don’t think a reading assignment qualifies as “indoctrination.” I would hope students would be required to read books from a wide variety of viewpoints across the political spectrum and encouraged to compare and contrast them.
James Madsion in 67 is absolutely right.
1. Emotion affects decision-making
2. We over-value info that confirms what we already believe.
There are evidenced based ways to address these challenges and Obama’s campaign made great use of that kind of knowledge in 2008, and even more so in 2012. I have heard his data analytics people present on this topic and they are brilliant.
Republicans need to use this too effectively persuade and motivate if the want to win.
On a tanget: main feed promotion! Woohoo!