(cross-posted @ dKos)
Earlier this week I posted a diary discussing the different approaches men and women take to emotion when communicating about problems. I tried to make the case that getting emotion right is necessary not just for personal relationships but for political success. I also suggested that a feminine paradigm for exploring emotion could be helpful to Democrats in helping them get the emotional connection to voters right.
In recent elections, Republicans have become masters of manipulating voter emotion to win elections. Democrats, in turn, have sometimes responded to this manipulation by rejecting the role of emotion entirely in the process. This is a strategic mistake. Just as we had to take the battle over national security directly to Bush, we must also engage Republicans directly on other emotional issues.
To do this effectively, however, we have to start getting our emotional ducks in a row. To succeed against the Republican BS machine and to win the hearts as well as the minds of America, we have to learn to do a better job of emotional politics.
DISCOVERING THE FAULT LINES
Emotion can be utilized to determine the priorities of the electorate and where the most serious political fault lines lie within and outside of our party. Some rules to explore:
Passion matters.
One issue that voters feel passionately about is worth ten that they are lukewarm about. We can be right on all issues but one, and still that one can sink our campaign if voters feels passionately enough about it. So individual issues are important.
On the flip side, passion can also be felt for a vision that encompasses numerous issues — none of which individually rise to a passionate level of feeling. So a party’s core message is important.
Finally, passion can be felt for a candidate that supercedes the emotions elicited by the candidate’s issues. So the emotional reactions elicited by a candidate are also important.
To win, we need to understand and respond to passions in all three of these areas.
When people act unexpectedly, you’ve probably seriously misread or underestimated their emotion.
This was certainly true about women voters in the 2004 election. Bush was re-elected because he narrowed the gender gap from the 10 point margin Gore had in 2000 to the smaller 7 point margin Kerry attracted in 2004. Why was Bush able to close the gap when so many of his positions hurt women?
One word — or rather — one emotion: fear. Earlier in the summer of 2004, women voters favored Kerry over Bush by 10 points. However, after the Swift Boat Liars debacle, the Republican convention, and the attack on a Russian school by Chechen separatists, that 10 point lead evaporated. Kerry was eventually able to win most of those women back, but not that crucial 3%.
Negative emotions may win arguments, but positive emotions are necessary for consensus and solutions.
This is one reason Republicans are doing such a lousy job governing despite dominating all three branches of government. Our challenge as the opposition is to be clear and passionately engaged battling what they’re doing wrong, but also to be equally clear, passionate, and emotionally coherent about what we would do to give people hope, help, and opportunity.
People will sometimes hide behind facts when they are uncomfortable with the emotional source of their positions.
When Republicans hide behind facts, the facts are often false. In such cases, we should not only unmask the false positions, but also seek to determine what emotions are making them uncomfortable and why. On the Democratic side, we have to be careful when we are uncomfortable with the emotional source of our positions, because this discomfort can come across as insecurity, lack of confidence, or insincerity.
If people are embarassed by an emotion, they will often attempt to hide its source — ie. the thoughts, prejudices, and assumptions that led to the emotion.
A voter may be embarassed by their support for a given issue or candidate and still be difficult to persuade. Such support should never be dismissed; it can in fact be hazardous because it is hidden and extremely difficult to engage directly.
CHANGING MINDS
It is tempting in the face of what we may see as irrational feeling to attempt to change minds by arguing facts and figures. However, we are unlikely to succeed in changing minds if we do not handle emotion with knowledge and respect.
Emotions can’t be reasoned with, only acknowledged.
Because strong emotion can evoke equally strong opposite emotion, there is often a instinct to try to argue with someone who has opposing views you see as misguided and emotional rather than rational. Unfortunately, the emotion is the result, not the cause, of the thoughts, assumptions, and prejudices you seek to change. Arguing with the emotion, therefore, accomplishes nothing. Acknowledging an emotion, on the other hand, conveys respect and may encourage the person you disagree with to open up enough to give the reasons that they feel the emotion they do. This is valuable, because
The thoughts that create emotion can be reasoned with, but only if they are brought out into the open. This only occurs in an atmosphere of trust.
Until you know why someone believes what they do, you can do nothing about what they believe. Not until they feel comfortable enough to admit the thoughts and assumptions that led them to support or oppose a given position, will you be able to persuade them to question some of those thoughts and assumptions.
Emotions denied only become stronger and more disconnected from their original cause. This in turn makes them harder to change.
Ignoring, rejecting, or dismissing the emotions of people you disagree with has two negative results. One, they are more likely to dig in their heels and harden their position. Two, it will become harder to discern the true source of the negative emotion and thus will be harder to change minds and heal rifts.
It is far easier to dismiss a possible grievance than to acknowledge it.
It is human nature to assume we are right and others are wrong. Right now it is easy for Democrats to reflexively assume we are always in the right and Republicans are always in the wrong. Similarly, in our shared passionate desire to win, we sometimes ignore the grievances within our party, dismissing them as unimportant compared to the bigger fight. In both cases, we will achieve more with respect, calm, and humility, then we will by giving our natural defensiveness free reign.
DEALING WITH LIES
Finally, if we learn to deal with emotion more effectively, we may also grow better at dealing with lies.
An emotion will feel true even if its source is false.
One frustration for a lot of Democrats is that we can know that the source of an emotion is false and yet be unable to persuade the the person feeling the emotion of that falsity. What is important to remember in such a situation is that you cannot tackle the emotion directly. Instead, the false source of the emotion must be chipped away at until, with luck, the emotion begins to change organically. This can be a slow, frustrating process (like water on stone), and it requires information be provided to the person from trusted sources in small increments, but it can work.
The time to fight a lie is when it is still a thought.
Once lies have been accepted to such a point that they elicit emotion, they become much harder to counter. This is because the emotion is a construction by the individual based on a false foundation provided by others. There is more personal commitment to the emotion and there is an ego element to defending the falsehood as true.
This is why we have to attack lies quickly, get our leaders to speak out against them forcefully, and insist the press do their job and set the records straight as soon as possible.
Not all truth can be proven.
We have to be careful about being put into the situation of always having to prove what we say is true while the other side gets the assumption of truth without proof. Sometimes truth is difficult if not impossible to prove; it still can be true nevertheless.
Similarly, we should not be too quickly dismissive of those within our own ranks who see something we cannot see. While we want to remain in the “reality-based” community, we need to take a respectful, if skeptical, view of our “conspiracy theorists.” There are people who sense things by instinct if not by proof, and like the canaries in the mine, they may alert us to dangers and issues the rest of us are just not able to perceive.
EMOTION MATTERS
It is easy to lose track of the fact that much of politics is just personal relationships on a massive scale. If being respectful and knowledgeable about emotions matters in successful personal relationships, it matters even more so in doing successful politics. Many in politics know how to handle emotion well by instinct. Others need to learn what doesn’t come naturally.
Taking our country back is going to require the efforts of each and every one of us, so it behooves us all to consider how we can do emotion better to make us all more successful at Emotional Politics.
