What Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama (and Elizabeth Warren) know … that you don’t

Lessons from The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in the Fate of the Nation.

A few hours after midnight on November 9th, I realized that Trump had won the election. Immediately after the shock wore off, I started asking myself, and many trusted friends:

“How could this happen?!? How could a man so obscenely unqualified for this office manage to convince so many people to support him so passionately?”

If you asked the same question of your friends, you’re not alone.

If you scoured blog posts and newspaper articles and books written by the wisest thinkers that you know of searching for answers, then you’re not alone.

And if, after all your searching, you still felt deeply unsatisfied and suspected that there was some core truth — some basic principle of human behavior — that Trump and many other conservatives understood, and that you and many other Progressives didn’ t… then I guarantee you’re not alone.

Because that’s exactly how I felt, until about 10 p.m. in the evening on Wednesday, December 28th. My wife and two kids had gone to visit the grandparents for a few days, while I stayed back home to work. That night, my mind turned again to the election. I picked up an older book from my bookshelf. Its title caught my eye. The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in the Fate of the Nation by psychologist Drew Westen. I devoured the book. Several hours later, well after midnight, I closed the covers with a smile. I finally had some answers. I finally felt like I understood:

· How Trump won
· Why his win was part of a clear pattern dating all the way back to Reagan
· What core principle of human nature I had grossly misunderstood … until now, and
· What steps we can all take to help secure a more Progressive future for this country

Here’s what I think you might want to know about this book.

Who this book is for
“This book is likely to be of particular interest to the 50 million Democratic voters who can’t figure out why their party has lost so many elections despite poll showing that the average voter agrees with democratic positions on most policy issues.” (p. ix)

What’s the TL;DR Version of this book?
“The central thesis book is that the vision of mind that has captured the imagination of philosophers, Cognitive scientists, economists, and political scientists since the 18th century — the dispassionate mind that makes decisions by winning evidence and reasoning to valid conclusions — bears no relation to how the mind and brain actually work. When campaign strategists start from this vision of mind, their candidates typically lose.” (p.ix)

Why Conservatives are succeeding, and why Progressives are failing
If you ask Conservatives what ideas they associate with Progressives, you’ll hear many familiar, short, vivid, emotionally powerful, and easy-to-share “memes” like:

· bleeding heart
· tax-and-spend
· pie-in-the-sky
· save the world
· pro-abortion
· socialist
· selfish
· weak
· lazy

There’s just enough truth in each of the memes above to make them stick in conservatives’ minds as the truth. These memes are not the truth, of course. They’re marketing messages — highly-effective tools designed by experts, and exhaustively field-tested like multi-million dollar advertising campaigns.

But these marketing messages are not designed to sell you a car, a watch, or a bar of soap. They are designed to frame every political conversation, every argument, every debate, in favor of conservatives.

So where did these memes come from?

They came from a story — a “narrative” told by a president who gave new meaning, new purpose, new drive and new identity to the conservative movement over 30 years ago. His name was Ronald Reagan. And the story he told goes something like this,

“Once upon a time America was a shining beacon. The Liberals came along and erected an enormous federal bureaucracy that handcuffed the invisible hand of the free market. They subverted her traditional American values and oppose God and faith at every step of the way…” (p.157).

That story — that master narrative — has been the driving force behind Conservative successes for the last 30+ years.

So what brief, powerful, viral memes do Democrats use to tell their master narrative?

It’s hard to think of any.

Why?

“Because the left has no brand, no counter brand, no master narrative, no counter narrative. It has no shared terms or talking points for its leaders to repeat until they’re part of our political lexicon. Instead every Democrat who runs for office, every Democrat who offers commentaries on television or radio, every Democrat who even talks with friends at the water cooler, has to reinvent what it means to be a Democrat using his or her own words and concepts, as if the party had no history.” (p.169)

And that’s why experienced, intelligent Progressives with solid, practical ideas have been losing arguments, debates and elections to Conservatives for the past three decades.

You may think, “Reason SHOULD be more of a factor than emotion.”
You’re right. Every thinker inspired by the Enlightenment, including America’s Founding Fathers, would likely agree. Unfortunately, wishing for something doesn’t make it true. The inconvenient truth — backed up by decades of research — is that most voters make decisions based primarily on emotions, not rational arguments. Progressive leaders can start to accept and act on this truth, or we can keep losing to people like Trump.

You may think, “If we go down this path, we’ll become just as bad as the conservatives.”
It’s possible, but certainly not assured. Many of our best leaders offered well thought out, evidence-based policies and programs, AND ethically appealed to people’s emotions. JFK, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama all did it successfully. Who does it now? Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren! Is it tough to be the smartest guy (or woman) in the room AND communicate powerfully, emotionally, and ethically? You bet. And those are exactly the kind of people all of us should want leading our country.

You may think, “We’re in crisis mode! Just resist Trump! Nothing else.”
For the moment, yes, we’re playing defense, as we should be. Want to see the playbook for this defense? Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda. Here’s the rub. No team ever won the long game by focusing only on defense. Over the next four years, Progressives can either build a powerful, emotionally engaging master narrative that’s better than Reagan’s story, or we can get used to playing defense permanently.

What practical steps can we take?
1. First, read The Political Brain by Drew Westen. You can get a used copy from Amazon for just a few bucks. (I get no compensation of any kind for this. I just think it’s a good book).

2. Pick your favorite quotes, examples, memes, etc. then share them with your Progressive friends, and family, on social media, or by phone, or at the dinner table, and ideally in person at local community meet ups. Together, start to collect the stories and memes that deeply resonate with you as a Progressive.

3. Learn a few powerful Progressive memes from Democrats who successfully use them. For example, listen to Elizabeth Warren on “Tax Responsibility.” Or note how some Conservatives seem to really like to “Privatize the profits, and socialize the losses.”

4. Ask your moderate right-leaning friends why they vote the way they do. Be real. Don’t judge, or preach. Just listen to their story and the memes in their answers. Then go home and develop a brief, powerful, story-based, emotionally engaging response for each one. Test it out with Progressive friends, then with your moderate right-leaning friends. Share the best ones with other Democrats, via email, social media, blogs, etc. Here’s an example. Instead of talking about “Universal Health Care” say you believe in a “family doctor for every family.”

5. Over the next four years, watch for the best of these stories and memes — especially the ones that get national attention. Adopt them as your own. Share and collect the best of these stories and memes by phone or in person with your Democratic Senator, Congressman, or even state and local level lawmakers. Remember the most powerful stories and memes are those that resonate emotionally with people and that get repeated over and over and over until they’re part of the common language.

Read the book. Build your story. Share the memes. Take a stand.