RW: In my own life, I've had on and off interactions with Bernie Sanders.
And he figures among the people that you are talking about in terms of persuasion.
And he is certainly a person, I've known him for many years,
who tries very hard to persuade and always has and has been (given that he accepts
the name socialist as applied to him)
remarkably successful in an environment
which was not friendly to that concept, to say the least.
It didn't get the results he had hoped for.
He's a person many of us admire for his stick-to-it-ness
and his commitment to persuasion.
But there do seem to be structural obstacles.
What are some of the structural problems
with a successful effort to persuade?
AG: Well, the reason I wrote about Bernie's remarkable
campaigns is that
I think the question is complicated, because on the one hand,
it is absolutely true that he was up against tremendous structural barriers
because he was running on a program
to restructure the United States in a direction,
you know, to the benefit of people, and away from the benefit of corporations.
And there’s obviously very powerful enemies to that.
And, you know, my previous book, Winner Take All, was about how the very wealthy
have erected those structural barriers and how they defend them.
Spending time with him for the book, but also spending time
with some of his advisers after he lost really processing
and reflecting on what went wrong or where he fell short...
I mean, again, these were remarkable runs, right?
Given who he is and what he is standing for, right? But
there's
also no consolation prizes in politics, right?
So I think with Bernie, it was in many ways
a test of a certain kind of persuasive method.
One was his stick-to-it-iveness, as you said, his moral clarity,
his almost prophetic quality
of just saying the same thing over and over again, pointing to a future
that people either come to or don't, not compromising to win people over.
And I think that was a huge part of his appeal.
And he got from a few percentage points of the American public up to 20/25%,
which is remarkable if you're a Democratic socialist in a crowded primary.
The interesting question for his campaign, particularly the second time, was
where's the next 10% come from?
Where’s the next 10% after that come from?
How do you go from 25 to 35, 35 to 45?
Those are going to be the people who don't like democratic socialism.
The next 10% is going to be people who kind of don't like it and the next 10%
after that is going to be people who actually hate it.
And you need to win them, too.
And his advisers were really thinking
about this problem, like, if you're going to be the commander
in chief of the United States, you have to win a ton of people
who don't like socialism, but they want to go where you're going.
How do you do that?
And I think this is where Bernie faced a really difficult decision that had
to do with his willingness to adapt some of his methods of persuasion.
Bernie was someone who really stuck to ‘I want to stick to the facts.
I want to stick to the policies.’ And Bernie really resisted
feeling, sentiment, emotion.
Democrats in
general are like that: Build Back Better, 72 point plans, Elizabeth Warren.
I mean, they're really speaking on this kind of faith
that people are smart, people are engaged, people will read bullet points.
And while I admire their view of human nature,
because it's almost soul stirring, I think it's dead wrong and inaccurate.
Bernie, for example, was someone who was almost unwilling to tell people
the really searing personal stories in his life
that motivated some of his stances.
His mother's struggle and untimely death when he was a late teenager
from a bad health care system that didn't treat her right.
It's hard to think of a politician who wouldn't put that front and center
if Medicare for All was your signature domestic issue.
Bernie just didn't talk about it.
His father's family was murdered in the Holocaust, and he was running
against an actual Nazi in Donald Trump.
And he wouldn't- a couple of times he mentioned it- but someone else
who had family murdered in the Holocaust might play up a kind of moral passion
for having personal reasons to fight this kind of thing.
And so what a lot of the Bernie folks I talked to and kind of after action,
what many of them agreed in different ways, was that
if this movement's going to win, it's got to be like a four engine movement.
It can't just run on policy and logos and the brain.
Having an astute understanding of voters, of their psychology, of emotions, of fear
and anxiety isn't beneath those who want to save America from
fascism.
It's what they need to do.