Translator: Christopher Kabakis Reviewer: Natalie Thibault
Populism is on the rise.
In the past decades, we have seen a steady increase of support
for extreme - or not so extreme - right-wing populist parties,
such as the AfD in Germany, which is rather recent.
But we have other players who've been around for a much longer time,
such as the Front National in France.
In Hungary, we have Viktor Orbán.
In Poland we have the PiS party and Kaczynski.
In the Netherlands, we have Geert Wilders with the PVV.
In Austria, we have the FPÖ.
And, as probably all of you know,
in 2016, Western liberal society
got a double whammy of first Brexit and then Trump.
And I felt a bit like this lady here.
(Laughter)
"It's going to be a long four years."
And maybe even a long eight years, you never know,
now seven ... or three ...
And the question was: How come this can be so successful?
I think what I've realized over the past one-and-a-half years is:
There are two main reasons.
The first one is: There are real problems.
So, there are real problems that our governance model,
based on nation states, largely on nation states,
has increasingly been unable to solve.
Such as the rise in immigration,
or terrorism,
or the rise in inequality,
or massive tax evasion, and so on and so on.
And what has happened is
that while the economy has been globalized,
our governance models have not.
They have stayed national,
and so they are increasingly incapable of addressing those globalized problems.
That leads to frustration and anger,
and then people fall for demagogues who promise something better.
But the second reason is: Communication.
Many successful populists are great communicators.
And it's a bit like this.
We feel like they tell it like it is.
I work as a communications consultant right now,
and so this really bothered me.
I was like, "Agh, how can this be?"
Donald Trump is insulting everyone,
from his opponents, to the media, to the courts,
to women, to minorities,
and he, according to a test by the Boston Globe,
has only fourth grade English in his speeches.
And, of course, he was lying constantly,
or let's say he had a free relationship with the truth.
(Laughter)
So I was like, "What does it mean? Is he a good speaker?"
I had always used Obama as a great example of public speaking and rhetoric,
and here we have Trump and obviously he is also very effective as a speaker.
And so I wanted to understand: So, what is this all about?
So I took a deep dive into populism, its roots, and its narrative,
and the communication approach of its figureheads,
and also tried, eventually, to come up with some solutions to it,
some effective countermeasures.
And this is what I would like to share with you today,
what I have researched and done in the past one-and-a-half years.
One heads-up:
when I say "Talk like Trump", I don't mean talk like this:
(Laughter)
use the same words, or be aggressive,
or insult everyone, or so on, and lie.
What I mean more is:
Understand what makes Trump, and other populists, an effective speaker,
and then use those weapons against them.
And it also means to understand
that, like Obama, Trump is a great storyteller.
He appeals very effectively to emotions,
very different emotions from Obama, but, still, emotions.
In order to deal with populism at the level of communication,
we first need to understand its narrative.
There are three key aspects,
three differences of how populists talk,
and how - well, who is it, a person who is actually not a populist?
Well, I would say liberals, classic liberalism,
or globalists or -
The best way I have come to describe it
is "friends of the open society" talk.
So, those three differences are:
Populists look very differently at the future,
they look very differently at - second - at how the world works,
and they look very differently at, third, how society works,
compared to the friends of the open society.
So let's start.
Liberals, globalists,
the classic liberal narrative is one that goes like this:
"The future will always be better than the past,
and the present."
And it's a narrative that people have believed for a very long time.
"You and your kids will be better off in the future.
And we can all work together to make this happen."
So this is kind of the basic vision and the basic promise.
Now, if we look at Trump's campaign slogan,
"Make America great again",
you already see the difference.
And if we look at, for example, Marine Le Pen's statement here, the quote:
"Only the Front National plans to give back to France
those essential weapons [such as control of its national budget and borders]"
and so on and so on.
And you see, this basically is the attempt to take us back to the past.
The vision of the future of the populists is the return to an idealized past.
It's a - you could say - a "nostalgic vision".
"You people have lost something of value, and I'm going to give it back to you."
And this has been surprisingly successful in the past years and decades,
but maybe not so surprisingly
because people feel sometimes the future has become like a black wall,
it's like we don't know where we're going, there's a high degree of uncertainty.
And so, what do you do when you're uncertain?
Well, you go back to a time or place when you still knew your way around.
The second difference between populists and liberals
lies in how they see the world.
The classic liberal idea is that
we should try to get away from short-term thinking, from intuition,
from gut feeling and so on,
to something larger,
like universal values, universal principles maybe,
universal human rights, to scientific reasoning,
knowledge with ever greater reach.
And liberals also believe in abstract principles like institutions,
and checks and balances and so on.
Now, while this movement of the liberals is an opening up to the world,
the movement of the populists is exactly the opposite:
it's a closing down to the world.
And they don't believe in universal things, in general,
or scientific evidence or reasoning and so on.
They say, "We trust only common sense, our gut feeling,
and what's important is a good national attitude."
And if you are against the common sense or the good national attitude,
well, by definition, you are an enemy of the people.
So, we abandon those ideals of liberalism
and we go back to something like truthiness:
when something feels right, it must be right.
Or we go to, simply, group loyalty:
it doesn't matter what is true or not,
but what my tribe thinks, and I believe the same thing.
The third difference, and maybe the most important one,
between the populists and the liberals,
is how they see society.
The liberal narrative is inclusive.
Everyone can join into the story, into the vision, and become a part of it.
And the "us" that the liberals define is one that can grow over time.
So, Obama, for example said,
"All of us pledge allegiance to the stars and stripes.
All of us are Americans."
And he tried to go away from "Blue States" and "Red States",
and Democrats and Republicans, and so on.
But of course that's just a first step.
I guess many of you would say,
"I'm not just a national of Germany, or of Mexico, or whatever,
but I'm also a European", in this case.
Or maybe, "I'm a citizen of the world", in the end.
So the idea of liberalism
is to enlarge this identity, this "us", this "we".
When I look then at the statements of the populists,
what you see is something like this:
"When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best.
They send people that have lots of problems.
They bring drugs, they bring crime, they're rapists" and so on.
You might have heard this statement.
Or, in Germany, we have the AfD,
and someone from their party said,
"When we arrive, we will clean up, then we clean out.
Politics will be made for the people again,
and only for the people,
because we are the people, dear friends."
Here we see the classic movement of "there are strong enemies", right?
Strong enemy pictures:
You have those people up there, the liberal elite,
the corrupt establishment that's sold out the people.
And that's left-wing and right-wing populism.
In right-wing populism, we have this movement to condemn "the others":
it's against the others, such as immigrants, or minorities,
or social welfare recipients, whatever.
So, it's always against "up there", and against "out there".
And the "us", it's very exclusive,
it's usually ethnically or culturally homogeneous,
and only the populist determines if you are part of "the people",
the "real people", the "hard-working Americans", or not.
Then you come to a point
where Erdogan, for example, says, like, "We are the people. Who are you?"
You don't matter.
And there is the true danger of populism.
It's delegitimizing everyone who is not of the same opinion
and who is not part of how they define "the people".
So it's anti-pluralistic and anti-democratic at its core.
It lives from, gains its energy from, exclusion and division.
That's kind of the third element of the three.
In total, populists want to take us back to the past,
they want to take us back to the tribal, close off,
and they want to divide us, and exclude people,
to gain power from this, and influence.
Now, what can we do about it?
How can we fight the populists effectively?
And when I say "we", I say you and me.
And I don't think, I don't know, I suspect,
that Wonder Woman is not in the audience today.
If Wonder Woman is here, please raise her hand -
Oh, we have one Wonder Woman, so I can go.
(Laughter)
So, for the cases that Wonder Woman is not around,
which might be in most places and at most times,
I would like to propose the following:
it's the "Trumple the Trump" approach.
That's how you could call it.
It's based on my research, and talking to experts,
and thinking hard about the problem for the past one-and-a half years,
and also observing, really, what has worked and what hasn't worked.
And it has three elements.
The first one: Tell stories that are properly framed and worded.
People think in stories.
We think about abstract things,
such as the government, or political leaders,
in terms of things we know.
Something like: "How are things in families, our own families?"
And Trump really played to one of the two dominant models,
the strict father model.
So, it's all about top-down communication,
it's about control.
And the assumption is: people are bad,
and you need punishments also to motivate them, and to make them better.
The other main frame is the nurturant parent model.
You might also know this.
It's kind of: we meet at eye level,
we're empathetic, fairness is very important,
and we generally believe people are good,
and you need to encourage and motivate them,
and make them even better people.
So, there are two contrasting family models.
Now, if you are faced with someone activating one of the frames,
such as "we need to build a wall",
"we need to ban Muslims from coming to the United States",
it's very bad to just negate the frame
and to say, like, "No, we shouldn't do this."
Because, by negating the frame, you strengthen the frame.
What you should do instead is activate your frame with your own story.
Now, one example of doing this is to tell a family story.
Here the story of the black sheep, or the brown sheep.
Imagine you have five children, five sons, and one of them does something bad.
Now, would you punish all of them?
No, that would be absurd, I mean, very unfair.
You punish only the person that did something bad.
And the same thing is with people coming from other countries
who might be committing crimes.
It would be very unfair, un-American,
to punish all of them based on their nationality,
or based on their religion.
And you wouldn't want that to be done to you either.
So, this is an example of how you can try to tell a story
that activates a different frame
so you're not just working yourself off
the proposition that might be very outrageous or controversial
of the populist.
Then, of course, when you tell stories, you need to mind your word choice.
So, some of you might know, in the discussion that we -
and the AfD and Alice Weidel, pictured here, also did this -
where we often talked about "streams of refugees",
streams of people coming to our country.
What that does is, basically, you frame people as a natural disaster.
And what do you do when you are facing the tsunami, the flood, and so on?
Well, you build dams.
The solution naturally flows from the frame that is being activated.
So be very careful.
Never use those kind of words.
What if, instead of talking about refugees,
we talked about people seeking protection?
Or even "newcomers". That even sounds nice, right?
A new music band and newcomers in our country.
What if we talked not about a refugee crisis,
but a solidarity crisis?
And if we go away from this topic,
if you are confronted with the accusation
"you are fake news" and you are a journalist,
you shouldn't say, "I'm not fake news."
You should say, "OK, let's have a discussion about truth in journalism."
You activate a different frame and, from there on, you've better chances.
So, if you talk about climate change,
well change might be good even, right?
I mean, a bit of change, here and there, and a bit warmer ...
might be even nicer in a country like Germany ...
So, you should instead talk clearly about "the climate catastrophe".
That is a very different image,
and a very different effect that those words have.
Finally, don't talk about "the people".
Better: about "some people", "some citizens",
or "many citizens" and so on.
So, differentiate here.
The second thing that I think works is to expose the flawed logic of populism.
If you are in a debate, or in a talkshow,
reveal openly how the populist logic works.
So, if they want to take us back to a past that never existed
and that will probably never exist,
if they want to divide us,
and the real enemy is not the Chinese or Mexicans who are taking away our jobs,
but actually division itself -
Someone who did this remarkably well
was, for example, Emmanuel Macron, now President of France,
who in the debate with Marine Le Pen said,
"The high priestess of fear is sitting in front of me.
Mme Le Pen's idea is that we're going to leave Europe
because the others can make it, but we can't.
In the face of this spirit of defeat, I am for the spirit of conquest,
because France has always succeeded."
There you see how he calls out the logic
that the populists live from fear and anger,
and moves over to his own project, his own ideas.
And that's the third element that's very important:
you have to have your own project, your own vision.
And in Germany there has been a big black hole in the past years
in terms of vision.
But that's what we need.
And it has to have certain elements:
It needs to be inclusive, in the best tradition of liberalism.
It needs to address the feelings of impotence,
and the feeling of loss of agency,
and the insecurity that many people are feeling.
And then it needs to define new ways of participation in society.
So, how can you participate productively, economically, politically, socially?
And finally, also important, you have to sketch out a positive role for technology.
Because technology is often pictured in the public discourse
as a force of disruption that will take away our jobs
and that will cause just problems.
I think it's very important to make a strong case
for which positive effects technology can have on all our lives
if it is managed well, implemented well,
and if the benefits are spread across the board equally in society.
So this is the "Trumple the Trump" approach.
I hope I made a good case.
Personally, I'm convinced
that only if the friends of the open society
start to tell powerful, strong stories again,
with the good word choice and the good frames,
when they expose the logic of populism
and how they live from fear, frustration, and anger,
and if they are bold and courageous in their visions again,
can we hope to deal effectively with populism.
Karl Popper, one of the main philosophers of the 20th century, maybe the greatest,
he said: "The fight against tyranny, against authoritarianism,
and for democracy, for open and liberal societies,
is never over;
it needs to be fought again and again."
And so it depends, I think, on all of us to protect our democratic values,
to protect the achievements of civilization.
And it depends on all of our commitment and our joint action.
And, ultimately, of course, it depends on your communication, the way you talk.
So yes, "Talk like Trump", in terms of become an expert storyteller,
but then "Trumple the Trump", and, with it, all of populism.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)