Sarcasm is the lowest form of humor AND an ineffective influencing tool
Haha.
Points scored.
Jordan Klepper has thrown down every kind of dunk on Trump voters: Tomahawk Windmill, Elbow Hang, Between the Legs…
Endless points scored by emphasizing (definitely not EMPATHIZING) how stupid someone must’ve been to vote for Donald Trump
The phrase “trump voters are stupid” gets 5700 hits on Google. Apparently, we have won the taunt tournament
Now what?
Does it do any good to dunk on the people who voted for Trump? I don’t think so. Please tell me what you think in the comments even if you don’t read this whole post.
Why do I doubt that affronting the other side does any good? Well, my definition of good is stopping the immediate madness and making sure at the next election that an electoral landslide blocks further degrading of democracy. That requires persuading people to change their minds. Starting by calling them stupid and worse seems a bad idea. What do you think? Please offer your own take in the comments section
I held onto this clip from December of the head of the Wisconsin Democratic Party explicating usefully and factually why a key segment of the electorate may have voted for a man who is a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, an acknowledged fraud, and now a a flouter of the Constitution. It wasn’t because they were stupid. Okay, maybe some of them are stupid, but stupid people are generously distributed in this country regardless of political affiliation. The answer was in what wasn’t in their wallets: money to buy what they need and want.
The general disdain for these particular people disturbs me but the failure to concoct a plan for bringing them back onto the side of good government shocks me. I’m not talking about trying to influence the insane haters out there clamoring for jail and worse as consequences for people like Adam Schiff and Liz Cheney. No one is changing their minds. Trying to go for everybody on the other side is the same as trying to go for nobody on the other side. Instead, we (anyone against what Trump is doing) need to reclaim the recent converts; ignite their buyer’s remorse. Over 77 million people cast their votes for the Republican candidate for president of the United States. That total was 3 million more than Trump collected in 2020 and over 14 million more than he won in 2016. My belief is in the persuadability those in the margins we should seek to change opinions and actions around voting and even polling responses.
And yet, on ‘OUR’ side (surely a misnomer, as perhaps the only thing that unites us amidst our petty quarrels about identity, affiliation, and wokeness is our dismay at DJT being President again and delight in jokes about Trump voters) the dominant response to the craziness of this administration seems to be insult and invective at everyone who pulled the lever for Trump/Vance. Situation very serious > be funny at the other side’s expense? Not my conclusion but if you have different answers please go straight to the comments and throw them at me.
So, what would work better than nonstop slang-whanging and giddy ridicule. Let’s start with the important slice of voters for whom the switch to DJT was an economic decision. Paul Krugman wondered if Trump would be called on his inflation lie, but are the members of this group going to be able to connect the dots as to how Trump’s actions are already causing their expenses to rise? Was it ignorance that led them to vote the way they did?
Some claimed that information deficit as the cause. It is true that many American are unlikely to get information that would change their mind about what’s going on if they live in a self-crated bubble or the news deserts described by Dan Kennedy. But does factual information even matter in this dynamic? Kennedy is quick to point out that the news deserts don’t explain fully why people in those counties might’ve voted for Donald Trump: “Trump’s dominance of news deserts doesn’t imply a cause and effect. That is, people didn’t necessarily vote for Trump because they lack local news. Instead, a simpler and more obvious correlation may be at work: News deserts are concentrated in counties that tend to be rural and have populations that are less educated and poorer than the national average — exactly the kind of places that went strongly for Trump in 2024 and in 2020.”
Proponents of the view that it is the ignorance of folks that prompted them to vote for Trump often cite Theodore Adorno:
All modern fascist movements… have aimed at the ignorant; they have consciously manipulated the facts in a way that could lead to success only with those who were not acquainted with the facts. Ignorance with respect to the complexities of contemporary society makes for a state of general uncertainty and anxiety, which is the ideal breeding ground for the modern type of reactionary mass movement.”
— Theodor Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality (1950)
Steven Bratman wrote on threads a few months ago in a post that is now deleted that the notion promoted by Theodore Adorno connecting fascism to the ignorant turned out to be incorrect: “We keep kidding ourselves, comforting ourselves, with the idea that it is the ignorant who acquiesce to this seizure of authority. If only people had the facts, they would decide differently. … Adorno was a philosopher, not a social scientist. No matter how brilliant you are, you cannot deduce the states of mind of people you have never met by sitting and thinking; you need data. Later sociological evaluations of those who joined fascist movements based on discoverable facts don’t fit very well with this “authoritarian personality” analysis. … As one counterexample to the claim, university professors and college students were greatly overrepresented among those who joined fascist parties. Fascism, especially in the form of Nazism, was an idealistic movement for many of the best informed members of society.” Heidegger wasn’t the only intellectual to be friendly to Der Fuhrer
They know he hasn’t done what he said he was going to do but having committed to him they must live in a state of cognitive dissonance until someone or something snaps them out of it. And before the next election. So if facts and information aren’t going to do it for people who voted for Trump, what is going to move the hearts and minds of the Biden switchers? That movement is critical to any successful formation of resistance against everything that is coming out of the Trump White House and his federal agencies.
Collin Jennings, the author of Enlightenment Links: Theories of Mind and Media in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2024), wrote a wonderful essay recently about AI and how it might flatten the architecture of thinking on the Internet. But the phrase in it that has stuck with me is more general in application: “The mind follows connections found in the world.” In order to change the minds of people, you must relate to their world, not expect them to confirm to yours. The technique of dunking and insulting and just plain shouting at those who voted for Trump to give him that 1.6 percentage plurality in the last election provides a connection to what in the target’s world? Anger? Shame? Guilt? I don’t think that those emotions are likely to promote the kind of change we seek in those fellow citizens.
The knowledge of how to change people politically — to get them to realize their interests align better with a certain group of proposed representatives over another group — is not in my toolbox. I did spend a lot of time in my straight jobs with organizations, however, on initiating, facilitating, and solidifying change in attitudes and behavior. The project might just have been a new system of performance review that would be fairer and more of a learning experience for everyone or it might’ve been shifting to a completely different strategy that needed the ‘buy-in’ of the entire employee population. I did not bat 1.000 in these engagements but most of the changes desired by various organizations’ leaders happened. Is some of that experience transferable to our current need to regain the support of those who switched or stayed home on Election Day?
There are a lot of people who wrote about these kinds of initiatives. I know because I read them all. Doing that and then collaging the parts I liked into my approach is the autodidact’s autobahn to success. But I actually got to know the person who with two co-authors offered what in my experience was the most ‘evidence-based’ and experience tested approach to effecting large scale change. His name was Edwin Nevis, one of the most famous Gestalt practitioners ever in the United States, and more powerfully to me a really nice guy who took the time to teach me some things. Together with Lancourt and Vasallo, Ed wrote a book called Intentional Revolutions. I believe it could apply to what our current goal should be: change the beliefs and actions of enough of our fellow citizens to make noise, make a difference, and maybe even make ‘good trouble’.
7 Influence Strategies To Get People To Think & Behave Differently
Edwin was a consultant to us on our work-based action learning and leadership development programs, and that is where I first came across these influence strategies. Later on, I developed a series entitled Ten Tools, which took participants through my collection of techniques and methods for organizational surviving and thriving learned from others. The ten (and a few extras added later) seemed to me to correlate with whatever success I and others observed and/or mentored by me were able to achieve. The Seven Influence Strategies was one of the tools and since I’m already asking a lot of questions in this piece let me use the framework to pose here a few more related to changing and reenlisting swing voters:
- If we spent $1.5 billion to try to elect the very estimable and worthy, harassed and failed, what lessons do we now have about what actually constitutes persuasive communication? Dem bosses and fundraisers: please tell those of us who donated. We deserve some return on that investment.
- How are we getting more people to participate (giving money does not count as participation) in our political movement instead of relying upon the well-paid consultants who have now let us to 2 presidential defeats in the last 3 elections? We need actual fellowship, not intangible ‘followers’.
- Who are the role models for our side? Humans adopt new attitudes from role models; recent experience shows us that as wonderful as Beyoncé, Oprah, and Taylor Swift are the role models for this attitude change have to be public servants who are doing more than posting on social media, who are in soup kitchens, PTA meetings, supermarkets, emergency rooms, and regulatory sessions on subjects like insurance hikes and new expensive requirements for average Joes and Jills. In other words, they have to be where those swing voters meet the hardships of their own roles.
- Does the insulting and arguing behavior towards those on the other side lead to the wrong kind of expectancy, the wrong sort of self-fulfilling prophecies? The first fifty times Jordan Klepper showed us MAGA madness were funny, but now?
- This might be the toughest one: what structure are we actually proposing? One of the great advantages that Trump and the Republican Party had was that they were proposing a structure that was very clear: we are going to blow everything up.
- Connected to the last one, what are the extrinsic rewards that come from shifting sides? It’s a pretty good bet that Trump will try to figure out some sort of cash payment to every taxpayer with his name on the check. What are we offering that’s more long-term and realistic? Our vision seems to be ‘magic potion’ of platitudes: throw in hot words and laudable phrases and expect something nourishing to emerge. Hit and miss: see Obama versus Biden presidencies.
Jon Stewart at about 17:30 of his February 24th rant about DOGE offered a hint, a start, by stating that “we live in the upside down and don’t blame the corporations”, an acknowledgement of a boundary for any electorally successful vision: we ain’t getting rid of capitalism anytime soon now that the 2024 meteor is going to miss Earth. Stewart’s most substantial suggestion about what the vision must be (a statement which he delivered after having seriously cut his hand while smashing a cup as part of the bit) is a worthy start: “Capitalism is by definition exploitative (sic). That’s how it operates. That’s fine. But then government’s role should be to ease the negative effects on Americans of that exploitation.” The swing voters always get exploited. Show them how you will stop the parts that most hobble their lives.
The last of the seven influence strategies is coercion. I always counsel people in my audiences when talking about the 7 Influence Strategies that once you use coercion you can’t use any of the others. They have no value anymore. You have burned the bridge to any other type of influence because people will not forget that you coerced them. Is it possible that people felt coerced by previous actions? That’s a question to which I hope others will offer answers.
That’s what I said at the top: there are more questions than answers in my old head and I hope others will question what I have outlined here and offer an. Please also re-stack this in an effort to get as many people to try to answer these questions as possible. Because we need more people on our side and were not getting them there through our methods so far.
