A thing happened. Town meetings all over the country told Republicans they are upset about the potential pending loss of health care. It turns out, this matters a lot to people (as does a perceived lack of oversight).
In fact, I had a Storify about that from reporter MJ Lee, which will lead to a larger point.
The Tennessee teacher who asked about ACA repeal from a Christian perspective was Jessi Bohon, interviewed here in Slate (“Meet the Teacher Whose Powerful, Christian Defense of Obamacare Made a GOP Town Hall Go Viral”):
On Thursday, Bohon challenged her representative in Congress, Republican Diane Black, on the Affordable Care Act at a public meeting—and framed her personal support for the health-care reform in explicitly religious terms.
“As a Christian, my whole philosophy in life is to pull up the unfortunate. So the individual mandate, that’s what it does. The healthy people pull up the sick,” Bohon said at the event at Middle Tennessee State University. Her concern? If Republicans repeal the ACA and offer coverage to people with chronic illnesses and pre-existing conditions via so-called high-risk pools—as several GOP proposals would do—they’ll have less coverage. “We are effectively punishing our sickest people,” Bohon said, adding that Medicaid should be expanded so we can “make everybody have insurance.” These comments inspired much of the room to all but explode with applause.
This was important in its own right, of course, but I want to highlight this last bit:
Yet when I ask Bohon what she hopes people get out of her burst of viral celebrity, she doesn’t mention religion or health insurance. She returns to her childhood, to the stereotypes Americans have of Appalachia and the south. “There are people in Tennessee, there are people from these little rural areas, that are different than they are categorized to be.” And what might that be? “Hillbilly dumb.” That’s wrong, she says. “I learned everything about taking care of your community growing up there.”
This may sound familiar to you all, especially if you’ve followed the work of David Wong (Cracked), of JD Vance, or the postings of Chris Arnade (who travels the country talking to Trump voters, something he got into while doing stories about opioid addiction in small towns). This recent Storify has some salient points, even if anecdotes are not data (which is the most pointed Arnade criticism):
Arnade isn’t a universal favorite here, but skip the messenger and look at the message. What does it mean and what do we take from it?
Well, let’s take this from it: the recent election suggests these two world views do clash, and instead of looking to cooperate, they are vying for supremacy. I know which side I’d be on, and where my sympathies lie, but the point is that it’s better not to have the battle at all, if it can be avoided.
Right now, we have people in the WH (Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions and Steve Miller, to name three) who would be more than happy to exploit that kind of tension. It doesn’t take a political savant to see them using the Nixon playbook on law and order to try and consolidate power.
So it seems to me that trying to find common ground for at the least the persuadable voters (not all of them) that Arnade speaks to, accomplishes a number of things. It might recruit a few. It might keep more on the sidelines (a remarkable feature of the Resistance protests is how few counter-protests there are). It might define the actual deplorables in their extremism (see “The Left Hates You, Act Accordingly” from Townhall). And it might avoid the all-out battle, if not civil war, they seem to be working toward.
How can one do this? My thinking is that it’s best done by finding shared values. Honesty. Rule of Law. Competence. Awareness that Trump and his WH are trying to rewrite what those shared values are, at least with his supporters.
George Lakoff puts it his own way:
Focus on democracy and freedom. In a government by, for, and of the people, there is, or should be, no distinction between the public and the government. The consequences are:
- Empathy: government should care about, and for, the public;
- Transparency: government should inform the public truthfully;
- Freedom and Opportunity: the private depends on public resources, both for private enterprise and private life. For example, if you’re not educated, you’re not free. If you have no health care, you’re not free. If you’re impoverished, you lack opportunity.
Jonathan Haidt talks more about the how:
The Rider and the Elephant
Haidt makes a key distinction between two types of human cognition: intuition and reasoning. Intuitive responses to questions or situations are automatic; they come instantly and easily. Such automatic processes have controlled animal minds for hundreds of millions of years. Human reasoning is a relatively new invention; it’s much slower and requires more work. Haidt uses the metaphor of an elephant and a rider, the elephant being intuition and the rider being reasoning.
The elephant usually has an immediate response to moral issues. The rider is very good at making up post hoc explanations for whatever the elephant has just done, and justifying what the elephant wants to do next. This doesn’t mean the rider can never override the elephant – it can, but that takes a lot more effort than letting the elephant go where it wants.
The important lesson to take from this is that if you want to convince someone of something, you’ll usually fare better if you talk to the elephant – that is, appeal to the person’s intuition and emotions.
I might say it different: we have shared values, and they are best told with stories (for the elephant) not numbers (for the rider, aka Big Data). This is why having a strong narrative is so important for elections (I wrote about it here). That’s why the anecdotes from the teachers we started this piece out with are so important, and why those town halls matter.
None of that means endorsing racism or racists. It means engaging (if you choose to) without a chip on your shoulder to start with, however well earned you think it is. It means not assuming these folks are stupid and it means avoiding shaming them as much as you can. If that’s an unpopular opinion, so be it.
Will it work? This Republican ex-congressional Chief of Staff thinks we have the advantage going into 2018 (see full Storify here).
Remember, you can empathize with Trump voters and try to understand them without sympathizing (i.e. agreeing) with them. This is important if you want to communicate with them. And in turn, that is the key to November 2018. It’s tough to do, to swallow your anger about being right all along, but the rewards make it worth looking forward, not backward.
And it sure beats what the WH has in mind, which is dividing us as much as possible so they can take advantage of the Chaos. Don’t let that happen. Don’t give them an easier win.
For every issue you have, train your sights on the WH, not the voters. When we win in 2018, you’ll be glad you did.