As happens with me pretty often, I had several seemingly unrelated ideas come together today in my head. I want to put this out there before I forget the way they link up.
Here's the takeaway for those who are too busy to go beyond the orange squiggle of doom:
First: Conservatives cannot be convinced of the wrongness of their position by facts, by evidence or by argument.
Second: Repeating any conservative argument, even to refute it, makes it stronger, more influential, more "sticky" and more difficult to get rid of.
Last: Facts and figures do not work to convince anyone of the rightness of a position. Moral arguments do.
The first fact was demonstrated in several studies, most notably at Yale and the Pew Center. You can't convince a conservative of opposing facts - especially an educated conservative, paradoxically enough. The other two are demonstrated in George Lakoff's work on cognitive psychology. Follow me over the squiggle for some discussion.
First, let me ask you this question. How do you train a muscle to do something? You use it for that thing until whatever it is you want to do with the muscle - squat, lift, flex, or pull - becomes automatic. We call it "muscle memory." Soon enough you don't have to think about it; you just do it.
The brain works the same way. Repeat an idea over and over again, and it takes root. The brain's cognitive pathways get stimulated by some idea, and it takes hold. The more it hears the idea, the more it takes hold.
This means that the last thing we should be doing is playing the defensive game and trying to refute the arguments of the right. Even if we say "that's not correct," we are bringing up their arguments and reinforcing them in the brains of everyone who hears them. We should keep their words and arguments off our lips and off our minds, and work to get our own messages out instead.
That's the basic gist of George Lakoff's recent article, "The Santorum Strategy." It's a great article, and I recommend it.
For me, this ties in with the Yale study, which talks about how trying to refute conservative beliefs make them stronger, stickier and harder to eradicate in the conservative brain - especially the most-educated conservative brain. This makes sense when you think about how deeply an educated conservative steeps him- or herself in the stories that the conservative right are telling. No wonder they're so impervious to our facts and figures! Not only do they believe Fox News, but they have a vested interest in continuing to believe it, and to be able to parrot it off in response to any challenge, because they have status to maintain. It is - forgive me for the metaphor - a no-brainer.
Another thing we need to be aware of is that we aren't disseminating the progressive moral system, and we need to be. Lakoff talks about this, too - human beings don't respond to facts and figures. We respond to moral stories. Not even the most-educated and most open-minded and most critically thinking people respond to facts and figures as well as we respond to moral stories. And the progressive moral story is centered on preventing harm and providing care, fairness, and reciprocity. Lakoff's view is that we put the society in the position of helping individuals, while conservatives do it the other way around.
So we should be emphasizing all the things that fit with our moral system. We should talk about how health care for all is the right thing to do because it helps everyone in society. We should talk - a lot - about various social safety nets that we either should have in place, but don't, or have in place, but inadequately. We should talk about how it is to society's benefit to have an educated populace, and that education through the doctoral level should be considered a public good, not a private benefit, and invest in it as such (as the newly promulgated Student Loan Forgiveness Act of 2012 suggests).
We should be talking about public goods and the public good. We should talk about the social safety net and how vital is is to societal success. We should talk about fairness, and reciprocity, and how we are all connected in this important social network, and how nobody makes it on their own. We should make videos like this Elizabeth Warren speech go viral and mention her points every chance we get.
But there's one other piece to this puzzle that I think is relevant. Here it is.
It's well known in cognitive psychology that the subconscious can't take a joke. It takes what you say literally. It also can't hear negatives. If you write out and say an affirmation like "I will not eat sugary foods," your subconscious drops the "not." It just hears "I will eat sugary foods." And then you do. This is why it's so important to make affirmations a positive thing - then they don't get processed awkwardly by the brain.
We need to come up with positive messages that stick, not refutations that will make the refuted argument stick - which is what we're doing now. Obama achieved it in 2008 with his message "Hope and Change." What can we do to communicate progressive values such that we are not responding to conservative messages? What can we do to go on the attack, and get off the defense?
Suggest your best positive progressive messaging here. Let's see if we can get progressives to notice and use these techniques, instead of playing defense to our detriment.