Arlie Hochschild’s new book about her conversations over 5 years with Tea Party supporters in Louisiana not only has long-term implications for how we approach politics but also has useful short-term implications for how we approach voters in the next two months. Although hard-core Tea Party types will not be won over before November, their underlying emotions are substantially shared by swing voters, the type of people who I’ve often talked with canvassing. Understanding what Hochschild calls their “deep story” can only help in trying to communicate and persuade.
Here’s Hochschild’s condensed version of that deep story, unanimously confirmed as accurate by the people she talked with, taken from her recent Mother Jones article.
You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Many of these line-cutters are black—beneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare. Some are career-driven women pushing into jobs they never had before. Then you see immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, the Syrian refugees yet to come. As you wait in this unmoving line, you're being asked to feel sorry for them all. You have a good heart. But who is deciding who you should feel compassion for? Then you see President Barack Hussein Obama waving the line-cutters forward. He's on their side. In fact, isn't he a line-cutter too? How did this fatherless black guy pay for Harvard? As you wait your turn, Obama is using the money in your pocket to help the line-cutters. He and his liberal backers have removed the shame from taking. The government has become an instrument for redistributing your money to the undeserving. It's not your government anymore; it's theirs.
So what does that tell us about how to talk with potential voters? Here’s my guesses, a bit along the lines I’d suggested earlier. Maybe these guesses are all wrong, but the point is that what we say has to aim at the actual felt story.
First, I think we should be prepared to listen without denying the experienced reality of the voters, including the painful things they often tell us about relatives, neighbors, etc. who are gaming some part of the welfare system.
Second, although it won’t help with the hard core, we should emphasize that the big leaks are at the top. However irritating the small-time freeloaders in our neighborhoods might be, the big crooks, draining much more from the economy, are at the top. They steal way too much to live around us. One of them is running for President. (Here there are plenty of specific anecdotes about DJT crookedness, stiffing workers and small businesses, etc.) I like to use specific numbers, e.g. that the 1%’ers are now taking an extra 10% of the GDP above what they took when I was a kid. That increase alone is about twice the total federal, state and local spending on all welfare-like programs, including child nutrition, medical care for the completely disabled, etc. The extra cost of our for-profit health care system, compared with Canada or Germany or anywhere else, is as big as the total spent on welfare!
Third, most people are pretty cynical, with good reason. Many of the most energized canvassers for HRC are likely to be people with very positive feelings toward her, so that connecting with swing voters or unlikely voters may require a stretch. I think that for these voters, realistic comparisons with DJT are more likely to be persuasive than are bland positive slogans. For example, one might acknowledge that HRC has worked and socialized with some pretty unsavory characters, even taking money and going to one of the weddings of a mobbed-up grifter, before she knew he’d run against her.
Fourth, there are positive things to say about what government can accomplish and how votes matter. For example, locally we can point to how our state representative and state senator led the way to blocking a toxic dump directly over our wonderful aquifer. If we’d let the Tea Party win, that law wouldn’t have happened. Those sort of concrete stories seem to register more than some of the more global issues.
Bottom line- I recommend reading the book, or at least the Mother Jones article, to help prepare for reaching people outside the bubble.