How To Do Politics Without Preaching

Two days after Donald Trump’s election to the presidency was confirmed, there was a young man outside my local tube station shouting about God. There is a hole in your heart, he said, a yearning that can never be filled with earthly pleasures. Save yourselves before it’s too late! My fellow commuters and I, stony faced and silently resentful, scuttled down the escalator as fast as we could.

I had to wonder about his communication model. It wasn’t a terrible message; it might even have resonated with some of us, in another context. It’s just not what you want to hear when you’re on your way to work, especially from a stranger. He seemed oblivious to this.

Maybe he really believed that if he just shouted at people loud enough the message would get through. Then again, perhaps he wasn’t really trying to change anyone’s mind or heart, but pleasing himself under the guise of helping others.

We criticise people for preaching to the converted, but preaching to the unconverted is much worse. The only time anyone should preach is to an audience who have chosen to hear them — people who are sitting in the pews, ready to be inspired. Otherwise, preaching is counter-productive. It gets people’s backs up. It makes them run away, scowling.

I am wary of drawing firm conclusions about what happened on November 8th. The votes are not all in yet. Many of the hot takes are based on incomplete or unreliable data. Even the tentative conclusions I draw here may be wrong. But I think there’s enough to sketch the outline of the event.

Clinton won the popular vote, and by a significant margin. Trump won the electoral college, by tipping over a series of Midwestern states Clinton was strong favourite to win: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan. He won them by very narrow margins: around one percent. What got him over the line in those states was a surge of support from white, working class voters, without college degrees, from rural areas, many of whom had voted for Bill Clinton or Obama in the past.

This is obviously not the same as saying that Trump’s voters were predominantly poor. His median voter will have been better off than Clinton’s, something that is true of all Republican coalitions in the modern era. But this election was won and lost at the margins. The majority of working class white votes were bound to go to Trump but he got more of them than expected. The majority of African-American and Hispanic votes were bound to go to Clinton, but she got slightly fewer of than expected. So the world turns.

There are many differences between Trump’s victory and Brexit, although perhaps fewer than I thought on November 7. One undeniable similarity is that there was a big turnout of white working class voters, particularly among men, and they swung the result.

Among my friends on the left side of the aisle (I have an aisle seat, I like to get up and stretch my legs now and again) there have been two competing responses to this news. One is that we need to get much better at addressing the concerns of the white working class. The other, to put it impolitely, is “screw them”. Yesterday, the Guardian published a piece by Hadley Freeman with the headline, “I’ve heard enough of the white male rage narrative”. Here’s an extract:

“Oh sure, listen to the grievances of enraged voters. But understanding them is different from indulging them, and the media and politicians — in the US and UK — have for too long conflated the two, encouraging the white victim narrative and stoking precisely the kind of nasty, race-baiting campaigns that led to Brexit and Trump…To call out voters for falling for such damagingly racist and sexist messages is viewed by politicians as a vote-killer and dangerously snobby by the media, as though working-class people are precious toddlers who must be humoured and can’t possibly be held responsible for any flawed thinking. There is no doubt the white working classes in the west have suffered in recent decades, yet no other demographic that has endured similarly straitened circumstances is indulged in this way.”

It’s difficult not read this column and not feel yourself in sympathy with it, partly because Hadley is a brilliant columnist, and also because there is truth to it. Blacks and Hispanics are worse off, economically and socially, than their white peers, yet they haven’t ended up voting for demagogues. And if we on the left excuse racism, what do we stand for anyway?

But I think the urge to turn away from these voters in disgust — and by the way, several other commentators are taking a similar line, I only pick out this column because it’s such a prominent and eloquent example — is profoundly wrong.

First of all, it’s politically defeating. One of the questions people have been asking is, why should we listen to them? Aren’t they the ones with the closed minds — shouldn’t they be listening to us? The short answer to this is: because we need their votes. When you’ve just lost an election, it’s insane to go around loudly writing off groups of voters.

The left is very good at getting angry and very bad at getting even. Instead of indulging its love of moral outrage — and I grant you, there is much to be outraged about — I’d like to see it start focusing its collective mind on how to win again.

Preaching to the unconverted — Hadley talks about “calling out” these voters — is a disastrous strategy. The following quote is from an interview with the sociologist Kathy Cramer, who has visited 27 rural communities in Wisconsin in an effort to understand white identity politics, and written a book about it:

“People are only going to absorb facts when they’re communicated from a source that they respect, from a source who they perceive has respect for people like them. And so whenever a liberal calls out Trump supporters as ignorant or fooled or misinformed, that does absolutely nothing to convey the facts that the liberal is trying to convey.”

In a broader sense, it’s now possible to see that the Clinton campaign’s strong emphasis on identity politics — on feminism, LGBQ rights, and racism — was preaching to the unconverted. It’s not that these causes are not just or important, but they weren’t meaningful to voters who weren’t already in the pews. In 2008 and 2012, Obama made a great play for white working class votes, and won a significant proportion of them. So did Clinton in the 2008 primary. In 2016 she barely bothered.

To state the obvious, if the left wants to displace Trump and the right more generally, it needs to work out how to bring some Republican (or in the UK, Tory or UKIP) voters over to its side, and that includes at least some of this group. One lesson of Clinton’s defeat, and of Brexit, is that while the left may never again win a majority of the white working class vote, it can’t afford to ignore it. Not if it hopes to win power again.

But perhaps by reducing this to an essentially tactical question, I am missing the moral dimension. So let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that you are a genius political tactician with a new campaign strategy that involves winning the next election without the votes of any of these guys. Would it then be OK to turn our backs on them?

No, it would not. First of all, while there is evidence that the Trump votes correlates with racist attitudes, “racist” is as useful a label as “black” or “white” or “working class” — that is, it’s necessary, but it hides much variation and subtlety. Being racist, or having some racist feelings, does not make you a member of the KKK. It doesn’t make you a bad person. If you’re having trouble understanding what I mean by this, re-read Obama’s Philadelphia speech from 2008 (and recall that many of the voters we’re talking about voted for Obama). Or read this by J.D Vance.

If a voter is racist, you don’t have to be OK with it. The left must stand against racism. But it must also stand against turning away from people who are suffering, on the basis that they do not meet our own moral standards, which are rarely as high we imagine them to be anyway.

“Oh sure,” says Hadley, “listen to the grievances of enraged voters”. It reads as impatient sarcasm. But actually, yeah, how about that? If you know voters like this, talk to them without bashing them over the head with their wrongness. If you don’t know any, read Kathy Cramer, J.D Vance, Arlie Hochschild, Chris Arnade. In the UK, lets’s seek out opportunities to listen to the voices of UKIP voters. Christ, let’s even read the Daily Mail.

If it’s uncomfortable or unpleasant to hear from the other side, that’s OK, that’s why they’re on the other side. You don’t have to agree with what you hear or read, but you should let it recalibrate your politics in some way. Because if you’re on the left, you need to recalibrate. You’re losing. And, politics aside, expanding your perspective on the world is always a good thing. Listening is never a bad thing (one reason why the commonplace prejudice against focus groups is so idiotic).

There is a point at which the tactical and the moral questions meet and merge. Let’s go back to the question posed by Hadley and others: why should we expend so much effort addressing the concerns of a section of the white working class? The simplest answer is that if we want to help the black or Hispanic working class, or alleviate the condition of the poor or the discriminated against more generally, we need at least some of the voters who are uneasy with blacks and Hispanics on our side.

This is the paradox of democracy and its moral beauty. Done right, it works against sectionalism, against the parochialism inherent in human nature. It forces us out of our bubbles, because in order to win elections and help the people on your side, you need to understand and help the people on the other side. Democracy has an in-built mechanism for generating empathy.

The politicians I admire, like Obama, Bill Clinton, and Tony Blair, are the ones who embrace this. I distrust any politician who does not possess the impossible aspiration to appeal all voters. Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remark wasn’t just tactically unwise; it was unbecoming of a presidential candidate. Let the pundits slice and dice; a president should be seeking to represent everyone. For similar reasons, I didn’t like Ed Miliband’s “35% strategy” and I am depressed by the apparent narrowness of Theresa May’s political ambition.

(I won’t claim to understand all the arguments around electoral systems, but one thing I like about First Past the Post is that provides a powerful incentive to go broad: to win voters from outside your natural constituency, rather than just target your own).

I cannot remember a time when liberal democracy itself has felt as vulnerable as it does now. If we lose it, it will be partly because we in the West are so used to it that we have become inured to its radicalism. Human are born tribalists; we are biologically evolved to cooperate with people within our group, and not with those outside it. Liberal democracy is untribal by definition, and in that sense, it is unnatural. Admirably so. It requires different groups, with very different beliefs and world-views, to work with common purpose. That’s bound to be really hard. If it feels easy or painless, you’re missing something.

I think it’s essential to make the effort –and it is an effort — of listening to those we consider beyond the pale, of trying to bring them closer to us, of persuading without preaching. Otherwise, we will be in unwitting collusion with those who will happily throw democracy overboard for the sake of power.