Sam Kriss is a writer and dilettante surviving in London.

Nobody knows what people really want better than the ones who make pop-up ads; they know it better than poets or psychoanalysts or priests of any religion. They need to be able to stir up your desire in an instant, to show you a brief vision of what you really want the most out of life, before instinct takes over and you close the window.

And what you want, most of all, is one weird trick. Ideally, something discovered by a simple-hearted ordinary citizen just like you, who managed to stumble on this incredible technique for shedding belly fat fast, or this secret pattern in the stock market averages that will let you earn millions online without ever leaving your home. There’s the promise of a new mnemonic method that will let you learn any language in days, and a loophole in female psychology that will make any woman want to sleep with you (or, less commonly, one that will make any man ready to commit). Doctors hate it.


Whole subcultures have grown up around this idea—pick-up artists, turning every human interaction into a tightly itemized flow chart; life-hacking aficionados, who insist that you’ve been eating bananas wrong your entire life and that the only proper way to live is surrounded by hundreds of tie clips and thousands of twanging rubber bands. All these messages might promise the same thing that god-kings and alchemists have been after for thousands of years—the secret to immortality and absolute power over others, a secret that must be out there somewhere among all the combinable elements of the world—but at the same time they’re testament to a fundamental neurosis in contemporary capitalist societies. This is meant to be a meritocracy, but all around you stupid and unpleasant people are getting everything they want; it must be because they have the cheat codes. So it was only a matter of time before this way of thinking made its way all the way up to the commanding heights of American politics.

In the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s nightmare waddle to victory, some sectors of the media became suddenly very excited by a simple psychological trick that could have prevented it all from happening. In the same way that one mom’s incredible discovery could end all the hassle of dieting and exercise, after a long election year of acrimonious political squabbles with maddeningly intransigent relatives or terrifyingly angry strangers on the internet, this trick would allow you to miraculously persuade people to agree with you about politics. It was discovered in 2015 by Robb Willer, a Stanford sociologist, and Matthew Feinberg, a Toronto social psychologist—but it was only after the election that their theory was held up as a discursive holy grail. In its headline to a piece on the discovery, the Atlantic described it as “The Simple Psychological Trick to Political Persuasion.” Vox, meanwhile, went with “Most people are bad at arguing. These 2 techniques will make you better.” This language should be familiar. The headlines are now indistinguishable from those clickbait ads.

The trick is this: When left-leaning people try to convince Trump supporters of the vileness of the new regime’s actions and intentions, they usually make some kind of emotive argument—they will say, for instance, that this plan to grind up millions of people into dog food and industrial lubricant is bad, because human beings have the right to life. But if you’ve ever ended up in a political argument, you’ll know this doesn’t work. The person you’re arguing with has an entirely different set of values from the ones you have. The intrinsic dignity of life is fairly low down their list of concerns. But they have others. Research by Feinberg and Willer found that self-described conservatives were more likely to support Obamacare after reading an op-ed that described it as a measure to reduce the number of “unclean, infected, and diseased Americans,” rather than one that argued for access to health care as a human right—because among conservatives, the value of “purity” is held to be more important than that of “fairness and harm.” It goes on: If you want to convince someone on the right that the violent repression of migrants is undesirable, appeal to their value of “loyalty”: Their own ancestors were migrants once, driven by the promise of a better life, and it would be a betrayal to abandon that promise now. Want to support unions? Stop talking about solidarity or wage stagnation; start talking about how they can help people achieve a state of rugged individualism. And if you don’t want to be fed feet first into the industrial meat-grinder, the most convincing argument is that your chopped-up remains would make a sickly and contaminated meal for the loyal and obedient dogs of this great nation.

That’s it. That’s the whole trick.

I’m not a social scientist, and I’m not interested in disputing the findings of Feinberg’s and Willer’s study. But it’s clear to me that taking them as a plan of action could be disastrous for a political movement.

In a Washington Post op-ed, the two authors criticized some recent left-wing actions: The neo-Nazi Richard Spencer being gloriously punched in the face, the rowdy protests at the University at Berkeley against the neo-neo-Nazi Milo Yiannopoulos. These “extreme” protests, they wrote, would only shore up support for Trump, and they had data to prove it. And it’s not untrue. But it’s only significant if you imagine that the only worthwhile goal for any political action is to endear yourself to some doughy everyman of a white conservative who is politically promiscuous but holding desperately to his core values, whose commitment to any fight for justice extends the distance of a raised fist but not as far as a thrown brick. (A New York Times article made the same point by showcasing one of the dullards in question.)

But consider what the Spencer-punching incident actually did: It gave incalculable joy and courage to the left, it let us know that these people can be defeated and made to look like the cowards they are, while the Nazis admitted that it left them less willing to parade around openly in the streets. It might have alienated some of Trump’s constituencies, but morale among his opponents is just as important. After all, it wasn’t reasonable debate that signaled the end of Sir Oswald Mosley’s Union of British Fascists, but violent protests at the Battle of Cable Street. It wasn’t polite op-eds that defeated the actual Nazis, but rather the mobilization of the entire American and Soviet economies, the agonizing push from Stalingrad and the storming of French beaches. All this is important, but in a way that the hyper-Gramscianism of Feinberg’s and Willer’s opinion-measuring is incapable of quantifying.

More fundamentally, their suggestions rest on a vulgarized version of the New York University scholar Jonathan Haidt’s “moral foundations theory,” in which certain values—care and fairness for those on the left; loyalty, authority and purity for the right—are held to be intrinsic and foundational. Some people are just predisposed to value loyalty and purity over fairness, and eventually grow into reactionary blowhards; we don’t know why, it just happens. As any good historical materialist knows, this is not the case. For someone to hold “respect for authority” in great esteem, there must first be an authority to respect. Before you can value fairness, there must be scarcity, unequal distribution and all the conditions that make unfairness possible. These values are the epiphenomena of a particular form of society. Conservative values don’t just emerge spontaneously from the individual; they’re an ideological support structure that props up theft and bloodshed and avarice.

What this means is that the one weird trick for winning political arguments really succeeds only in conceding ground to the right. When Stephen Biko was fighting for justice and against apartheid, nobody told him to reframe his arguments so as to appeal to the cherished value of racial separation. Simón Bolívar managed to build the movement that liberated half a continent without having to invoke the value of loyalty to the Spanish Empire. In the United Kingdom, the Labour Party has been playing Feinberg’s and Willer’s game for decades now. Faced with the first sparks of a rising racist nativism, the ostensible party of the left adopted a policy of appeasement, trying to conjure up the failing spectre of “progressive patriotism,” abandoning its tatty, shop-worn emphasis on solidarity and socialism for a lot of gruff nonsense about British values. It didn’t work. Instead, the sudden omnipresence of these ideas just helped the reactionary right grow even stronger, until it consumed the entire country. Cloaking your ideas in right-wing signifiers might help you win a Facebook argument. But do it too much, and you can lose the world. Just ask Tony Blair.

There’s no better example of just how useless this type of thinking can be than another article in the Atlantic, in which the former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum offers his advice for the anti-Trump movement. Examining the speakers from the Women’s March on Washington, he asks: “What is Angela Davis doing there? Where are the military women, the women police officers, the officeholders? If Planned Parenthood is on the stage, pro-life women should stand there, too.” Davis has spent a lifetime fighting for and with the oppressed; Frum tried to bludgeon the public into supporting the war in Iraq. His advice is to build a political movement drained of all politics, that fights Trump for nebulous reasons while being indifferent to his ideological particulars, that damps down even basic left-wing demands like reproductive rights, while he encourages us to “open with the Pledge of Allegiance” and “call the cops.” He doesn’t even attempt to hide the fact that his is a recipe for a conservative movement, one that might get things done, but only if those things are conservative things. He encourages any resistance to Trump to stop talking about any issue if they would “still be upset about this if Marco Rubio were president now.” Rubio was an exemplar of the kind of measly, moribund, image-obsessed conservatism that Frum admires. So were most of the other Republican contenders; so was (if we’re honest) Hillary Clinton. They all lost. Pick up their torch and you’ll lose, too.

Curiously, Frum plays the exact opposite of the game suggested by Feinberg and Miller: While he’s speaking directly to the left, and encouraging its members to adopt conservative framing and messaging, he makes no attempt to dress his own prescriptions in any leftist values—it’s all “military formulas” and pragmatic action, with a decent heft of disdain for anything remotely hippie-ish on the side. One rule for him, another for us. And his article was extremely popular, because what he does do is make that same clickbait offer: Follow these simple rules, and you can get rid of Trump.

Here is another simple rule: There’s no secret trick in politics to getting everything you want, no clever little hack that cuts through all the drudgery of building movements and changing consciousness. But there are things that work. When the left wins, it’s not through rhetorical tricks to penetrate various psychological loopholes but by offering people the promise of something better—better education, better health care, an end to war and poverty, the beginning of a real democracy. And the radical left—from Martin Luther King to Rosa Luxemburg—can deliver on its promises. This wasn’t discovered by some mythical suburban mom, or through psychological experiments by Stanford professors. But conservatives hate it.