Anand Giridharadas: Persuasion Isn't Dead
Shenker-Osorio argues that this approach all too often ends up pleasing no one, leaving the base disillusioned and the moderates merely meh. Crystal1Johnson would tweet 11 more times that day, a major increase relative to the real Crystal's posts, and in this noticeably different vein. If this theory of the 60–40 voter who needs help sorting things through has a patron philosopher, it is Anat Shenker-Osorio, a messaging consultant who is upending many of the left's long-standing assumptions about persuasion. What struck Torres was how the woman's hostility to immigrants lay on the surface but, right below it, was the seedling of another view. A few years ago, as the pandemic began and a cloud of doom rose over the horizon, I began to follow a group of these optimists: activists, educators, political professionals, and, above all, organizers. Over and over, they used these topics to suggest to Americans a certain way of looking at one another: as menacing, alien, and, therefore, unchangeable. On the walls were inspirational posters: Leadership is action, not position. A better term for moderates, then, might be "persuadables. Major in transgender activism crossword club de football. " "The story of Russian interference was a really damaging crutch for the imagination, " the Russian American writer Masha Gessen told me not long ago. This essay is adapted from The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy.
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Crystal1 also weighed in on a television remake of The Wiz, a remix of The Wizard of Oz with an all-Black cast. Managers issued detailed instructions about content and obsessed over page views, likes, and retweets. Major in transgender activism crossword club.com. And another time: "Awful! Inside was the managed chaos of activism—an array of folding chairs, hand sanitizer, packets of sugar, a microwave above a mini-fridge. Beyond that, their activities are not well known. If Russian trolls could pull us apart, can we bring ourselves back together?
Just put their food stamps under their work boots. Indeed, one of the ironies of our time is that some of the most dangerous and antidemocratic movements have managed to make their causes appear welcoming and make newcomers feel at home, whereas some of the most righteous, inclusive, and just movements give off a feeling of being inaccessible and standoffish. Major in transgender activism crossword club.fr. The ease with which the Russian government exploited these tendencies is frightening, but it also, perhaps, points to a way out: If Americans are so easily manipulated in the direction of enmity and sniping and rage, might they also be more open to persuasion than we tend to assume? The ranks of the persuadable change from issue to issue, year to year. But this real problem was sensationalized as a lurid story of irreconcilable identities.
She's smiling widely, dressed crisply in a black blazer and a white shirt. Your "moderate" stance was a temporary state—a situation, not an identity. And so she works to create messages that don't simply sell policy ideas but also try to subtly teach voters how to think about an issue. The troll farm's work seemed designed to make people wonder if their fellow citizens were really even their fellow citizens.
A year ago in Flagstaff, Arizona, I visited the office of an organizing group called LUCHA, or Living United for Change in Arizona. Hundreds of workers toiled in 12-hour shifts at the IRA offices on 55 Savushkina Street. Russia's Internet Research Agency, or IRA, had been founded in 2013 as an industrial troll farm, where workers were paid to write blog posts, comments on news sites, and social-media messages. They had encouraged the view that the basic activity of democratic life—the changing of minds—had become futile.
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When you ask people to rate their support for various issues (as opposed to parties, about which people are far more tribal), a fifth are committed to your side; a fifth are reliably for the opposition; and most people are "moderate, " which is to say their minds are in play. There is so much we have to be thankful for. " Then another group was asked if focusing on and talking about race doesn't fix anything and in fact makes things worse, and 69 percent said … yes! When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. It seemed to me that there was a faint sliver of hope in the Russian experiment. Johnson tweeted occasionally under the handle @CrystalSellsLA. More likely, you will ultimately resolve the dilemma and go with a pizza or a burger.
They will never change. The troll farm wanted Americans to regard people with different views as immovable, brainwashed, disloyal, repulsive. It read, according to the newspaper Novaya Gazeta. "White people can see aliens, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster but can't see racism, oppression or white privilege, " she wrote. If those who seek to unravel our society can figure out what moves citizens in this fragmented and confusing time, so, too, can those who wish it well. "Anger drives people to the polls; disgust drives countries apart. They believe that, yes, immigrants enrich our lives, and, yes, immigrants cost us jobs. What they shared was their dissent from the great write-off. Crystal Johnson is an actual person, a real-estate agent in Georgia. "The IRA has used Trump—and many other politicians—as vehicles to further these twin goals, but it is not about Trump himself. " Persuadable implies malleability. In their long conflict with the United States, officials in Russia have many tools of sabotage available to them.
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Krylova was a high-ranking official at the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, Russia, an ostensibly private company that was connected with Russian intelligence. I visited a summer camp for families who had adopted children of another race where, in contrast to the well-publicized explosions over critical race theory, parents were sincerely grappling with how to convince white Americans to adopt new racial attitudes while neither alienating them nor watering down the truth. Jenna also turned political disagreements into conflicts over identity—"New study confirmed: Men who are physically strong are more likely to take a right-wing stance, while weaker men support the welfare state. " The dominant view in the party, as she sees it, is: You have your base, so don't worry about them; reach out to those moderates in the middle, and if you need to water down your ideas somewhat, so be it—that is the price of big-tent living. Persuadable voters, she told me, are "the 'Good Point' People because they're like this: 'Good point.
Some posts were outright disinformation; others sought to whip up anger at the truth. Aiding Donald Trump was indeed among the IRA's objectives, but it wasn't the mission's focus. On another occasion, the account sought to meld the left's pro-abortion-rights attitudes with its aversion to war: "Liberals are brave enough to kill unborn children, but not brave enough to kill our enemies #LiberalLogic. " Follow ISIS example? Crystal1's tweets shared news stories that implied, not incorrectly, the endemic nature of white racism. "If we ask them to plant their flag on one side or the other, if we approach them that way, they're going to do so, because that's what makes us feel like rational, thinking humans—having an answer to a tough question. Linvill and Warren, the Clemson scholars, put me on to Crystal1 as an exemplar of the IRA's left-leaning trolls.
For these and other reasons, Americans have grown alienated from an idea central to democratic theory: that you change things by changing minds—by persuading. In traditional political canvassing, campaigners might knock on supporters' doors to make sure they have a plan to vote, and quickly move on. Each had to manage multiple fake accounts and produce message after message—reportedly three posts a day per account if Facebook was their medium, or 50 on Twitter. If you were pushing to increase the minimum wage, for example, you might begin by framing this as a shared value: No matter what we look like or what's in our wallets, most of us believe that people who work for a living ought to earn a living. Organizers spend as long as 30 minutes at each door, and the goal is to get people to talk and talk—about why they feel some kind of way about transgender people or undocumented people or minimum-wage workers—while the organizer listens without judgment and builds trust before trying to persuade. It could be as simple as No matter our differences, most of us want similar things. Alicia Garza, a prominent activist in the Black Lives Matter movement, argues that those who want a "woke" future must make space for the "still-waking. "
—it doesn't follow that you want a pizzaburger. The group was pushing for a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. In a survey of persuadable Minnesota voters with which Shenker-Osorio was involved, one group was asked whether focusing on and talking about race is necessary for societal progress, and 85 percent said yes. "Does #Mississippi Gov. "The message that I was able to get across to her was 'When you think of immigrants, sure, you're thinking of the border crisis or gangs or whatever the media wants to bring up that week. Moderate implies a taste for the tempered version of a thing. And who they are is a threat. LUCHA does something different, called "deep canvassing. " White people used Black Babies as Alligator Bait.
Trump, still a relatively new presidential candidate, had proposed "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on. " The second week of December 2015 was a tense one. According to the analysis provided to the Senate, the Russians were trying to amplify "a roster of social issues, " among them Black culture; police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement; the pro-police/Blue Lives Matter movement; anti-refugee content; arguments in favor of Trump and against Hillary Clinton; arguments in favor of Bernie Sanders and against Clinton; Texan culture; Confederate history; Muslim issues; LGBTQ issues; religious rights; and gun rights. Here, the politics of redistribution was turned into a difference in virility.