The Return of Facts
‘Forward’ comes out on paperback on October 4th! Here is a never-before-published excerpt from the book. I hope you enjoy it and will consider buying a copy!
The Return of Facts
I ran for president on a platform of eradicating poverty. In order to compete, I became a character that was at first marginalized and has now been normalized.
There have been times when I’ve felt like the Black Mirror character in the episode “Fifteen Million Merits,” where the protagonist played by Daniel Kaluuya rages against the system and is then given a weekly TV show, plugging into the system again in a different way.
At the beginning of my presidential campaign, way back in October 2018, I spoke at an Iowa Democratic event, the Johnson County Democrats’ BBQ fundraiser. It was billed as a gathering of potential presidential candidates, though I was the only candidate who had actually declared: the speakers were Tulsi Gabbard, the Oregon senator Jeff Merkley, Governor Jay Inslee of Washington, and me.
I spoke directly after Jeff Merkley. His speech had a series of applause lines invoking health care, drug companies, Betsy DeVos, Brett Kavanaugh, separating children from families at the border, internment camps, climate change, voter suppression, corruption, Democratic majorities, and blue-collar working families, among other topics.
My introduction was not great: the county supervisor said to the crowd, “Keep an open mind, there may be twenty-five candidates running, it’s our job to start weeding them out. This man has some very interesting ideas.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement. I delivered my usual remarks about automation, a transforming economy, and universal basic income. My speech cited several facts about Iowa and job loss: the state had already lost forty thousand manufacturing jobs and twelve thousand retail jobs. The country’s largest truck stop—Iowa 80—was in Walcott, Iowa. What happens when the trucks drive themselves? I got very limited applause; my main applause lines were when I referenced health care and the value of parents.
I walked offstage thinking, “Huh, did I not do a great job? Am I not a fit for this state?” In most cases politicians are communicating with their most active partisans in the most activating language possible. They are throwing out a red meat list of issues they know will elicit a fiery response.
A year later I would give a similar speech in Iowa at the Liberty and Justice Dinner at the Wells Fargo Arena in Des Moines for about fourteen thousand people. By then, attendees were able to shout answers to my questions.
“One state has had something like universal basic income since 1982,” I proclaimed. “And what state is that?”
“Alaska!”
“And how do they pay for it?”
“Oil!”
“And what is the oil of the twenty-first century?”
“Technology!”
Eventually, my facts had become symbols that brought with them their own responses. I had managed to introduce a new language and new applause lines to the people of Iowa. It had taken a year.
I’ve had thousands of conversations with Americans of all political backgrounds. If you sit down with the average person and ask a question like “Hey, do you think prescription drug prices are too high?” or “Do you think you should have health care even if you lose your job?” most people will agree with you regardless of their political affiliation. But if you use loaded terms like “Do you think we should have socialized medicine?” that have been coded as negative, many people will dislike it intensely.
Michael Grunwald wrote in Politico in 2020, “There is a line of thinking that America has entered a kind of postmodern political era where the appearance of governing is just as politically powerful as actual governing, because most Americans now live in partisan spin bubbles that insulate them from facts on the ground.” Passing laws, solving problems, and measuring impacts don’t matter anymore. You can simply argue for your version of reality and aligned media outlets will trumpet and reinforce that narrative to your people. Value statements and virtue signaling have assumed the role of laws and policy for many in the day-to-day back-and-forth of cable news.
Instead of achieving results, our leaders are asked to demonstrate the correct moral approach by evincing sadness or anger, invoking certain words and issues, and inveighing against the excesses of the other side. Speaking to a group is now an enormous expression of alignment or allegiance. Neither side can pass laws, so we are reduced to warring languages and symbols.
The former Michigan congressman Justin Amash observed of fellow members of Congress in 2020 that there is now a “performative aspect” to their activities and “the sad truth is that the majority of them prefer this system . . . If they bend the knee to leadership, say we’ll go along with whatever show you’re doing, you’re putting on the Democrat Show, you’re putting on the Republican Show . . . As long as they play along and do the performance, they are taken care of, they’re babied.”
In his book The Righteous Mind the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt tried to answer a fundamental question: Why is it that well-meaning people can disagree so violently when it comes to politics? He argues that there are six fundamental human values that cross all cultures and constitute our universal sense of morality: caring, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Haidt posits and observes that people on the progressive side of politics naturally use arguments that emphasize the values of caring and fairness: “Every child deserves a quality public education” or “Women should have equal rights.” Conservatives acknowledge caring and fairness but are much more likely to make appeals to loyalty, authority, and sanctity: “Protect our troops,” “Respect law enforcement,” or “Preserve American families and values.”
You can see this dynamic play out in issue after issue. When it comes to separating children from their parents at the southern border, progressives are outraged at the shocking mistreatment of families. Conservatives are more likely to question why immigrants are breaking the law by entering the country illegally. The first point of view is about caring and empathy. The second is about authority.
Haidt argues that conservatives’ ability to use and appeal to all six values gives them a broader moral palette that gives them an advantage in political communication. They can hit more varied notes that ring true to different types of people.
Case in point: I remember sitting in the waiting room before one Fox News appearance watching the programming before I was to be interviewed. The hosts were showing images of the remains of soldiers arriving back in the States on a flight from Afghanistan after being killed by an explosive device. The MSNBC stories while I was waiting in their greenroom were generally about Trump officials’ malfeasance or families separated at the border. There is a specific symbolic language that works for people on each side. Fox News ratings are typically about 60 percent higher than MSNBC’s or CNN’s; more Americans self-identify as conservatives and enjoy appeals to loyalty, authority, and sanctity than caring and fairness.
Our media organizations relentlessly push us into tribes with our own applause lines and sources of outrage. Our leaders are transformed into characters to either cheer or boo, to catalog their steps or missteps. We are degenerating into a set of characters in a play, with the media mapping our relative rise and fall while our communities at home fall apart. As the author Philip Howard put it, we are playing games of “You lose, I lose,” passing the ball back and forth while the people lose no matter what.
While campaigning for president, I met many people who voted for Donald Trump; this group includes some family members of mine. The vast majority of them struck me as good people. Many seemed open to supporting me or at least listening to me because I adopted a language that was neutral in their view; it wasn’t coded either positively or negatively. It was for the most part just numbers and economic trends. Later, a January 2020 survey of my supporters indicated that 42 percent of them weren’t planning on supporting the Democratic nominee if I didn’t win the nomination. I was using a different terminology and moral language and thus reached people who weren’t traditionally Democratic or, in many cases, even political.
I awakened a significant group of people who were not politically engaged. In the book Open Versus Closed, the political psychologists Christopher Johnston, Howard Lavine, and Christopher Federico tested responsiveness to various political opinions among those who did not follow politics. They found that disengaged citizens had less of a fixed political identity based upon their psychological profile. They were more pragmatic and practical when presented with a question. They reacted to a policy by trying to answer “what will this policy do for me?” They heard “$1,000 a month” and did the math.
Meanwhile, those who are more politically attentive were more likely to try to answer “what will supporting this policy say about me?” They are joining a group.
This indicates something very important—that political engagement ends up forming an allegiance based on perceived values and identity as opposed to perceived advantage or disadvantage of a policy. If you watch a lot of Fox or MSNBC or listen to conservative radio, you actually get pushed into tribes that are completely distinct from how you might be affected by, say, a tax cut. It’s one reason why some voters seem to “vote against their own interests”; they define their interests based on what their vote says about them rather than what they think their vote will do for them.
My appeal—which struck many partisans as ridiculous initially—was to say we should give everyone enough money to get by. The politically disengaged heard this and responded, “Hey, that would help me a lot.” This appeal was initially dismissed because it didn’t fall into an existing group narrative or language structure. But eventually this idea made headway among the more engaged as well.
‘Forward’ comes out on paperback on October 4th – get your copy today!
