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Focus more on stories than on facts

This is the eighth and final installment of a series of posts on lessons we progressives should take on the Presidential election. The overview is here.

Okay, so this last installment is about tactics, not policy.  Progressives need to start telling better stories.  Facts are important and all, but … well, most people obviously don’t really care about them.  It doesn’t matter that NAFTA probably was a net positive on the economy as a whole as long as the opposition has a story of a factory closing. Global consensus among people that have spent their lives on studying climate is irrelevant when we have scandalous emails that show peer review processes are not perfect. Saying you had one position on the Iraq invasion even when there is demonstrable proof you had another is irrelevant if you have a cool narrative about a secret conversation with a TV personality.

Note that I’m NOT being snarky here.  I’m being absolutely serious that, as far as elections or other public-opinion-driven areas go, facts don’t matter nearly as much as stories.  Hillary never told a good story about her email server, so people were left to parse her unconvincing reasons.  She could have had a two-hour press conference, answering all the questions, saying that she valued the privacy of herself and her friends, and she didn’t trust that the government would do a good job at protecting it.  She should have leaned on how Snowden stole stuff from the U.S. and she protected it, saving the country from those issues. She should have walked through the various emails and how she was trying to help her friends and be loyal to both them and her country. She should have admitted that she was jaded by her past service and how people always attack her and her family, and she should have stressed she wanted to protect them, too.  She should have gone through print-outs of Colin Powell’s emails from his private email address, and Jeb Bush’s, and then, when all that was exhausted and no reporter had anything left to ask, she should have gone into a detailed account of people hurt by Trump University and the Trump company’s refusal to release emails about defrauding people.  She should have brought the mechanics he didn’t pay to the press conference. And so on.  She should have had simple, straightforward, real-world stories.

We should stop bringing up the computer models that show climate change.  Of course they do, and of course it is caused, to a large degree, by humans.  But let’s not talk about that anymore, okay?  Or at least not lead with it.  Let’s talk about how ski resorts are having to close early, costing jobs.  Let’s talk about how California goes through a multi-year drought followed by monsoon-like weather, with videos of dams almost breaking. Let’s talk about more ticks in Arkansas because the climate is better for them now. Let’s tell stories.

And let’s remember to tell the RIGHT stories, with the right values.  Who are you trying to convince?  You need to use the appropriate moral frame. Progressives want to hear about equality and empathy.  Conservatives want to hear about loyalty and purity, about free market and American values. And those are good things!  We don’t have to dissemble in any way – we just have to put more focus in areas that we don’t usually put that much focus.  It’s like you are single but trying to sell your house to a family of six.  You don’t focus on the awesome party capabilities, blackout curtains, and sound insulation; you describe the benefits of a split plan, of having the master and the other rooms on the same floor, of proximity to school and distance from high-traffic areas. Like any time you want to be persuasive, you consider your audience and focus on the areas that they would care about.

This doesn’t mean we stop trying to get facts and evidence back in the public discourse.  Of course we do, and we push it to apply to people of any stripe. Only robots and Vulcans only care about facts.  Facts need context, and we lost the war of contextualization during the Presidential campaign … so we lost, period.

We should stop doing that.

Thoughts?

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