At a February 10 talk sponsored by the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, Anand Giridharadas, editor-at-large for TIME and an MSNBC political analyst, spoke with Miguel Centeno, Vice Dean at the School of Public and International Affairs and Musgrave Professor of Sociology. Giridharadas assessed the state of liberal discourse today, focusing on the underuse of narratives of patriotism and personal transformation, as well as the degradation of common institutions in political rhetoric.
Giridharadas framed contemporary liberal discourse as existing in the context of five major crises facing Americans—poor healthcare access, economic injustice, racial injustice, threats to democracy and the rule of law, and the climate crisis. The concurrence of these disasters sometimes reveals the need for policies addressing them. COVID-19, for example, has provided a new argument for advocates of universal healthcare coverage, since in the face of the pandemic, Giridharadas said, “You are only as healthy as the least insured member of your community.”
At the same time, these issues sometimes intersect to politically undermine potential solutions. When people perceive social unrest and a threat to their racial status, for example, they may be less willing to support institutions for the common welfare.
Giridharadas described patriotism as the first of two languages missing from Democratic and progressive messaging. As the Republican Party has grown more ideological, Giridharadas said, Democrats have reacted by emphasizing facts and data and avoiding playing to emotions, including patriotism. Yet playing to emotion, he said, is a value-neutral tactic. While it can be used to undermine democracy, it can also drive positive change.
“There’s a feeling a lot of Democrats have that [emotion] is beneath them, that it’s a debasement of what politics is. I think they’re wrong about it. A lot of them struggle with it. I think there’s also a feeling with patriotism that it becomes thoughtless jingoism very quickly, that it’s ugly chest-beating nationalism… it’s very important to say that’s not the only way to be patriotic, and nationalism and patriotism are not the same thing.”
The second missing language Giridharadas described is the language of personal transformation, or the deeply American idea that individuals can change their own lives.
Giridharadas contrasted the traditional, human rights-based progressive argument for universal healthcare, which fails to resonate with many Americans, with an argument he said aligns more closely with these two elements.
“For some white guy in a factory in northern Michigan, statistically, those arguments may not appeal to him. Statistically they’re not appealing to him. Why wouldn’t we also say to that guy, ‘When we send our troops overseas, if one person falls on the battlefield, they don’t leave that person down. They go back, they get that person so some bride in Indiana doesn’t have to wonder about what happened to her husband the rest of her life’, right? ‘And when I’m president, we’re going to not leave people down on the battlefield of healthcare in this country.’ We know from so much message work that now you’re working with the values that person has. That person has values about troops, about solidarity in war. That person’s strongest sense of solidarity values have to do with a militaristic context. You play into that.”
Giridharadas acknowledged liberals’ resistance towards this argument, which is rooted in a history of US military intervention abroad, but said that enacting progressive policies requires making uncomfortable pitches.
“You’re not endorsing a war. You’re making a pitch. And if you can get kids healthcare by making a militaristic pitch to a guy in Michigan that explains solidarity to him in a way that strums on his chords instead of yours, to me you’re doing something very valuable.”
Arguments for universal healthcare based on personal transformation, Giridharadas said, may also be more effective at convincing moderates compared to framing healthcare as an issue of justice, as was done by Senators Sanders and Warren in their 2020 campaigns.
“Ask people, `What would your life be like if there was Medicare for All? What business would you start? Which corrupt boss would you quit working for, and what dream would you go follow if your job wasn’t tied to your healthcare? What would you study?… What would your evening with your children be like if you could work two jobs or one job instead of three jobs or four jobs? What would you do with them, what books would you read with them?` There is this whole way of speaking to people that actually helps people see what their life would be like and plays on these deeper chords of patriotism and other sources of belonging. If Democrats don’t learn to speak in these languages, they can’t only blame the power structure for blocking these changes. They have to blame their own lack of talent.”
Giridharadas later discussed political name-calling and the degradation of government and the commons in political discourse.
Those who falsely call Democrats socialists, Giridharadas said, have won the argument because of a lack of an opposing story. Rather than this name-calling, he said, he is more concerned about quiescence on the part of Democrats.
“For example, no Democrat today in office, except maybe Bernie Sanders or AOC, is willing to use language like, ‘I welcome their hatred,’ which is what FDR said about very rich people. So give the game back to them. How many people in American public life at that level would use a term like, the term I use all the time, plutocrats? They call them billionaires—fine, let’s call them plutocrats. They are ruling through wealth, they are literally plutocrats.”
The fundamental challenge of politics, Giridharadas said, is of reaching people who are busy and don’t have time to pay attention, then convincing them that you will fight for them more than the other side.
“Voters are not as rational, as a lot of scholarship shows, as we often imagine… instead of just saying, `You shouldn’t call us that`, let’s define those people. Let’s define the people who only work for the wealthy. Let’s have them on the run… I’d like to see Democrats learn to call them some accurate names.”
Giridharadas concluded by discussing America’s common institutions and how they’ve been denigrated over the past generation.
“What I urge young people to realize is that you only get a society as good as the quality of your common institutions. That has not been the story of this era. The story of this era has been government is bad, government is a leech, government is communist, government is Maduro’s Venezuela, government is working for welfare queens, government is the biggest threat to your liberty… these are the stories of our time. They’re idiotic, but they’ve been very persuasive. They’ve been very well funded. They have created a culture in which even Democrats like Bill Clinton say the era of big government is over. And the challenge of this era is not to win individual elections within this bad paradigm. It’s to break the paradigm.”
The problem, Giridharadas said, is that work done alone and in private has been cast as better than what is done together, democratically. Rather than pursuing change through social venture capital, donation-with-purchase consumer goods, philanthropy, and other private frameworks, Giridharadas emphasized the commons as the source of true change.
“When you clear that brush, a new way of making change becomes possible, which is actually the old way of making change that we knew about before we got waylaid. And that is changing the laws, the policies, the institutions that govern us in common. If you are a young person wondering how to make your dent, how to make your change, look at the issues you care about. Look at the problems that most bother you, and ask yourself this simple question: Is the solution I’m thinking about public, democratic, institutional, and universal? Does it solve the problem at the root for everybody? And if it does, march in that direction.”
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