Matt Miller wrote a fascinating op-ed column in the New York Times over the weekend that had plenty of blogs buzzing. The premise was simple enough: our political discourse has become so strident and polarized, persuading others with arguments and ideas is no longer possible.
Is it possible in America today to convince anyone of anything he doesn’t already believe? If so, are there enough places where this mingling of minds occurs to sustain a democracy?
The signs are not good. Ninety percent of political conversation amounts to dueling “talking points.” Best-selling books reinforce what folks thought when they bought them. Talk radio and opinion journals preach to the converted. Let’s face it: the purpose of most political speech is not to persuade but to win, be it power, ratings, celebrity or even cash.
By contrast, marshaling a case to persuade those who start from a different position is a lost art. Honoring what’s right in the other side’s argument seems a superfluous thing that can only cause trouble, like an appendix. Politicos huddle with like-minded souls in opinion cocoons that seem impervious to facts.
I think Miller has identified a common problem in our national dialog, but I also believe he’s slightly off-base about the ability to persuade.
Miller’s right to the extent that “opinion cocoons” offer those who consume the news a chance to filter out perspectives different from their own. Someone could, for example, read the Washington Times in the morning, listen to Limbaugh in the afternoon, spend some time on the Free Republic after work, and then enjoy some Fox News before bed. On weekends, he or she could trudge through the latest book from Regnery Publishing. Will this person be exposed to progressive ideas and weigh their merit? It’s unlikely.
To this extent, Miller has identified a genuine problem with a bi-polar discourse. We’re not all open-minded, which means we’re not all open to persuasion, which means competing ideas will sometimes rise and fall regardless of merit.
But in identifying one problem, I think Miller’s missed another one.
Miller’s column argued that the act of persuasion may be dead. But one need look no further than public opinion polls to see this isn’t true. People are constantly being persuaded — on whether or not Bush is doing a good job, on whether the war in Iraq is going well, and on virtually every other policy issue under the sun. The fact that poll numbers change frequently necessarily means that large numbers of people are being persuaded in one direction or the other all the time.
But I suspect Miller’s not referring to these people; he means the swaths of people who have largely already decided where they are on the political spectrum and what side they fall on when it comes to the ideological fights of the day. But this leaves out a very large chunk of the populace. They’re usually called “undecideds.”
This is going back a ways, but Christopher Hayes had a stunningly good piece in The New Republic shortly after last year’s election, in which he describes his experiences in dealing with undecided (or persuadable) voters while working on the League of Conservation Voters’ Environmental Victory Project.
Perhaps the greatest myth about undecided voters is that they are undecided because of the “issues.” That is, while they might favor Kerry on the economy, they favor Bush on terrorism; or while they are anti-gay marriage, they also support social welfare programs. Occasionally I did encounter undecided voters who were genuinely cross-pressured — a couple who was fiercely pro-life, antiwar, and pro-environment for example — but such cases were exceedingly rare. More often than not, when I asked undecided voters what issues they would pay attention to as they made up their minds I was met with a blank stare, as if I’d just asked them to name their favorite prime number.
The majority of undecided voters I spoke to couldn’t name a single issue that was important to them. This was shocking to me. Think about it: The “issue” is the basic unit of political analysis for campaigns, candidates, journalists, and other members of the chattering classes. It’s what makes up the subheadings on a candidate’s website, it’s what sober, serious people wish election outcomes hinged on, it’s what every candidate pledges to run his campaign on, and it’s what we always complain we don’t see enough coverage of.
But the very concept of the issue seemed to be almost completely alien to most of the undecided voters I spoke to. (This was also true of a number of committed voters in both camps–though I’ll risk being partisan here and say that Kerry voters, in my experience, were more likely to name specific issues they cared about than Bush supporters.) At first I thought this was a problem of simple semantics — maybe, I thought, “issue” is a term of art that sounds wonky and intimidating, causing voters to react as if they’re being quizzed on a topic they haven’t studied. So I tried other ways of asking the same question: “Anything of particular concern to you? Are you anxious or worried about anything? Are you excited about what’s been happening in the country in the last four years?”
These questions, too, more often than not yielded bewilderment. As far as I could tell, the problem wasn’t the word “issue”; it was a fundamental lack of understanding of what constituted the broad category of the “political.” The undecideds I spoke to didn’t seem to have any intuitive grasp of what kinds of grievances qualify as political grievances. Often, once I would engage undecided voters, they would list concerns, such as the rising cost of health care; but when I would tell them that Kerry had a plan to lower health-care premiums, they would respond in disbelief — not in disbelief that he had a plan, but that the cost of health care was a political issue. It was as if you were telling them that Kerry was promising to extend summer into December.
This is the problem with the political discourse. Yes, it’s a shame that politically engaged citizens, on both sides, are not as open to persuasion as they should be. But the real problem is that everyone else, the politically-unengaged, are ridiculously uninformed — and they’re the ones who get persuaded all the time.