A Yeats poem – one of the last he ever wrote – begins, “How can I, that girl standing there / My attention fix / On Roman or on Russian / Or on Spanish politics”.
We like to think our political values are noble – we just want to make the world a better place! We seek a more just society, a fairer economy; to defeat Trump and protect the vulnerable from the far right; to save the Earth and free Gaza. Yeats was also a politician and he knew that our true motives were often less than virtuous.
In Don’t Talk About Politics, Sarah Stein Lubrano – an academic whose research occupies the intersection of psychology and politics – describes the way we construct our political beliefs out of self-identity and group affiliation. We then trick ourselves into believing that these fine ideas arise out of abstract values or rational arguments. When we’re confronted with evidence challenging our beliefs we experience cognitive dissonance: the psychological discomfort arising when our actions or beliefs conflict. We generally address this by dismissing the discomfort rather than examining or resolving our contradictions.
For Lubrano, cognitive dissonance isn’t a sign of irrationality, low intelligence or hypocrisy; it’s a central, ubiquitous feature of human reason. We all want a coherent world view and most of us want to belong – to be liked by our friends and peers. Dissonance is the pressure that protects us from new information, calling either condition into threat. It’s joined by other well-known phenomena described by cognitive psychologists – confirmation bias and motivated reasoning – compelling us to overvalue information that confirms existing beliefs, to devise clever rationalisations to justify nonsensical positions.
And yet people do change their minds. Consider the gay rights movement, the most successful progressive cause of the past 50 years. In 1985, consensual sex acts between men were illegal under New Zealand law. A Heylen poll that year found very narrow public support for decriminalisation. By 2013, Louisa Wall’s Marriage (Definition of Marriage) Amendment Bill legalising marriage for same-sex and transgender couples was passed, with polls indicating 63% support.
Similar shifts took place across most liberal democracies. Lubrano theorises that sexuality is not necessarily observable, so people built friendships with gay men and women, came to see them as friends and then reckoned with their sexuality once the relationship was established. This was a form of visibility that only became possible via political activism. The dissonance of prejudice against a friend could only be solved either by ending the friendship or diminishing the prejudice.
More visible forms of difference have higher barriers. The psychologist Gordon Allport studied the racial integration of the US military after World War II. He found that racism could diminish dramatically, but only under specific circumstances: members of the different groups should have equal status in an environment; they needed to have common goals and co-operate to achieve them; close relationships needed to be possible; and contact between the groups needed to be legitimised by the institution. These are exactly opposite to the conditions of social media platforms, where so much political discourse takes place. They seem designed to isolate and alienate groups, to sow division rather than overcome it.
Lubrano is a progressive Jewish feminist intellectual, so it would be odd if she wasn’t influenced by the political theorist Hannah Arendt. Growing up as a Jew in Weimar Berlin, Arendt observed the way academics and philosophers of Europe instantly capitulated to either the Nazis or the Marxists when they rose to power – all the fine words about freedom and political ideas meant nothing. She argued political values were anchored in experience and identity, not facts or arguments; that real politics must be about taking action in the public realm. We must put our beliefs into practice, not just talk about them.
Lubrano’s concern is that she observes the theory and science of political communication – once essential to movements like gay rights – being deftly practised by right-wing political parties and groups. They’re adept at creating environments, identities and emotional frames in which right-wing political values feel natural and compelling, while the left fixates on fact-checking, abstract debates, moral panics about disinformation, scolding the public and policing language.
Lubrano wants to reverse that trend: for left-wing politics to become more persuasive and inclusive.
She’s probably right – to a point. Some left-wing politicians are wonderfully gifted communicators, but this quality counts for less than Lubrano thinks. New Zealand politics will never see a more charismatic leader than Jacinda Ardern, but her power to persuade diminished rapidly as it became apparent that her ministers were quite bad at governing the country.
Many of the ideas of the modern left are highly questionable, especially in the economic sphere; do the policies of contemporary progressives really help the poor and downtrodden, or merely pretend to, using them as a pretext to justify actions that enrich the educated class? Arendt stressed the importance of taking action as a way to test our own ideas, as much as a means of persuading others. This means being open to being wrong, to questioning our motives, to taking on new beliefs ourselves, not merely recalibrating our messaging to convince everyone else we’re always right.
