About the Guest:
Anand Giridharadas is the author of theNew York Times bestseller The Persuaders, the international bestseller Winners Take All, The True American, and India Calling.A former foreign correspondent and columnist forThe New York Times for more than a decade, he has also written forThe New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Time, and is the publisher of the newsletter The.Ink.He is an on-air political analyst for MSNBC. He has received the Radcliffe Fellowship, the Porchlight Business Book of the Year Award, Harvard University’s Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award for Humanism in Culture, and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Episode Transcript:
Leah Dajches: Political activist, Linda Sarsour, went to speak for the Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies program at UMass Amherst. She was told ahead of time that a group of young Republicans came to protest her speech. They did attend her talk, but didn't disrupt it. Afterwards, Sarsour shook hands with a member of the group, and asked him why he didn't follow through with the protest. She said his response was one of the most profound things she'd ever heard. What he said was, "I started listening to you, and I decided to give you a chance." This is one of many real-world examples shared in The Persuaders, The New York Times Best Seller that provides insider accounts of activists, politicians, educators, and everyday citizens who are on the ground working to change minds, bridge divisions, and fight for democracy. That's great for those folks, but what about you? How do you respond when someone disagrees with you? If you're like many Americans, you probably end the conversation and write them off, but what's the cost of walking away instead of making an effort to engage?
Matt Jordan: To find out, we're going to talk with the author of The Persuaders, Anand Giridharadas. Giridharadas is a former foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times. He's also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Time. He's the publisher of the newsletter The.Ink, and is an on-air political analyst for MSNBC. We'll talk with him about what we can learn from successful organizers and activists when it comes to engaging and persuading those with different beliefs. We'll also look at how persuasion tactics show up in the news media, and how this shapes our democracy.
Leah Dajches: Anand, welcome to News Over Noise.
Anand Giridharadas: Thank you for having me.
Leah Dajches: So there's a lot we want to cover, but for starters, why don't you go ahead and give us the elevator pitch version of The Persuaders?
Anand Giridharadas: The Persuaders is an intervention, a loving intervention, with those who I think I broadly agree with on issues. I would say in this country, in this moment, there isn't really a left and a right, so much as there is a pro-democracy movement and an anti-democracy movement. The anti-democracy movement really taking on a kind of increasingly fascist cast, embracing violence as a normal means of achieving political ends, and overturning elections as a normal way of securing power. And arrayed against that is a broad, motley, complicated, pro-democracy movement that spans from the far-left, to moderates, and even decent, democratically-minded Republicans. And my concern that motivated the book was that those of us on the pro-democracy side, who stand between all of us and an anti-democratic apocalypse, are failing to persuade, to woo, to actually seek to grow the base. And in many ways, the anti-democracy movement is oriented towards persuasion in a way that the pro-democracy movement is not, and I think that's a recipe for disaster and tyranny. And I wrote the book to try to inspire those on the pro-democracy side to reclaim persuasion, even in an age when it seems so hard, it seems so elusive, it seems sometimes futile. And this is a book that says, "No, it's not any of those things." It is doable, it is happening all the time, there are brilliant people showing how it can be done, showing how you can pull people into your visions of a bigger "we" of democracy, of a multiracial democracy that we are increasingly becoming. And so yeah, it's an intervention to say, "Let's buck up and win the era."
Matt Jordan: You described the other side, the anti-democracy side, as being really good at persuasion. What are they trying to persuade people of that they're so good at?
Anand Giridharadas: Well, I think part of why they are so good is that they understand that, what you just asked, what are they trying to persuade people of, comes quite late in the process of persuasion, right? That they actually understand that there's a pipeline of persuasion, in which trying to persuade someone of something is a, I don't know, stage three, four, whatever you'd call it. What they really understand, they're good at that part too, don't get me wrong, but what they understand is there is an entire process by which you pull people into some vision of the world that you're trying to sell. You don't start with, "Hey, are you interested in this tax cut? Hey, are you interested in this kind of healthcare policy?" That's like the last part of the transaction. What they understand on the far-right is what a lot of the people I talk about in the book call "meaning-making.” They understand that the way politics works, before things become political stands, or big important opinions, what actually happens is this. You go to Walgreens in your small town, and you make an observation. The average person goes to Walgreens in their small town in Arizona, and notices that there's more Spanish-speaking cashiers at this Walgreens than I remember last year. And I think what's really important to understand about the way political opinion formation works is someone does not go from that to "We're having an alien invasion on our border, and we need to jail people, and separate kids, and have militia men shooting at people." People don't go to that kind of place, like a 10, automatically. There's a tremendous amount of ladder one needs to climb, emotional, psychological, intellectual ladder that one needs to climb from the Walgreens observation to fearing an alien invasion on the southern border. It takes a tremendous amount of what I would call meaning-making to go there. And what the right understands, to your question, is that you need to build an entire apparatus, almost a conveyor belt, that takes people from the initial stimuli of living life in this country, things that are really not necessarily super political in the initial form people encounter them. Just things people see and things people have questions about, right? "Huh, wonder why those cashiers are changing face of... Huh, my kid came home asking me whether America's founding fathers were bad people." These are all just stimuli; the question is what happens next. And if you are left alone to figure out why is this happening, if you have those questions, the right is right there to help answer them. "Oh, you're curious about why you have those trainings at work? Let us tell you about Kimberlé Crenshaw, and the whole history of intersectionality, and CRT. Oh, you wonder why your kid's asking you about American history? Let us tell you about the war on the Founding Fathers," or whatever. They do it through Fox News, they do it through messages of politicians, they do it through all kinds of activism. But my point is, this is miles prior to, "Hey, vote with us on that tax cut.” It’s very insightful understanding, that people need to be walked with through every mile of opinion formation. And that, this is a big part of the book, a lot of opinion formation is a more emotional process than a reasoning process. The guy at work who's like, "Why do I have to go to trainings about being a white guy at work?" When he's asking, "Why do I have to go to the trainings?" He's not really asking an intellectual question. It may sound like an intellectual question, but if you understand people you will know what's really behind the question is, "Am I a bad person? Am I going to be okay? Are people like me, raised the way I was, are we going to be able to navigate the future?" That's what he's really asking. And the right has built an entire, massive, media, political, industrial complex to be there for anyone in this country whose has any kind of question about their masculinity, about why things are the way they are at work. And basically, I am advocating for the political left, for the pro-democracy movement writ large, to get in the game of meaning-making in a way that, frankly, it is absent.
Leah Dajches: Can you speak a little bit more about how the right uses news media to step in, to help people get along through this conveyor belt?
Anand Giridharadas: So think about it this way. I work as a contributor for MSNBC. Now, someone might think of MSNBC and Fox News as being mirror images of each other, like a left version, right version, whatever. They are not mirror images of each other. They are in totally, qualitatively different businesses. MSNBC is broadly covering major national news events. It's doing so from a center-left, or progressive, vantage point. But if you just look at what are the stories on Morning Joe, or on Chris Hayes, or on Lawrence, it’s like big national news stories. It's the same stories on the front page of The New York Times, The Washington Post, discussed, talked about from a center-left or progressive point of view. Now if you turn on Fox News, that's actually not what Fox News is doing a lot of the time. What Fox News is doing is, I would say, meaning-making. It is taking some small, obscure, local story that, so it's finding a beautiful young white woman who is killed by an undocumented person or whatever. Not a statistically common thing, but it finds that case, and then it'll just run with this, “The War on Ambers,” or whatever it's called, and it'll just run with this for days and days and days and days. MSNBC's not doing that. What it would look like for MSNBC to do that would be to find someone with a scandalous medical bill, and run a four-day story about how insurance companies are waging a war on American pocketbooks. That's what it would look like to have an equal and opposite thing. So what a lot of what the right is doing is actually, in some ways, teaching through news as opposed to doing what I think a lot of traditional journalists, who are actually journalists, are trained to do, which is update you on the latest news. The problem is updating someone about the latest with Kevin McCarthy's speaker bid, it's just updating you. It's not really getting into the realm of opinion formation. And by the way, I'm not saying that MSNBC should be doing this. I'm saying someone should be doing this. But just updating people on the developments in the news is not going deep into people's psyche and helping them get a view of the world. And so, what a Fox News understands is that if you really want to radicalize people, it's not like Washington updates and investigation updates. It's telling stories.
Leah Dajches: If you’re just joining us, this is News Over Noise. I'm Leah Dajches.
Matt Jordan: And I'm Matt Jordan.
Leah Dajches: We're talking with Anand Giridharadas about his book, The Persuaders and the relationship between persuasion, the media and democracy.
Matt Jordan: Shouldn't the be advocating for liberal democracy and teaching people why that matters?
Anand Giridharadas: Yeah, I agree with that, and I have been a big advocate . I think what I'm saying is I don't think it needs to be the job of MSNBC or The New York Times to think about radicalizing people into anger about their healthcare system. I think there is a role for that that and it fits into a broader ecosystem. I think The New York Times has a different goal for itself. But on the question of liberal democracy, yes, that's a different issue. That's not a specific policy idea. That is the water in which we swim. And I say this with empathy for the leaders of these institutions, I don't actually think this is an easy problem. I think they basically face a challenge that the very system, atmosphere, surrounding them that makes what they do possible is threatened by a movement that is essentially half of the political establishment of the United States. And I think if we're honest, those of us who trained in journalism or studied journalism, there was really no preparation for this particular situation. I mean, maybe if you trained to be a journalist in Iran or China, you had to think about how do you cover reality when half or a whole of the political establishment is just committed to propaganda and lack of reality, but if you grew up in the United States of America, until quite recently, that was not the training. I think they're in many cases missing the moment, but they're missing the moment because this is unprecedented. I mean, how do you cover a two-party political system in which one party is a party of mass delusion, the advocacy of violence and kind of against liberal democracy? And how do you do that in a way that doesn't... Here's the fear I think they have. I think the fear is that once even the most venerable institutions are perceived, perceived, as organs of the Democratic Party, then they lose all their power. Every investigative story will be perceived as like a DNC press release. It's not true, but that's what... I'm just trying to give you my empathetic read on what they are worried about. At the same time, we can't live in a world in which we're so devoted to a kind of fairness in coverage that we're not simply and clearly explaining to people that half of the American political establishment is committed to the elimination of democracy at this point.
Matt Jordan: One of the things that you talk about is how whether it's the IRA or maybe even Fox News, that one of the things that they're trying to cultivate is a kind of disposition where contempt and dismissal is part of the mentality. It seems to me that this is something that we could teach people that when you're being taught, "Those people can't be listened to," or, "These people are unreachable," that a little bit more self-reflexivity in the press could be aware of when they're amplifying that mentality, that mentality that you call it anti-persuasiveness, that is based on a kind of contempt for the other side that frankly doesn't need to be amplified.
Anand Giridharadas: Yeah. I mean, one of the reasons I started with the story of the Russian troll farms in 2014, 2015, 2016 and beyond is I wanted people to realize that we are being manipulated to think even worse of each other than we already do. And it's not that we think great of each other. I mean, we are absolutely a country falling out of love with each other and falling out of knowledge of each other and falling out of touch with each other. That said, you think about intelligence services, the Russians obviously have a powerful one, as do we. And you think about these high level meetings that must take place at the CIA or the Kremlin about like, "What should we do? What should we do to that adversary?" And you can imagine a lot of choices, like a binder, and there's like choices being presented by junior people to more senior people that have worked up the chain. And finally, four or five serious choices of just how to kind of f**k with the adversary are presented in a meeting. And in 2013, 2014, 2015, Russia's marquee weapon against the United States that survived all those meetings, that was kind of chosen, that was approved, that was like, "Yes. This is our thing that we're putting an investment in," was a social media campaign to stir up mutual contempt and mutual dismissal among Americans towards each other. Now, I take that very seriously. I'm not of the view that tipped the election or this and that. The important data point there for me is that they thought this was the most important thing they could do out of the menu of options available. You could take out a power grid in Houston. You could give nuclear weapon technology to some new country that doesn't have it that's your client state. You could stoke civil unrest in Mexico, thus putting pressure on the US border. I mean, the Russians could do any number of things, as can we, to mess with the United States. So, what does it mean that their marquee effort was going on social media and making us, just ginning up this notion that we should all just dunk on each other, write each other off, dismiss each other, think that there's no hope for anybody who disagrees with you. I take the insight behind it, the calculation behind it, incredibly seriously. And what I took from that is that they rightly understand that democracy is premised on the idea of persuasion. It is premised on the idea that if you want to change things, then you have to be willing to change minds to change those things and you have to be willing to say, "I see that you don't like gay people right now, but we got a whole bunch of gay people here and we're going to have to figure out a way to have them thrive and flourish the way you want to thrive and flourish. And what can we do?” So that basic view that underpins democracy, that it is possible if you work hard, convince people, change the meaning of issues, rally people, raise the temperature on people who disagree with stuff, that you can change the fate of lots of people. So, this happens all the time. And, the Russians, what they wanted us to believe is that this can't happen. This never happens. People can't change. They're against gay marriage now, always going to be against it. If they're anti-vaxxers now, always going to be anti-vaxxers. If they're white, they're always going to be part of a racist system. If they're men, they're always going to be committed to patriarchy. And the problem with this attitude is that, A, it's empirically false. People change their minds all the time. All the time. Just because we are frustrated with the pace of change sometimes, it doesn't mean we should deny the basic, obvious truth, that there's been a tremendous amount of opinion change, thus leading to structural and material change in this country. And we underplay the achievements, by the way, that our ancestors and we have made when we kind of adopt this French philosopher cigarette pose that, "Ugh, nothing ever changes." It's not true. It's literally not true. And all of our lives are different from our parents' and grandparents' lives in measurable ways because it is not true. And so I started with the Russians because I wanted us to realize that we are being manipulated into this kind of contempt and dismissal and fatalism, and there's another way.
Matt Jordan: At one point you talk about disinformation as a public health crisis, which I love that framing, but if you think about that, the journalists then start to be the vectors of inoculation. They are the doctors in a way for our democracy. And I'm wondering what you think, what kind of stories would help inoculate people and inoculate audiences from this pervasive cynicism that seems very deliberately designed to pit us at one another?
Anand Giridharadas: Well, I think first just the awareness, the conversation we're having needs to be a broader conversation. Once you realize that there are very powerful actors with a vested interest in us believing that our fellow citizens are irredeemable, then it really may motivate people to not be duped by those actors. The notion that nothing can change and it's too hard and this kind of fatalism, that has really in many ways spread on the left. It is a profoundly right-benefiting view. And, I've had this argument with so many people. I remember having this argument with a very influential, not for the book, but just outside the book, an influential figure in the Movement for Black Lives. And this person was saying, "I'm not even sure that we're winning the era." And I totally understood where that was coming from, but I also said, "Hey, look back. Just step back a little bit, you are absolutely crushing the era if you zoom out enough and these people who are trying to shut down a movement for black dignity and justice, are absolutely losing the era if you step back far enough. And that is why they're freaking out.” And I think if we don't have the ability to step back and say, "This movement of Trumpism and fascism is a reactionary movement, reacting to progress we've made, if we skip the part of the story of amazing progress that we've made and go straight to bad people want to do bad things to our country,” well, I think we're really selling ourselves short. It is absolutely legally, socially, otherwise, very different to be a black person or other person of color in this country in 2022 than in 1950. Doesn't mean everything’s done doesn’t mean there hasn't been backsliding on certain issues. But if we can't start by acknowledging that through the tremendous effort of generations of activists, policymakers, marchers, others, things really did change. And then as that change got disorienting and bewildering to a certain minority of people who would rather break the country than share it, they flared up and tried to shut down progress. Well, okay, that's a way of telling the story that feels like hopeful and inspiring and full of possibility. Like, "Oh yeah, we have done a lot of stuff. We could keep doing a lot of stuff, and there is going to be transitional anxiety to get there. Some people, some minority of people are not going to like it." But look, I try to remind myself that this movement that we're dealing with right now, this anti-democracy, increasingly fascistic movement on the right, it is not some new phenomena. That faction has been with us in one form or another, one party or another, one name or another, always. When there was a choice about do we abolish slavery or do we not, there was a faction who was against abolishing it. When we, in the late 19th century when you started to have industrial revolution creating a need for labor protections, there was a debate. "Should we protect workers from this kind of new ravages of the industrial revolution or not?" There was that same faction, different people, but the same river. "No, we shouldn't create protections for workers." When there was a question about, "Should we do suffrage for women or not?" In 1920... The same faction was against granting women's suffrage. A couple years later after that, the New Deal up for debate, same faction, was against social security, basic provisions to protect people like unions against. When in the fifties there were questions about, "Should we break down segregation and overturn Plessy, and have schools and other restaurants and other parts of American life integrated?" Faction was against that. 1965, we opened up immigration to non-white countries. Faction was against that. Gay rights, faction was against that. Let's take a minute to pour one out for this poor faction that has lost every single time. They've had moments of backlash and reaction. But on every question I just raised about, "Do we extend the blessings of liberty to more people in more ways?" They've lost every time. The generous America tendency has beaten them every time. I feel sad for them actually just reciting this for you.
Matt Jordan: And I think what you're saying is true, and I think there's a certain recognition of that, which is why the transitional anxiety is so great. You know that's-
Anand Giridharadas: But the right gets what I'm saying. But in a way, the left doesn't acknowledge that they're killing it. They're killing it. This is a book to say, "Have some joy. You're doing great. It doesn't feel like it right now." And there is this transition, there is this flare up, but there has been an on... this was a country for white male propertied people at the beginning. If you don't recognize that it has been radically opened up since then, through what Nicole Hannah Jones, so rightfully in the 1619 project talked about as, "The people who loved America the most, but were loved by it the least fought to make it true to who and what it was." If you don't recognize that that dynamic has truly changed things through extraordinary persuasive labor, then you're not in a great position to look at someone like Trump and say, "Look, this is a big problem we got to deal with, but this is exactly the kind of barnacle on progress you would expect to develop when we are this close to building a truly multiracial democracy." That is kind of a marvel in human history. Most countries throughout history have not been what we're trying to become. By the way, most countries today are not trying to become what we're trying to become. No shade to Europe, I love their safety nets. I think their social democracy, healthcare much, much better. However, these are mostly white countries that are staying mostly white countries that have a certainly carefully managed minority population. Like America is actually in a way that we don't talk about it, we are well on our way towards building a kind of country that is rare in the history of the world. That is, I think, a kind of glorious undertaking. A country made of the world. That is a pretty bold pursuit. It doesn't necessarily have a whole bunch of evidence that it works. We're trying to do something in real time that is hard. There's a lot of social science research that people are willing to share through collective institutions with people who vaguely look like them, have the same kind of hair color, skin color. That's a thing. We're trying to not do that. We're trying to say we're going to take people from every part of this world. We are going to build a country that looks like a New York City subway car, for better or for worse. And we're going to try to build institutions that see and recognize all of them as equal and inherently worthy of dignity and justice. It's a cool pursuit we're engaged in, and I think we have to remember how far we've come. And buck up, and understand that those who are not there yet are, many of them, not all of them, but many of them are people who could get there as has happened time and time again on so many issues and really recommit to the work of persuading to get them there.
Matt Jordan: Anand, thanks so much for being with us and for sharing these stories of people who help us remember that, that we've come a long way, and the stories of the persuaders is one of people who seem to be able to bridge those divides really nicely. So thanks again for sharing your work and for being here with us.
Anand Giridharadas: Thank you for having me.
Leah Dajches: That was a really engaging conversation. And it really makes me think about how we should highlight the importance of stories and storytelling when we're thinking about journalism and the meaning making role that journalists or the news media can have. But I also really liked how we wrapped things up, especially throughout our podcast we've been talking about how the news can often leave people feeling hopeless or helpless. And I think it's important to remember that sometimes when we do feel hopeless to really think about how far we've actually come as a country, and to recognize that there can be hope. Matt, what was something that really stuck with you?
Matt Jordan: As we think about how we can help people manage that world of the news, people should be aware that there are vested interests trying to convince us that we are simple, that we're unpersuadable, and that we should write the other side off. And I think that if we remind ourselves that that's not true, that people are complicated, that that's okay, and that they're persuadable if we talk to them, is a great place to end.
Leah Dajches: That's it for this episode of News Over Noise. Our guest was Anand Giridharadas, author of The New York Times bestseller, The Persuaders. To learn more and to hear an extended version of this interview with additional content, download the podcast at wherever you subscribe to podcasts or at newsovernoise.org. I'm Leah Dajches.
Matt Jordan: And I'm Matt Jordan.
Leah Dajches: Until next time, stay well and well informed.
Matt Jordan: News Over Noise is produced by the Penn State, Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications and WPSU. This program has been funded by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost of Penn State, and is part of the Penn State News Literacy Initiative.
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Episode Credits:
Producer: Lindsey Whissel Fenton
Audio Engineers: Mickey Klein, Scott Gros, Clint Yoder
News Over Noise is a co-production of WPSU and Penn State’s Bellisario College of Communications. This program has been funded by the office of the Executive Vice President and Provost at Penn State and is part of the Penn State News Literacy Initiative.