The Persuasion Project Is Hydrogen Fuel

There is, abroad in the land today, a particular kind of political advice that sounds sensible, humane, and eminently reasonable -- right up until you ask how much time, money, and effort it would take to make it work in the actual world.

That advice falls broadly under the umbrella of what we'll call the Persuasion Project, and that project is the hydrogen fuel of political strategies.

And before the pedants come for me, yes, I realize that's a deliberately strained metaphor. Hydrogen can be produced using intermittent energy sources like solar and wind, making it a potentially useful way to store and transport energy that might otherwise go unused. It's whatchacall an "energy carrier".  

But hydrogen isn't something you can simply dig out of the ground and burn. It has to be produced, usually from natural gas or water, and that process requires energy. Depending on how it's made, you can wind up spending substantially more energy producing a fuel than you get back when you use it.

And that, more or less, is the problem with the Persuasion Project.

Once upon a time, there might have been large, harvestable deposits of Republicans who could be coaxed down out of the Stupid Tree with logic, evidence, and a clear, honest presentation.  There may have been a world, long ago, lost to history, in which you could make your case, patiently answer their stupid questions, show your work, and perhaps persuade them that the world was a little more complicated than Rush Limbaugh told them it was.

But that was all before Conservative media spent decades building an alternative political reality in which facts are whatever the Dear Leader says today, expertise is demonic, and telling the mopes anything they don't want to hear is taken as proof that you're part of the conspiracy.  (Fair point.  I am.)

The conservative political project didn't merely fail to persuade Republicans to abandon reason. It built a media ecosystem in which abandoning reason became a condition of membership. And then the people who built that ecosystem turned around and demanded that Democrats turn away all of that wrath with gentle answers and a better PowerPoint deck.

Which means that The Persuasion Project, like an inefficient fuel-production process, has a negative energy balance.

Oh, sure. Give yourself limitless patience, all the time in the world, and a Republican willing to sit still and listen indefinitely, and I'm willing to believe that eventually you might succeed. Like the bird in the Brothers Grimm story “The Shepherd Boy,” which sharpens its beak against a mountain once every thousand years until the mountain is finally worn away, you might persuade your subject that not all Democrats are baby-murdering demons, that tax cuts don't magically pay for themselves, and that perhaps the people who keep promising to make their lives better while making them measurably worse don't deserve their loyalty.

But even that could only happen under a very particular set of circumstances.

You'd need a media vacuum in which Fox News and Hate Radio and the internet did not exist as readily available alternatives. You'd need a Republican willing to listen to an argument that might threaten their sense of identity, their friendships, their political loyalties, and their entire understanding of the country. And you would need the conversation to take place one person at a time, because, in case you hadn't noticed, there is no fucking "Liberal" media.  Nothing remotely comparable to the well-funded propaganda machine that delivers bullshit by the metric ton to the MAGA masses daily.  

And even if there was a genuine Liberal media with some real cops, you absolutely couldn't count on any of those teeming masses of bigots and imbeciles to tune in voluntarily. Unless you took away their remotes, strapped them into chairs, and forced them to watch "A Clockwork Orange"-style, why would they submit themselves to a persuasion campaign whose premises they have already been trained to reject?

And finally, who the hell has the time, energy, and access to devote to this project?

Suppose you are one of those unusually patient, indefatigable souls. You spend months, perhaps years, building a relationship with a Republican voter. You answer every objection. You patiently correct every falsehood. You find just the right words, the right examples, the right moment. And finally, after all that labor, you succeed.

Congratulations! You have persuaded one Republican to become an independent.  Maybe a couple of 'em.

Now what?

One person is not an electoral strategy. A handful of conversions is not a political realignment. And a satisfying personal story about a former Republican who decided that, just maybe, there was some wisdom in what you said is not evidence that the underlying machinery of right-wing misinformation has been dismantled or even mildly inconvenienced.

To make any Persuasion Project work at a scale that could change elections, you would need millions of liberals willing to devote enormous amounts of time and effort and the patience of Job to the task of persuading Republicans, one conversation at a time. And you would need millions of Republican counterparts willing to show up, listen with open minds, and seriously consider the possibility that everything they've believed is wrong and everyone they've trusted has lied to them.

In other words, the strategy depends on an immense supply of labor from one side and an immense supply of good faith from the other.

And the very political and media system you're trying to overcome has spent decades making the second requirement nearly impossible to find.

That's the part the advocates of the Persuasion Project never account for. They're still acting as if the only thing standing between a Republican voter and enlightenment is a sufficiently patient liberal with a sufficiently compelling argument. They act as though the playing field is level, the information environment is neutral, and the MAGA morons are simply waiting for someone to explain things properly.

But the playing field isn't level. The information environment isn't neutral.  The people who built the machinery of conservative grievance have spent years teaching their audience to regard anyone trying to explain things properly as an enemy.  And by the way, we tried all of this already!  In detail.  For years.  It was called "The Obama Administration".  

Jesus, Mary and Harry Hopkins, am I the only one who remembers what these people were already like before Trump showed up? 

You can spend all the energy in the world refining the fuel. If the system is designed to reject it, you're not going to power the country with it.  

So at some point, any sane person acting in good faith would have to stop asking why the persuasion engine isn't producing enough energy and start asking why they're still running it.

Burn The Lifeboats