Persuasive Beats Abrasive
12 suggestions for Democrats on how they might win back skeptical voters.
This is a slightly edited version of a post that appeared earlier today at the Persuasion substack. I would characterize Persuasion as a left-of-center newsletter whose authors take their substack’s name very seriously. Not long ago, I wrote a piece that was highly critical of an essay that appeared on their site. In response, its author sent me a gracious message complimenting my piece and thanking me for “civil disagreement.” In our polarized era, such reaction is rare—and deeply appreciated. Today’s piece, “Persuasive Beats Abrasive,” resulted from my followup interaction with that author. This essay doesn’t address what sort of policies might appeal to me in 2028, but rather what sort of rhetoric might catch my ear.
Long ago, I was state chair of the Virginia Democratic Party’s youth auxiliary, party chairman in my hometown, and a national convention delegate. By around 2000, economics and other issues had led me rightward, though not implacably so. These days, my votes go often to Republicans, sometimes to no one, and occasionally to Democrats.
Here are my dozen suggestions for how Democrats might persuade my hand (and the hands of similarly-minded Americans) to gravitate toward the “D” on the 2028 ballot. Consider this in the vein of a “Chautauqua”—the social movement that encouraged discourse even between those who disagreed with one another and which Theodore Roosevelt referred to, near the movement’s peak, as “typical of America at its best.”
[1] If your message only works when shouted, you won’t persuade me. “DONALD TRUMP IS A THREAT TO OUR DEMOCRACY!!!!!” is a message that only tends to be delivered loudly and angrily—and shouting almost never persuades. (Say that sentence softly, with a smile, and you’ll sound a bit unhinged.) If you think Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, calmly itemize his behavior on January 6, his unsettling third-term chatter, and his suggestions that the U.S. take Greenland by force. To help you distinguish between these modes of communication: Bernie Sanders, AOC, Chuck Schumer, and Jasmine Crockett always shout. Josh Shapiro, Ro Khanna, Abigail Spanberger, John Fetterman, and Ritchie Torres tend to discuss.
[2] If you reflexively ignore or reject what I say, you won’t persuade me. I agree that President Trump’s behavior on January 6 was deeply unsettling, but, personally, I’m just as bothered by President Biden’s decision to allow protestors to surround the private residences of Supreme Court justices, day and night, for months. Dismiss my view out-of-hand, and your power to persuade evaporates. Acknowledge that my point is legitimate—even if you disagree—and you may still sway me.
[3] If you use the F-word and the N-word to describe your adversaries, you won’t persuade me. On Bastiat’s Window, I recently wrote:
“Compare Donald Trump [to] Perón? Marcos? Ataturk? Nkrumah? Cromwell? The Shah? Henry VIII? Batista? Indira Gandhi? Louis XIV? Wilhelm II? Tell me more. I might well share some of your concerns. … Compare Trump and Republicans (or Biden and Harris) to Fascists, and I’ll roll my eyes and … gently explain Fascism to you. … Compare Donald Trump and the Republicans to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, and our conversation has ended. In uttering this comparison, you exhibit a staggering ignorance of history and a disgraceful predilection for demagoguery.”
[4] If you fail to condemn political violence in absolute, unalloyed terms, you won’t persuade me. When Luigi Mangione (allegedly) murdered a father of two in cold blood on the streets of Manhattan, an SNL audience cheered for him, and Elizabeth Warren offered a slice of justification (“People can only be pushed so far”). When reprobates attacked Tesla dealers and drivers with firebombing, vandalism, doxxing, and road rage, Jimmy Kimmel cracked jokes, and Tim Walz celebrated the impact on Tesla’s stock price. As I waited for condemnation by Democratic higher-ups, the yard signs proclaiming “Silence Is Violence” came to mind.
[5] If you psychoanalyze your adversaries, you won’t persuade me. That’s true even if (or maybe especially if) you are a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist. My inbox is loaded with emails from friends and readers offering precise clinical diagnoses of Donald Trump’s mental infirmities. My usual response is that, in my layman’s view, Trump’s mental state accords with that of (1) New Yorkers and (2) real estate developers—neither of which condition is yet listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In some cases, the same correspondents also once insisted that Joe Biden was “sharp as a tack” and “fit as a fiddle.” In 1964, nearly 10 percent of America’s psychiatrists disgraced their profession by publicly declaring Barry Goldwater mentally unfit for the presidency. In hindsight, it’s difficult to name a president more wracked by psychological demons than Lyndon Johnson or a senator as well-grounded as the prickly-yet-affable Goldwater. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association belatedly adopted its “Goldwater Rule,” prohibiting psychiatrists from offering public opinions about the mental state of individuals they haven’t personally examined.
[6] If you can’t separate everyday life from political life, you won’t persuade me. Even when an obsessive-compulsive hand-washer has something useful to say about manual hygiene, his wise words are obscured by his tics. Similarly, if every conversation, postcard, and email of yours includes a gratuitous swipe at Donald Trump, those swipes will be the only thing people remember about your words. You will reduce yourself to a quivering bore.
[7] If you traffic in disproven accusations, you won’t persuade me. Donald Trump offers a Klondike Gold Rush of attributes to criticize, with fist-sized nuggets lying on the mine floor. But a great number of Democrats somehow prefer to peddle chunks of pyrite found outside the mine. Snopes—no right-wing site—has dismissed the endlessly repeated “inject bleach” and “good people on both sides” stories. When you peddle such stories, you diminish your credibility in all areas.
[8] If your messaging consists of synchronized, transitory memes, you won’t persuade me. In 2024, a sequence of Harris-Walz messages exploded across social media, with each one vanishing as it failed to move the polls. There was “JOY!!!!!,” “FASCISM!!!!!,” “WEIRD!!!!!,” “COCONUT TREE!!!!!,” “BRAT!!!!!,” and “THREAT TO OUR DEMOCRACY!!!!!” The most entertaining eructation came after 60-year-old Harris replaced 82-year-old Biden; my inbox overflowed with nearly word-for-word observations from Democratic friends expressing “concern” that Trump looked “tired” and “exhausted.” Trump is many things, I said—but not tired and exhausted. The current catchphrase is “OLIGARCHY!!!!!” and that, too, is coming under criticism by leaders like Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin.
[9] If you vilify masses of voters, you won’t persuade me. If you instinctively presume—even silently—that voters who chose Donald Trump over Kamala Harris are either (1) racist, sexist, and homophobic or (2) stupid, then your capacity to persuade will be nil. To sway voters to your side, you must ask yourself, sincerely and sympathetically, why a decent, well-informed voter would vote the other way. Consider the peculiar juxtaposition of well-educated, high-earning white people slinging the “racist, sexist, and homophobic” charge at the millions of Trump-voting African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, Jewish Americans, Muslim Americans, Native Americans, LGBTQ Americans, not to mention women. More than once, I noted this incongruity to left-leaning friends and asked whether their status as well-educated, high-earning, white heterosexuals gives them special insights unavailable to darker-skinned and non-hetero Americans.
[10] If you lack empathy for your adversaries, that will be obvious, and you won’t persuade me. Empathy acts as a check on your more destructive impulses. Empathy may steer you away from arguing that preemptive pardons issued by Trump in 2020 imply guilt while preemptive pardons issued by Biden in 2025 do not. (Adam Schiff claimed the former and received the latter.) Empathy helps you avoid the “SURELY you MUST agree that Trump is worse than Biden” statements you’re tempted to include in emails or Facebook posts. A key to persuasion is focusing on that which is verifiable and avoiding that which is easily dismissed as caustic opinion.
[11] If you don’t understand your adversaries’ mindset, you won’t persuade me. Writers like Jonathan Haidt have suggested that conservatives understand the preferences of liberals much better than liberals understand the preferences of conservatives. As described at the Volokh Conspiracy blog:
“Haidt reports on the following experiment: after determining whether someone is liberal or conservative, he then has each person answer the standard battery of questions as if he were the opposite ideology. … ‘The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who describe themselves as ‘very liberal.’’”
Perhaps you should spend time talking with that conservative uncle whom you disinvited from last year’s Thanksgiving dinner.
[12] If your nominee can’t persuade your own voters, then you probably can’t persuade me. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama captured the passions of Democratic voters and persuadable independents. Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris were remarkably unsuccessful in that realm, perhaps because all three got a boost from party bigwigs: Clinton’s superdelegates in 2016, Jim Clyburn’s intervention for Biden in 2020, and Kamala Harris’s rapid-fire anointment in 2024. Donald Trump, by contrast, was chosen by his party’s rank-and-file over the objections of the Republican Party’s grandees—and he persuaded large numbers of longtime Democrats to support him. Regarding the nomination process, perhaps Democrats should now ponder the question that Anton Chigurh asked the doomed Carson Wells in No Country for Old Men: “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”
The above acts as an invitation for how I—and various other conservatives, libertarians, classical liberals, centrist independents, and iconoclasts—might be persuaded to vote Democratic in the 2028 presidential election. I look forward to civil conversations with you over the next four years.
“PERSUASION” AS MUSIC
In appreciation for my appearance at the Persuasion substack, here’s the 1999 song, “Persuasion,” by German ambient guitarist, Govi. Born Werner Monka, he changed his name to Govi while spending eight years in India. He now lives in Hawaii, where he has embraced the musical culture. There are other songs called “Persuasion” (including a fine one by Carlos Santana), but Govi’s recording has a gentle sound that could provide excellent incidental music for a civil discussion of politics.
The interesting thing about Haidt's research you cited here is the implication thereof. Volokh pokes at it a little bit, further down in the article:
> If it is the case that conservatives understand liberals better than liberals understand conservatives, why is that? Haidt’s hypothesis is that it is because conservative values are more overlapping than liberals–conservatives have a “thicker” moral worldview that includes all five values, whereas liberals have a “thinner” view that rests on only two variables. Thus, the liberal moral values are constituent part of the [conservative] views, but not vice-versa. So conservatives can process and affirm liberal moral views and liberals literally cannot understand how someone could be both moral and conservative–the moral values that might be animating a conservative (say, tradition or loyalty) are essentially seen by liberals as not being worth of moral weight. So conservatives who place weight on those values are literally seen as “immoral.”
What the article is hinting at, but being very careful not to actually say in so many words, is extrapolating this point to its logical conclusion. As Jonathan Haidt has recounted elsewhere, he began as a liberal — a very committed one, who started researching moral psychology in an attempt to help Democrats win elections! — but his research and analysis made him move to the right.
If the notion that "conservative morality is a superset of liberal morality, thus conservatives can easily understand the liberal mindset but not vice versa" is correct, it strongly implies that what you're asking for here ("If you don’t understand your adversaries’ mindset, you won’t persuade me.") is literally not possible. When a liberal begins to understand the conservative mindset, *that is when they stop being a liberal.*
In your experience and opinion, what has happened over past four or five election cycles to bring civil discussion into such disuse and the object of political disdain?
I thank you for this piece, and for the “backstory” that was its genesis.