Overcoming Pride and Prejudice Through Persuasion

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 the end, that's 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. Or you're a guy at work, like a middle-class, middle-management guy, who's suddenly called in more and more for trainings about what are appropriate ways for men to behave towards women in the workplace? Or what is white privilege, and how does it function? And things that millions of Americans are just experiencing every day in the normal course of life. Now, someone does not go from that stimuli to thinking there's a communist plot to install CRT in the brains of Americans. 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, why am I having to go to these trainings suddenly? Huh, my kid came home asking me whether America's founding fathers were bad people." These are all just stimuli that people, everyone you and I know, are receiving these stimuli in various forms. The question is what happens next? And if you are left alone to figure out why is this happening, the title of Chris Hayes's podcast is Why Is This Happening? I think it's one of the great questions of the age that people are asking, why is this happening? The right, if you have those questions, the right is right there to help answer them. The right, as soon as someone has those questions in America, I feel like they turn around and the right is just standing right next to 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," or "Hey, support X person for president or speaker." This is actually understanding, and it's a 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 there's a lot of emotion in that question. 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. There's that great line, I forget whose it is, that anger is what pain looks like in public. A lot of these kind of lashings out are about pain, loss, confusion, people just not quite clear on who they're going to be in the new world that's coming. 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: So you talked a little bit about how, when people have these questions about why is this happening, or they almost have these internal identity dialogues that the right is right there to give them an answer, 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, right? I'm a political analyst. Now, to a casual observer out there, 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're not doing left and right versions of the same thing. They are in totally, qualitatively different businesses. And so let me explain, because I think this gets to the heart of your question. 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 votes in Washington, it's big investigations, it's 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, on its own, has no notoriety or power, and it is running with it for four days to elevate the profile of... 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, right? I don't think The New York Times should be doing what I'm describing, but someone should be doing it. 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, or politicians like Donald Trump understand, is that if you really want to teach people from a kind of passive place to a kind of active place, where they really care about a certain issue, or you want to radicalize people, put people through a kind of funnel of radicalization, it's not like Washington updates and investigation updates. It's telling stories, right? It's bringing issues down to scale and size. It's literally what I do in my books. I don't write books about big issues, I write books about people grappling with big issues. I could easily write The Persuaders as a book of concepts, but that would not work. So I understand that. You're not doing this episode with 40 people talking about this issue, you're talking to one person, who you're going slightly deep with. And the right just gets that that's a better... That kind of instruction and edification of people's consciousness. Consciousness-raising, as it used to be called, is a really important part of the political process, and when I look at my own side, I just think we don't really do that. We kind of rest on the laurels of reason and facts and policy and, "Here's the right kind of healthcare policy," and there's almost this self-confidence of if you were doing the right thing, it's self-evident. There's a view I think on the left that it's truths are self-evident, and contrary to the Declaration of Independence, very few truths are actually self-evident. Almost everything has to be explained.

Matt Jordan: To follow up on that and just to note, two things, one, why shouldn't the press teach? Why shouldn't the press be the fourth estate column for democracy instead of amplifying the people who do teach would be one way to think about it? But shouldn't the press 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 The Nation magazine can play or Jacobin can play, 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 have said many times that I think, and I say this with empathy for the leaders of these institutions, I don't actually think this is an easy problem, what they face. 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. And so I don't think they're being deliberately foolish or... 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, what I say to them when I have those conversations, people in those roles, people who cover politics in the open and privately, is, "Look. 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: Yeah. 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 to inoculate themselves from, is 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 a kind of unconventional choice maybe to start the book 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, family to family, neighborhood to neighborhood, city to city in every kind of vector. That said, the Russians... 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 or FSB in Russia 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 fuck 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 and you don't want the decision about which things to change and how to be left to some guy but you want to change things through essentially what democracy is, a kind of rolling, perpetual conversation among ourselves, 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?" And by the way, on that issue, we've gone from support in the gutter for gay rights to what is approaching a increasingly durable consensus across left and right that at a minimum, gay people should be free to live lives of dignity, and you have Mitt Romney and other Republicans voting to protect gay marriage in the Senate recently, a huge milestone. 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 if you push and push and push, you can get a Mitt Romney and other Republicans to endorse gay marriage. You can change the fate of lots of people. I spoke to so many after the book came out, so many, I would say, middle-aged gay Americans who talked about, "If you had told me when I was a teenager in X, Y, Z city that this would be the state of consensus in the year 2023, I would've told you, 'No, that's closer to 2050 or 2075.'" That issue, but it's not the only issue, has actually come in some ways much faster than a lot of people anticipated. 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.

Leah Dajches: Just a reminder, 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. So you've been talking a little bit about transformations and in people changing their minds. So when we're thinking specifically about persuasion and how to persuade towards pro-democracy, who kind of exactly should these efforts be targeted towards? Are we looking to wanting to speak with people who hold maybe more ambivalent attitudes or kind of more neutral? Or can we go and talk with people and try and persuade those who are maybe on the extremer sides?

Anand Giridharadas: Yeah. Well, first of all, this is a book in many ways about organizing and organizers and kind of an alternate title might be like The Tau of Organizing. And organizers, one of the first things they do in the kind of setup you described is to delineate who they're really going after and who they're not. And this is very important. And one of the problems right now is we don't do this, and therefore what actually happens is we assume that way more people are not persuadable because we kind of tar them with the same brush as the people who are truly not persuadable. So when you start to do this delineation, you essentially see two broad groups, that most of the people I'm writing about in the book think about, and they use different terms, but I'm going to kind of synthesize what I learned from them. If you look at people essentially voting for the right or who are moderates who are really in play for the right, there is a hardcore group in there, maybe 20% of the country, 15, 20, 25, something in that general ballpark, who are profoundly morally committed to that vision. Okay? They don't just have the strong opinions. They hold the strong opinions strongly, which is to say if you were to poke and prod at them, they would have rebuttals, they would have evidence. They've read books. They've watched YouTube videos. They have been really deeply radicalized by Fox News. They talk about this stuff. They think about this stuff. They're engaged politically. These issues matter to them. They care about immigration or they care about tax policy, whatever. And there's absolutely a certain hardcore that is. And that's true on the left the way it's true on the right. Then there's another group, call it the next 20%, 25%, 30%, where one way to think about it would be kind of strong opinions lightly held or sometimes not even strong opinions, which is to say even if in that group there are some people who say, they may talk outwardly the way people in the hardcore group do, there's less roots under those trees. In other words, they may from a more casual or casual Fox News viewer have a kind of, yeah, alien invasion on the southern border, but it's not a deep conviction. They don't actually know what's going on. They haven't read about it. It's an atmospheric thing. I mean, as Gen Z would put it, these people are kind of more voting on vibes. They're voting on... It could be spouse influence. It could be community influence, could be they're listening to their pastor. Listening to your pastor to vote is a really different thing than watching 40 hours of YouTube videos about the border. Those are two really different people, even if they're voting the same way. And broadly speaking, we should not be going after someone who has watched 40 hours about the border and is radicalized about a southern invasion. But someone who is voting for that kind of border policy or the candidates who support it because they really trust their pastor and always have, that is absolutely someone who is addressable. So the first thing organizers do is that kind of taxonomy. And I think one of the core arguments of the book, drawing on the work of Anat Shenker-Osorio who I write about and others, is that this group of people, this kind of latter group, is really misunderstood. Sometimes, I mean, a certain subset of them we would call moderates in politics. And what a lot of people kind of implicitly understand about moderates is that they're in the middle, they're centrist, they want the kind of halfway position between the extremes. And what Anat and others help me understand is that moderates are people who actually don't have a determining moral algorithm for resolving the issues in question, right? They don't have a worldview. I mean, probably most people listening to your podcast have a pretty baked worldview, which when a new issue comes along, that algorithm of that worldview will help them quickly think about it. But most people are not like that, right? Most people really do not think about politics more than a little bit every week. And for those people who are a pretty significant fraction of the electorate and pretty significant fraction of swing voters and swing states in an election, there's a kind of deficit of how to think about an issue. And so once you understand the moderate is someone who is a little bit short of a kind of moral framework, what you want to do is not just moderate your stance to reach this supposedly moderate person. What you want to do is actually encircle that person with a sense, an atmospheric sense, that your way of thinking about the world is the normative way of thinking about the world. In other words, the way that moderate person chooses a stance or a candidate may have more to do with how people choose pants than how people carefully calculate some major decision in life. If you think about how you choose pants, you do no analysis to choose pants. You don't calculate the ratio of your waist to your hips to your length of your leg and then do some analysis of what kinds of pants ... No one does that. Maybe fashion designers do that. But when you and I buy pants, we go to a store, or we browse online and we're kind of like, "What are we doing now? What are people doing these days on pants? Are we doing high waist, low waist, loose, tight, bell bottoms," right? It's a kind of vague atmospheric sense of, "What's that?" And then within that, sure there's some room for individuality and for expression, but broadly speaking, right, the number of times you see bell bottoms in 2023 is pretty rare in a totally free country where you can do whatever you want. I can't remember the last time I saw bell bottoms. Interesting, right? Like broadly speaking, people are part of some kind of flow and they look at some choices available to them. And so what you want to do to woo moderates is to kind of turn the opponent's view of the world into bell bottoms. Like no one's doing that. And you kind of want to turn your view of the world into whatever the opposite of that is, whatever the kind of pants everyone's wearing now. And so that in a way dictates a very different strategy than what you often see from the Democrats. It's not about, "Okay, I'm going to cut my healthcare benefits policy in half to appeal these moderates." It's, "I'm going to have everybody shouting from the rooftops about how amazing it would be to have truly universal healthcare." And once everybody is shouting about that, everybody's uncle and nephew and aunt is shouting about that, people are just going to think, "Yeah, that's what we're doing. That's what we're doing." And so I think this evolving view of what a moderate even is very crucial to building the kind of persuasive movements we need.

Matt Jordan: I'm struck by you're kind of saying that you really don't see people who are centrists. And I think you're absolutely right on that, that people are much more ambiguous and complicated than we think that they are about these issues. But it strikes me that a lot of the time in the news what we see are journalists pretending that they are. They're arguing a position that is really in a place where nobody really operates. And I wonder if you think that their attempts to stay centrist, to stay in this nowhere land where people really don't exist and kind of frame the world as a conflict between the 20% on one side and the 20% on the other doesn't exacerbate the problems that you see endemic in our culture right now?

Anand Giridharadas: Yeah, I think this misunderstood moderate is a problem that you can actually see throughout the society. I mean, you see it in the political parties as I was saying, but yeah, I think you see it in the media where I think there's a confusion between neutrality and middleness, right? And there's a desire to just be pleasing to middleness in a way that I think it's just a mistake. I don't think that's where people are, and I've done a lot of ... Actually as a journalist, you do kind of voter interviews when you're often starting out, and I've done many in my life, and one of the funny things about voter interviews is they don't fit remotely into any of the categories that we then need to kind of use in politics. It is totally normal when you're doing voter interviews for people to say, "I hate big government overreach. That's why I just think Medicare should absolutely be expanded so the government is not in bed with these insurance companies." You're just like, "What? Like what are you saying right now?" And, "Obama is just taking away our healthcare," this and that. People are just some combination of disinformation, but also just like people have their own experiences, moral intuition. So there's people who just really, really anti-immigrant, but pro-gay because of their nephew. Who is that person voting for? That is what I would call a very in play person. They don't have a relatively simple algorithm for realizing who their team is. They're basically either going with their personal fear of demographic change in this country, but at the risk of harming their nephew or the other way around. So I think once you have a view of voters as complicated, and once the media actually properly covers just how complicated voters are, it actually creates so much political potential. And what I write about in the book is people who recognize that, people whose fundamental, I think the persuaders I'm writing about, their fundamental view of the world is that people are complicated, people are torn, and that people who have not yet come around to your view of the world are not irredeemable sinners. They are potential converts. And the confusion of potential converts for irredeemable sinners is an extraordinary problem for the pro-democracy movement that I have tried to intervene with in a way with this book.

Matt Jordan: It seems like one of the issues in media in its relation to democracy is that a lot of media has become more niche, that there's venture capital flooding into bigger and niche. So what the media's learning is from Madison Avenue, that if you hit a target demographic and you turn them into algorithms, if you turn them into easily programmable, easily persuadable people, there's more money into it. So I mean to be provocative about this, but talking to the people on MSNBC, if you get a chance, the kind of treating the other side as a kind of cartoon that seems to signal you're in the right channel is, again, another part of this anti-persuasive mentality that you show pretty persuasively to be at the root of the problem.

Anand Giridharadas: Yeah, I share that concern because I think what ... If I turn on my own network or CNN or others, I mean, I think what in a way the stories that dominate the discourse are the ones that are kind of maximally polarizing. Will Trump be arrested or not? Will the 15th round of Kevin McCarthy's speaker bid happen out of this chaos that will continue? So on and so forth.

And there's this whole bunch of other issues where we don't so neatly fall into tribes. For example, there is a whole reckoning that needs to happen around the role of China today in modern American life, and the choice to trade with China and grant it permanent normal trade relations in the early 2000s. The fallout of that to today's 14-year-olds essentially spending a lot of their waking hours on a Chinese surveillance app that is manipulated to show them content that is kind of one kind, while where in China the same app is encouraging people to do their math homework. And this is an issue that's not neatly left or right. There are real questions about did we do enough trade adjustment assistance for folks given the tsunami that trading with China was. There are these questions around TikTok. I mean, I don't think they fall neatly into the left or right. There's people on both sides of the aisle who are concerned about whether a Chinese kind of state-affiliated surveillance app is the best way for American young people to come of age and so on and forth. That would be a kind of issue where there's a place for the media to really explore and ask questions and not try to just sort us into camps and tribes and please some of us by dumping on others of us, but to really just go deep and explore and teach. And the fact that there's so little of that is revealing. I mean, one, that kind of reporting is just more expensive. But two, I think you're getting at something important, which is that it's probably not as good for the business model. I think the kind of reporting that the kind of news that is essentially tribe rallying is just better for business. And so I think it's really, really important to see if another kind of storytelling is possible. I'll give you the most specific example I can of where this goes wrong for me, is like I, generally, and I may be wrong, and if, look, if Donald Trump is in handcuffs in three weeks, you can tell your listeners that I was totally wrong. I think one of the most hilariously, but also truly awfully bad decisions of this era from a media point of view is to devote so much energy to the question of the criminal investigation of Donald Trump since, I mean, I'm going back to the Mueller ... everything. It was a choice. When you have an hour of television or one front page, the choice to front load ... This story has literally yielded nothing, nothing in six years has come of any of this stuff. Mueller report, Bob Mueller became kind of a surrogate father who was going to protect you for half this country. He did not. He did not. These people go and they do nothing when they have investigative power over these people, and then they go write memoirs. And then they go on TV talking about how the current investigators who still have power, the kind of power they once had, how they should go about it, even though they didn't do it when they had power, right? I have now spent six years watching investigation coverage. These are all people who break law in the light of day. I profoundly accept with great sadness in my heart that these people will not go to prison anymore than the people who did the Iraq War will go to prison, and the people who messed up Katrina will go to prison are the people who did 2008 financial crisis. Like, I understand, I don't accept it, but I understand that I live in an age of impunity, elite impunity. I fully understand that this will be just the latest chapter in decades of elite American impunity for these kinds of things. So why is 40 minutes of an hour of television or five stories on a website out of seven devoted to this thing as opposed to some of the things we've talked about? How to think about China, how to think about what kinds of things are happening around this country to actually build bridges and save communities from this kind of division? We are being fed in many ways, for all kinds of reasons, from the Russians have their reasons, the business model of media has its own reasons. And also there are, as I said, just totally innocent reasons of just culture and habit. We're being fed a vision of each other that is full of this notion of our irredeemably to each other. And there are other songs in the hymn book.

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, Rupert Murdoch, Vladimir Putin, others 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. So I think first of all, just as I try to do in the book, elevating for people, the notion that this is happening, that very powerful people benefit from this notion. In a way, 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. It's a kind of pose and a shrug that I hear often among very progressive people. But who does it benefit? 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 they haven'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. There's no joy. There's no joy. 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. I spend time in Europe for my work. 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. They're not actually on the trajectory. If you look at the demographics, even Canada is not. Canada is quite diverse, but Canada has, I think, one or two majority minority cities out of all the cities. Most of our cities are majority minority, 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. No shade to Norway. But if you are in charge of a country with a bunch of oil money and a pretty overwhelming fraction of your population looks like they're fourth cousins of each other or less, there's just a certain level of demographic homogeneity, which is their history. That's not a problem. That's just their history. Well, that's a pretty easy country to govern. 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 that we just had. And Matt, 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 for individuals. But I also really liked how we wrapped things up, especially throughout our podcast and these episodes, 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 about the future of our politics, our government, to really think about how far we've actually come as a country, and to recognize that there can be hope. We've gone through tough things before, and we can continue to do that and move forward progressively again. 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 and think about so much of the news as really not doing the work of reminding us about those things to be optimistic about to, 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 on the side of optimism is knowing 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. For more on this topic, visit 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 podcast 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.

END OF TRANSCRIPT