3 weeks ago
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In the wake of the only presidential debate, Vice President Kamala Harris is leading nationally. But former President Donald Trump is still twice as likely as Harris to win an Electoral College majority.
Recently Harris has been doubling down on the same tactics that worked for her in the debate, taunting Trump and baiting him. But that may not be enough for her to win. In fact, it could stiffen support for her opponent.
Voters tend to seek consistency with their beliefs. Pummeling them with facts and criticisms inconsistent with their beliefs may actually cause them to dig in. Democrats might want to reconsider their strategy and learn from an experiment that a team of Israeli psychologists conducted during the 2013 Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
To get beyond intractable, hardline support for the conflict, the researchers proposed a fruitful approach they called “paradoxical intervention.” Instead of bombarding voters with facts and opinions that challenged their entrenched support for continuing the fighting, they validated it, but with information that led them to discover for themselves what could be perilous about it. As Kahlil Gibran wrote in “The Prophet” a century ago, the teacher “does not bid you enter [his] house of...wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.”
In the experiment, hawkish Israeli Jews were shown 30-second videos. Instead of asserting that the conflict threatened peace in the region and should stop, the videos argued Israel couldn’t afford not to continue the conflict, because continuation demonstrates the morality of Israel’s position and encourages unity. This counterintuitive approach did what more conventional messages couldn’t: It unfroze the Israelis’ insistence that the Palestinians were exclusively to blame for continuing the conflict.
That prompted center and right-oriented Israeli Jews to vote for more dovish political parties, and made them more open to compromise in order to reach a peaceful resolution, including eliminating Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
These changes were remarkably long-lasting, especially given the intense counter-messaging voters were subjected to during the period.
“Paradoxical intervention” might also help the 85 percent of white evangelical voters who identify with the GOP to drop their fealty to Trump by leading them “to the threshold of their own knowledge” that Trump’s professed devotion to the Bible and personal relationship with God is disingenuous and false campaign rhetoric.
This process could start with messaging that respects evangelicals’ devotion and their desire to have a devoted Christian in the White House. Then it could revisit videos like Trump discusses the Bible, Trump the Bible Salesman or Trump’s personal relationship with God. Validating their beliefs might take them to a threshold where they can recognize Trump’s palpable ignorance of the Bible and disrespect for their beliefs.
The same counterintuitive logic might help unfreeze conservatives’ obsession with smaller government and their support for hamstringing or dismantling most of the 439 federal agencies.
In this case, the "paradoxical intervention" could start by agreeing that abolishing or undermining federal agencies restores the balance of power and checks and balances among the three branches of government required by the Constitution. It could concede the point that allowing administrative agencies to make and enforce their own interpretations of the law (a hot topic given the recent Loper Bright decision) subjects the country to rulings by unelected bureaucrats whose decisions can be influenced by whoever is in the White House at the time.
Then, taking these views to their logical conclusion, it would propose federal courts hire the expertise they need to address the thousands of diverse, complex, pressing public interest issues Congress entrusted to the federal agencies. That should help Republicans recognize what they may already know deep down: This is an impossibility.
It's like the Aesop’s Fable about the old man who wants to be released from his difficult life and comes face to face with the Grim Reaper. Confronted with death, he learns the moral: “Be careful what you wish for.”
It’s a lesson evangelicals and conservatives might learn. But before that can happen, Democrats need to learn how to curb their knee-jerk opposition and show that they can appreciate the reasons of the other side.
Neil Baron is an attorney who has represented many institutions involved in the international markets and advised various parts of the federal government on economic issues.
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