| Page Contents | ||
| Values & Issues | How to Persuade | Reich: Four Stories |
What should we say to our audience?
Begin with our values.
Seemingly separate and unrelated issues (like the separate legs of a stool) often are seen to be connected by a common value. This recognition encourages advocates of the different issues to work together to strengthen that value in the minds of voters.
What are issues? *
From an author on strategic planning***: "An issue is a difficulty or problem that has a significant influence on the way the [society] functions or on its ability to achieve a desired future, for which there is no agreed-on response.... Issues are framed (fashioned or formed) in terms of opposing forces pulling or pushing the [society] in various directions and away from idealized images of its future."
Our positions on a number of seemingly unrelated issues may be based on the same value.
What are values? **
Values are our beliefs in what should be—the way the world should work. Because we hold our values on an unconscious level, we're usually unaware that they drive our feelings about issues. (If you ask most progressives to name our values, why we feel the way we do about particular issues, we'll have difficulty doing it. We may cite facts or statistics but not what underlies them. Our values are established so deeply in our brains, over years, that we don't think consciously about them.)
We're often disappointed that simply stating to others our opinions on issues (giving them "the facts") doesn't convince them to agree with us. That's because we've skipped connecting with them on the level of values—so they don't see the basis of our opinion, "where it comes from."
What are our values?
(Available as a free download, in Adobe PDF format)(updated 7/26/2021)
Three values, we believe, are foundations of democracy, are universally shared among progressives (even if we're not aware of it), and should be a uniform basis of Democratic messaging: Freedom, Opportunity, and Security.
Republican think tanks understand the power of these values—that they have strong and positive associations in people's minds and therefore Republicans should try to "own" these words. They've been so successful that progressives sometimes give up and concede these as "Republican" terms—essentially ripping them out of our dictionary.
(There is another expression of our values—from George Lakoff, formerly a cognitive linguist at the University of California, Berkeley—that describes essentially the same values in different words.)
| Another consideration. While focusing on conveying our values, we must take into account conservative messaging, based on their values, with which we're competing for the public's attention. |
* Examples of "what to say" about specific issues are in Messaging Examples.
** This is more on the definition of values here. This link will take you out of these messaging pages and open a new tab or copy of your browser.
*** From Peter Smith Ring, "Strategic Issues: What Are They and From Where Do They Come?," in Strategic Planning: Threats and Oportunities for Planners, ed. by John M. Bryson and Robert C. Einsweiler (Planners Press, American Planning Association, 1988, p. 69)
The following is quoted from a section of "Voicing Our Values," (see above to download it).
"How to Persuade
"First, always begin in agreement with your audience....
"...to persuade, you have to find a point of agreement and work from there. You need to provide your audience with a bridge from their preconceptions to your solutions. The goal is not to change people's minds, it is to show them that they agree with you already. The way to begin is by expressing empathy and shared values....
"You never have to compromise your political principles to demonstrate empathy. Rather, you need to search for some element of the debate where you sincerely agree.... [Note 1]
"Second, show your audience how they benefit....
"...whenever possible, you need to show voters that they personally benefit from your progressive policies....
"Third, speak their language, not ours.
"Persuadable voters aren't like partisan activists. They don't pay much attention to politics, public policy or political news. They don't understand political ideologies. They don't care a lot who wins elections. In general, they're the citizens who are least interested in politics. After all, with America's highly polarized parties, anyone who pays attention has already taken a side.
"In talking to these less-enlightened and less-interested fellow citizens, candidates and lawmakers tend to make three mistakes.
"(1) Progressives often rely on facts instead of values to persuade....
"(2) Progressives often use insider language instead of plain English....
"(3) Progressives often use ideological language even though persuadables are the opposite of ideologues....."
Note 1: The words used to state "agreement" require some care not to accidentally reinforce conservative framing, as this example illustrates.
The following is quoted from "The Lost Art of Democratic Narrative," by Robert Reich (2005).***
"There are four essential American stories. The first two are about hope; the second two are about fear.
"The Triumphant Individual....
"The Benevolent Community....
"The Mob at the Gates....
"The Rot at the Top....
"Speak to these four stories and you resonate with the tales Americans have been telling each other since our founding....
"These four mental boxes are always going to be filled somehow--if not by Democrats, then by Republicans—because people don't think in terms of isolated policies or issues. If they're to be understandable, policies and issues must fit into larger narratives about where we have been as a nation, what we are up against, and where we could be going. Major shifts in governance—in party alignments and political views—have been precipitated by one party or the other becoming better at telling these four stories...."
*** This link will take you out of these messaging pages and open a new tab or copy of your browser.