With the Brexit debate still raging and a stream of bewildering news emanating from the Trump administration, progressives on both sides of the Atlantic are floundering, struggling to make sense of a world that was unthinkable just a couple of years ago.
Their failure to win over hearts and minds has been critical in shaping events in the last few years. Progressive campaigning efforts largely haven’t worked, and are still not working. Since the EU referendum, little has changed in the tone and tenor of the public conversation on Brexit. In the run-up to the vote, the remain campaign desperately tried to take to task the leave campaign’s claim that exiting the EU would free up £350m a week for the NHS. The urge to set the record straight, call out “fake news” and counter false information has not subsided since then.
Some in the remain camp have clung to the idea of Bregret – the wishful thinking that hordes of remorseful leave voters would quickly change their minds. In reality, there’s no evidence that leave voters regret their decision; in fact, recent polls suggest they stand by their vote even as they have become more pessimistic about Brexit’s impact on Britain. Across the pond, meanwhile, millions of dollars and a great deal of blood, sweat and tears have been pumped into debunking the falsehoods of Donald Trump.
These fact-checking efforts are largely futile. Take the £350m claim. It wasn’t the number itself that swayed undecided voters, but the idea of taking back control. This was not about factual accuracy or the size of the figures, but values and feelings. In response, the remain campaign flung around big numbers and complicated concepts, compounding the common view that the EU is remote, complex and “not for us”.
Similarly, the focus on “making America great again” provided a motivating sense of what was at stake for many Americans. For voters who felt robbed of their agency, and under impending threat from a growing surge of “others”, the idea of returning to a mythic time of greatness held huge appeal.
To stand a chance at winning over voters, progressives need to be able to answer the question of why something really matters. You can’t disprove a feeling, and you can’t argue against an emotion with numbers – you have to weave the facts into a different and more appealing story than your rivals’. This isn’t a sign we live in some sort of new, post-truth reality: the stories in our heads have always been more powerful than the new information we’re hit with. But progressives often struggle to work with this. Countless studies show that fact-based myth-busting too often reinforces people’s original beliefs. Despite its ineffectiveness, the urge to shout people down with “the real facts” and nothing else often proves irresistible.
Talking about issues that tend to matter to progressives – climate change, inequality, global poverty – is hard, because these are systemic problems on a massive scale. It might feel logical to focus on communicating how serious these problems are, but research shows that overemphasising crisis and urgency can backfire, creating an overwhelming sense of fatalism – the idea that these problems will always exist, and nothing can be done about them.
When it comes to climate change, many people don’t automatically respect scientific authority, so “This matters because science says so” doesn’t cut it. Scientific principles and practices such as empiricism and peer review are not widely understood or appreciated. And our brains will often default to the easiest and most appealing story, not the one that requires us to grapple with technical information and imperfect modelling.
There are important lessons from progressive campaigns that have worked. The Climate Coalition’s Show the Love campaign tells a story about the things we all care about in the natural word – and our shared responsibility to protect them. It is light on facts but big on motivation. Instead of painting a picture of impending, paralysing doom, it leads with the notion we have “the power to choose”. Activists in the US, the UK and Ireland won the campaign for equal marriage by framing it in terms of love, commitment and family – values that speak to conservatives – rather than the language of human rights. They didn’t seek to shout people down or fact-check their beliefs.
It’s not just a case of telling people what they want to hear. It’s about framing the case for change in a way that doesn’t require people to abandon all the beliefs they hold close: they simply won’t. Motivating and inspiring others to care can feel very counterintuitive, though. The first step is understanding where people are coming from: lots of analysis to work out what’s really going on when someone answers yes or no on a ballot paper. Without this, attempts to engage will backfire, digging progressives further into the hole of seeming smug and out of touch. But far from seeking to understand, campaigners aiming to stop Brexit or minimise its fallout often ignore or undermine leave voters.
The last few years have shown us how far progressive campaigners are falling short. We too often slide into the lazy assumption that an ability to connect and communicate with people is something politicians either have or don’t. It’s true that some leaders have a more instinctive grasp than others of how to craft hearts-and-minds narratives. But there is a science as well as an art to this – and it’s a science that people who have been finding themselves on the losing side of the debate could do well to learn from.