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The Science of Defeating an Authoritarian, Part 2 - Sink Trump's Approval Ratings [1]
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Date: 2025-02-26
Past diaries in this series:
Now that you and your friends on the left are ready to fight, it's time to heed the words of Yale authoritarianism expert Timothy Snyder:
"A coup is underway, against Americans as possessors of human rights and dignities, and against Americans as citizens of a democratic republic. Each hour this goes unrecognized makes the success of the coup more likely [emphasis added]."
How do we do this?
Communicate in Terms People Can Understand
I want to take you back to the moment last summer when Tim Walz called Republicans weird. If you asked me to describe Trump, I would give you academic jargon: He is an authoritarian who has remade the GOP as a personalist party. He is a malignant narcissist. Robert Paxton, who wrote the book defining the word fascism, calls him a fascist.
Explaining it my way did not break through. People didn't get it.. Weird broke through. Why?
I think it's a few things. It can be that words like authoritarianism are too abstract. Or that when people hear the word "fascist," they think Hitler, so they don't think the word applies to anyone who isn't literally Hitler. And we can complain all day about the failure of civics classes in the American education system. However, I think the real issue is that fascism, authoritarianism, etc, are too big.
Our brains are not well-equipped to handle overwhelm. When something is too big, we can't take it in. But weird? That's a playground insult. It's not abstract. It's not too big. It's not too scary. And you know weird when you see it. JD Vance in that donut shop? Weird. Creepy, too.
My point is: we need to find ways to communicate what is happening that are concrete, expressed in everyday plain language that normal people understand, and not so big and terrifying that people cannot take it in. That's going to be hard because the truth is actually terrifying.
Information Politics and Framing
Framing is a cognitive tool for mobilizing people. In plain English, framing is how you help people understand why your cause is right. Generally, you tell people what is the problem, who is to blame, what's the solution, and what they should do about it. (BTW, my information here comes from Activists Beyond Borders by Keck and Sikkink. The book is a study about how social movements succeed.)
Right now we need to frame our issues successfully. Here is an example. Impoundment is wrong because it is illegal. It is dangerous because it is a huge power grab by the executive branch, and it erodes our system of checks and balances. Ditto dismantling a federal agency (USAID). But will that get the number of Americans we need mobilized to oppose Trump? My guess is no.
Keck and Sikkink (1998, 16) divide tactics into four categories:
Information Politics: “the ability to quickly and credibly generate politically usable information and move it to where it will have the most impact” Symbolic Politics: “the ability to call upon symbols, actions, or stories that make sense of a situation for an audience that is frequently far away” Leverage Politics: “the ability to call upon powerful actors to affect a situation where weaker members of a network are unlikely to have influence” Accountability Politics: “the effort to hold powerful actors to their previously stated policies or principles"
Set aside the other three and focus on information politics for a moment. Keck and Sikkink say information must be reliable, well-documented, timely, and dramatic. It should include a mix of personal testimony by people directly affected to put a human face on what is happening alongside statistics. Frame issues simply, “in terms of right and wrong" (p. 19). Framing is especially successful for “issues involving bodily harm to vulnerable individuals, especially when there is a short and clear causal chain (or story) assigning” blame and “issues involving legal equality of opportunity" (p. 27).
With that in mind, check out these news stories from the past week:
What's more, a lot of the organizations that had their funding cut off are Christian - and there's an article in Christianity Today. Someone even created a website to track the number of people who died preventable deaths because Trump cut off PEPFAR. (This would be more effective if it included personal testimony from the people affected instead of only the numbers.)
Now we're getting somewhere. There's bodily harm to vulnerable individuals and blame is easy to assign. But will Americans care, since it's happening to other people? Well, as one article put it: USAID Isn't Just a Humanitarian Issue- It's a Threat to American Interests.
Dismantling USAID is also going to hurt farmers:
That said, focusing on American farmers instead of starving children in other countries removes the focus from bodily harm to vulnerable individuals. Another option is to focus on cancer patients in this country, where clinical trials were frozen because of Trump. There you have bodily harm to vulnerable individuals, and it is happening in this country.
For me, focusing on anything other than the threat to our democracy misses the point. The point is we just had a coup. The point is fascism. But we need to move Trump's approval rating numbers into the toilet quickly and get people mobilized in opposition to everything he does. If talking about babies and cancer patients dying gets us there and talking about a coup doesn't, then we should talk about dead babies and cancer patients.
Make It Personal
Some people aren't going to care until Trump and Musk hurt them. We need to communicate to people how Trump and Musk are directly harming Americans right now. Talk to the people who are open to hearing it, not to die hard MAGA folks who will never be receptive to the message.
I think right now the data breach is a good way to do this. Musk's goon squad has all of our personal information - social security numbers and whatever bank account you use for direct deposit for your tax return. There have been court orders restricting their access to this data and instructing them to destroy anything they took, but there have also been reports about this administration defying court orders and lying about what they are doing. Until we have more assurances, I think we should assume our data is not safe.
There's a simple thing you can do to keep yourself safe: change your bank account number and freeze your credit. I had to open a new account, move my money into it, and then close the account. If you do this, do it before you freeze your credit.
I think, for one thing, spreading the word about how to stay safe is the right thing to do. But it can also be a useful way to communicate to people that what is happening in DC right now is tangibly harming them. I don't expect the most hardcore MAGA people to believe this is a threat to them. After all, many of them refused to get vaccinated to (potentially) save their own lives. Some even died. But average folks who are not paying attention to the news are more likely to be receptive to this message.
I think we should also look for other ways to communicate to the people around us how Trump is tangibly harming them. It's even better if we can give them an action step to take to try to keep themselves safe. Fascism may be too big to take in or too abstract or simply not believable because there are no gas chambers, but people understand identity theft. Then the lesson gets reinforced as you go through the hassle of changing your bank account and freezing your credit.
To some extent, it might be trial and error to see what resonates with people. There will be no shortage of Trump and Musk doing bad things, that's for sure. I plan to use the principles here to try to communicate as effectively as possible while also being responsive to what works and what doesn't through trial and error.
I love The Focus Group podcast to learn about how regular people are perceiving politics. A week into the dumpster fire we now all live in, first-time Trump voters' take on Trump was, "at least he is doing something." Host Sarah Longwell thought it was going to take a little bit longer for Trump's approval rating to go down. Our job is to help it go down.
Talk to people in person (and don't bother with hardcore MAGA people, because it's a waste of your time). Communicate on social media. Make TikTok videos. Attend protests if you are able (be safe - there's a risk he will use the military). Put communicate the message in a way that people will be able to hear it, not in ways that they won't.
Getting back to the beginning of this post, it's vitally important that we get the word out that this is, in fact, a coup. I am telling that in the most convincing terms I can to anyone who will listen. I tell them that Yale historian Timothy Snyder called it a coup, and so did Heather Cox Richardson, and if they say it's a coup, it's a coup. But for all of the people who will not believe that, I'm also telling them about the babies dying around the world and the cancer patients who had their clinical trials canceled here. I'm also telling them their data is not safe, and when their grocery prices go up because of bird flu and tariffs, I will tell them that too. Because if I can't get the full message through to them, I want them to know enough to be good and pissed off at Trump.
Part 3 is here: It’s the Corruption, Stupid
[END]
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