Whups

The aikido principle applied to political argument has not been appreciated by the Democratic Party leadership.

In college I took an aikido class. The core principle of aikido is to redirect an attacker’s energy with the goal of unbalancing them. The redirection of your opponent’s energy, instead of using your own energy to forcibly block an attacker’s blows, reduces the advantage that would favor a larger and more powerful adversary. So a large and powerful opponent can be felled, usually without hurting them, by the addition of small, unbalancing forces on the defender’s part. The optimal outcome is to end the conflict without pain for either party.

American politics is essentially binary and can be likened to a series of matches between the Democrats and the Republicans. The majority of Americans who identify with a political party are Democrats so in that sense, not to discount the immense Republican advantage manifest in the Electoral College, Democrats have a political advantage, though they have recently failed to convert this advantage into wins. Unfortunately for America, Republican strategists grasped several decades ago the political aikido of unbalancing the Democrats through the low cost, large benefit application of rewording the Democrat’s messaging in a way that altered voting patterns. Republicans have felled a larger adversary by applying a small amount of force to over accentuate whatever electoral weaknesses the Democratic platform contained.

Many observers have recognized that the major weakness of the Democratic Party during the last couple decades, notwithstanding the elections of Obama and Biden, has been a failure to use language effectively to persuade skeptical voters of the goodness of their goals. Evidence of this failure is the fact that Republican voters are more likely to be economically and even physically hurt by Republican policies than by Democratic policies, yet Republican voters continue to support Republican politicians.

If you were to survey Republican voters asking them; “Do you like to drink clean water or dirty water? Do you like to breathe clean air or dirty air? Do you want low cost healthcare or high cost healthcare?” the answers would be, “Clean. Clean and Low.” But if your survey questions are written with a little aikido twist, then the responses pivot and good Democratic ideals fall. “Do you like elite Washington insiders to tell you what water you are allowed to drink? Do you want elite Washington insiders to decide that you need to buy a fuel efficient vehicle so that the views in Los Angeles and New York are prettier? Do you want elites to tell you what kind of healthcare you deserve?” And so on.

I am joining a chorus of other voices when I say that a basic and costly mistake of Democratic leadership has been to believe that logic and economic self interest determine votes. The Democrats can be likened to a little angel sitting on the one shoulder while the Republicans are the little devil sitting on the other. Democratic ideals in general appeal to fairness and a belief in human goodness while Republican ideals appeal to fear and a belief in human badness. The reality, of course, is that both beliefs are true. Humans are generally bad when they are scared and usually good when they feel safe. That is why the devil carries a pitchfork to threaten and the angel carries a lyre to salve.

Democrats need to change the wording of their messages to inspire fear of Republican policies and they need to inspire that fear with words that resonate amongst the fearful. Logic has no place here. Appeals to justice and fairness have no place here. Appeals to future global environments have no place here. They should appeal, rather, to victimization, because most Americans are, in fact, victims of the rich and powerful. Even rich and powerful Democrats victimize Americans. Americans need to be persuaded who the real adversary is (with some exceptions, the rich and the powerful) with clear and simple language. Nuance, though real, fails to persuade most Americans because most people want binary choices. It makes decision-making easier.

In addition to altering the content of messages, Democrats need to excise every phrase in their messages which has been leashed, through repeated associations, to an entrenched political view. For example, there should be no usage of the phrase “global warming.” Instead let us appeal to the conspiracy-minded and the aficionados of political drama. Going forward, I suggest using the phrase “world heated up by plutocrats.” If people start abbreviating this phrase as “whups” that would be desirable. Republican leaders have mastered the use of word associations. Let the Democrats unbuckle their language straitjacket enough to realize that “whups” sounds close enough to “oops” to generate the same feeling in voters.

Let the Democrats embrace the invocation of conspiracy theories. After all, there truly is a conspiracy amongst the wealthy and the powerful, even many wealthy and powerful Democrats, to keep the rest of the country relatively powerless. Let them embrace the bending of truth in the service of more powerful rhetoric and the employment of the devil on every person’s shoulder. Would you rather have an honest politician who can’t get elected or one who lies but takes action against whups and against concentration of wealth and against dirty air and dirty water?

Some reasonable people would criticize this approach, saying that, if there is one bully and one victim, an uneasy peace is maintained, but two bullies in one room results in violence. But the natural evolution of the relationship between a bully and a victim is a greater and greater loss of happiness for the victim. It is good to remember that one of the basic tenets of our American way of life is the guarantee that we can pursue happiness. Bullies obstruct this tenet and cannot be tolerated. One way or another, a bully must be constrained.

When your parents taught you to express enthusiastic appreciation to your great aunt Bea for the Loggins and Messina Greatest Hits album she got you for your 10th birthday, they were teaching you that it’s okay to lie if the result is greater happiness. That deflection was, perhaps, your first lesson in the aikido principle. The Democratic leadership needs to remember that childhood lesson and needs to sign up for an aikido class.