Sarah Stein Lubrano wants to fathom the mess we’re in and help us navigate a way out of it. Her provocatively titled debut, Don’t Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st-Century Minds, contends that “trust in society and interest in politics have hit a nadir” in Western democracies. The reason: we continue to mistakenly believe talking about politics will change peoples’ minds, prompt them to organise and bring about positive social and political change.
This belief is rooted, she argues, in two interrelated and dangerous myths about politics that are “deeply imbued in our cultural sensibilities.” The first is the myth that politics effectively works like commerce (as in “the marketplace of ideas”): if we allow all ideas to flourish, the best will eventually rise to the top. The second is that politics is a warlike debate between opposing viewpoints: that facilitating rigorous argumentation and aggressive contestation means the best ideas ultimately triumph.
Spoiler alert (as Lubrano might put it): politics doesn’t work that way.
Fuelled by caffeine and newspapers, political conversation and debate stoked democratic ideals in late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century coffeehouses. But these were also places that nurtured the global networks of capitalism that eroded these same ideals (Lloyd’s and the New York Stock Exchange began in coffeehouses). “The capitalist and bureaucratic world that was in part created in these coffee shops,” writes Lubrano with a nod to Jürgen Habermas, “has eaten away at the democratic life also generated there.”
Today we live in an “age of digital screaming” that utterly undermines the health of the public political sphere. Social media platforms are not digital town squares that enable reasoned conversation and rational debate in the manner of coffeehouses. They are private, for-profit entities run by billionaires who have a vested interest in algorithms that foment rage, resentment, aggressive confrontations and polarised debates.
Part of Lubrano’s mission is to demonstrate why, even in less hot-house environments, talking politics doesn’t work. A social theorist by training, she is particularly interested in the nexus between psychology and politics and draws on several studies to show that — at least when it comes to party political issues — simply exposing people to ideas or arguments is unlikely to change their minds. So, for example, evidence indicates that watching debates between party leaders during an election campaign has no impact on people’s opinions or how they vote.
Instead of attempting to influence people’s beliefs and behaviours using “words” (arguments but also conversation and writing), Lubrano argues that we need to focus on our actions, experiences and social relationships. This, she sketchily claims at one point, is what made past social movements successful:
Many of the gains of the long arc of history are to do not just with exposure to new ideas but also with fearsome generations-long social struggles, from the feminist movement to the gay rights movement. Some of their efforts involved persuasion-via-dissemination, of course, but other efforts included protest, property destruction and technologies such as the birth control pill.
To bolster her broader argument Lubrano points to research that suggests friends can have a powerful effect on each other’s attitudes and habits — not through active persuasion but by modelling different ways of being and living. Indeed, one of her central claims is that friendship plays a significant — even vital — role in processes of social change. In a chapter called “Think with Your Friends” she leans heavily on social contact theory to support this proposition.
The intergroup contact hypothesis was formulated by the Harvard psychologist (not economist) Gordon Allport in the 1950s. Building on work that investigated the effects of Black–White contact in an era of desegregation (notably within the Merchant Marines and the US military), Allport held that intergroup contact worked to reduce prejudice in situations where there was: a) equal status between groups, b) common goals, c) intergroup cooperation and d) it was in some way institutionally sanctioned.
Lubrano leaps awkwardly from an exposition of this theory to riffs on the “political power of friendship” to change the world for the better. In her conception, friendship is a positive force that can, among other things, reduce prejudice, help people become politically engaged and commit to (presumably progressive) protests and social causes, and lead people to combat climate change. It may well explain advances in gay rights over the past few decades, she suggests. Thus, “if we want to build a world that would actually enable all of us to think better about politics… one of the key challenges for our current political age is to create a world where we are likely to make and keep friends.”
Rising inequality in Western countries means this may be harder than it once was and more difficult for those on lower incomes. Building this world then also means “progressives need to take back wealth and power, so that everyone is supported in expanding their lives.” As Lubrano notes, her approach thus flips the traditional script on how change happens. “We can’t talk our way around to equality,” she writes in the final chapter, “so much as we can build equality and then do democracy better.”
As an argument about how social change occurs, Don’t Talk About Politics is a tough sell. When Lubrano writes that “we’ve destroyed the economic and social grounds on which it might be possible to have a functioning democracy” or suggests that we need to “build equality” to “do democracy better,” it’s easy to jump on board. But the “how” remains elusive. And when she insists that “If you want to change people’s minds, you must change their lives,” I’m stumped.
The past is littered with examples of societal transformation — from the French revolution to the women’s liberation movement — that effectively happened the other way around. That is, where the changing of minds on a vast scale led to people fighting to change their lives. It is hard to imagine this happening without words.
Scholars from an array of disciplines recognise that language plays a significant role in the way people comprehend and interpret reality. Certainly, there is no shortage of historical scholarship that analyses the vital part it played in the social movements that arose hand in hand with Western democracies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The notion of “the working class” and “class war” and, later, terms and phrases such as “racism,” “sexism,” “the patriarchy,” “gay pride” and “black power” helped give collective voice to what had previously appeared private issues and struggles. Disseminated through conversations, newspapers, manifestos, petitions, speeches, books and consciousness-raising groups, new ideas and language shaped new political constituencies, strategies and goals. In other words, what changed in the first instance was not peoples’ lives but how they understood them.
An American living in London, Lubrano makes no bones about the fact that she writes what she knows — a “product of the ‘Global North,’” she is concerned about problems faced by liberal democracies and wants to proffer solutions that might help. But Don’t Talk About Politics also feels as if it was written for people like her: middle and upper-class young people who have attended elite universities (Lubrano has degrees from Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford) and are deeply committed to, and engaged with, progressive politics.
The book reads as part theory of social change and part activists’ manual. Or, to think of it another way, in the spirit of Alain de Botton (who has provided an endorsement), it’s part pop-psychology and part self-help book (statistically, “left-wing activists are happier than non-activists” who have similar beliefs, we are encouraged at one point).
There are insiders and outsiders. Lubrano writes for those she sees as fellow travellers — variously referred to as leftists, progressives and disillusioned American liberals. Don’t Talk About Politics is pitched at friends and allies — or potential friends and allies. And there’s the rub. While it gently and generously offers salves for democracies in crises, this is a book that is simultaneously palpably symptomatic of what James Walter has recently described as the “intensifying polarisation that cripples the compromise on which living together with others in a democracy depends.” We have a problem. •
Don’t Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st-Century Minds
By Sarah Stein Lubrano | Bloomsbury Continuum | $38.99 | 288 pages
