The Big Mistake the Left Has Made When Marketing the End of Systematic Racism

A communications expert explains the enthusiasm gap between Biden and Trump voters

As a consultant for almost a decade to corporations and entrepreneurs trying to communicate their message to customers or employees, there is one thing I learned: our appeals to ethics are well-meaning but ineffective. The same is true in politics.

Nobody Ever Won an Election Appealing to Ethics

Arguments use various rhetorical appeals, from appealing to pathos (emotions) to logos (logic) and so on. From a rhetorical standpoint, the newly woke Democratic party is appealing to ethics — claiming that a vote for them is a vote for social justice. It’s the right thing to do. Which is ultimately a battle for the soul of the nation, and we must do the right thing.

Meanwhile, the opposing camp is appealing to emotions (nationalism), fear (the socialists and anarchists are going to destroy you if you vote for them), and self-interest (we’re going to keep the good times rolling).

The famous marshmallow experiment, the Stanford prison experiment, and many others have shown that, psychologically, appealing to ethics is a waste of time, as people inevitably end up doing what they want to do because it benefits themselves. In other words, people always act on their perceived self-interest.

Thus, looked at from psychological and rhetorical perspectives, it is not unreasonable to predict that the right will win the election. Conservatives won the 2016 election precisely for this reason. Hillary Clinton began arguing near the end of her campaign, when she started losing, from an ethical perspective — I am a better person, the right thing to do is to vote for me because Trump is a pig who gropes women and brags about it. As it turned out, many voters didn’t care about that ethical argument. Trump was appealing to self-interest — I will make your country great again.

The democrats eschew appeals to nationalism and patriotism because of humanism — which dictates that every person is no better than any other human being.

Democrats do believe that America would prosper and could be better if it espoused more liberal values — the social safety net, more racial, gender, and socioeconomic equality, etc. This could be branded a different sort of nationalism — or at least something that would make us a great nation.

The Left Should Lead With Its Own Nationalism

Wouldn’t the end of racial injustice be a wonderful thing for our country and everybody in it?

Of course, it would. Who wouldn’t want to live in a country where there is no race-based hierarchy, no police violence against minorities, and where all people were treated fairly and equally?

In other words, the idea that the left is trying to promote — racial healing — is a very big positive. In a way, the left could be stealing Trump’s message: Make America Great — not Again, but finally.

Make America a Wonderful Country for People of All Races

Equality is something to hope for, isn’t it? An America where you won’t get shot by the police because of the color of your skin?

However, the left doesn’t market it as a great thing, and they don’t claim that making America a post-racist society would make us all happy. In their speaking, they define this goal as something of hardship, a privilege that white people are going to have to give up, and a self-reckoning that is going to be painful and difficult.

OK. It may be a hard road, but the destination of a more perfect union and a beautiful society is as great a destination that can be imagined.

The Democrats need way more enthusiasm in their message to encounter something that may be the biggest obstacle to the success of this dream — fear.

We Have Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself

This phrase, which is arguably one of the most famous nuggets of wisdom from political speaking in American History, was uttered by FDR in 1933. It is a perfect example of positive political messaging that understands the human animal.

We are, after all, animals who operate under the constant survival mechanism of fight or flight. There are, of course, intervals in human activity and experience that have nothing to do with fight or flight, where the human being is in a state of relaxation, contentment, or security. But even during those happy periods, in the background somewhere — Freud postulated the unconscious — there is this reptilian brain full of fear and committed to survival.

The Democratic political messaging fails in almost every instance to calm the beast at the back of all our minds. Instead, it carelessly throws out sentences that enrage, dishearten, or depress the beast. Witness this from Joe Biden’s website:

“Today, multiple, overlapping crises reinforce how far we have to go to deliver on that vision.”

Wow. What a bummer. Imagine a track coach addressing his long-distance runners as they round the first lap by saying, Team, you may already be getting tired, but I want to emphasize how far you still have to go. It’s really, really far.

No coach would present such a message because coaches know their job is to encourage. Donald Trump inherently seems to understand how to inspire his base. Joe Biden and the Democrats, on the other hand, often seem to embrace discouraging and deflating messages. The consistent theme among every page of Joe Biden’s website, whether it’s discussing climate change, job creation, or racial inequality, is that change is going to be hard, really hard.

It’s Not That Human Beings Are Lazy

FDR understood that. He knew that human beings had enough work ethic to pull themselves back from the depression. But he also knew that they needed a strong cheerleader to overcome their innate fear of failure.

When one reads almost any paragraph from Biden’s web site, the feeling that yeah, we’re probably going to fail at that seems to bubble up repeatedly. It’s like the authors are actively trying to deflate optimism and instill a kind of hopeful hopelessness. It would be really great if we could have these things, even though it’s almost impossible to achieve any of them. The reason that the language has this effect is its overwhelming use of words that I call failure-ish. Words like can’t. Look at this sentence from a section on the website where he starts with the hopeful idea of job creation for all Americans.

“That starts with a real strategy to deal with the pandemic. We can’t solve the jobs crisis until we solve the public health crisis.”

We can’t do one thing until we do another thing? I’m exhausted. The unconscious hears this and thinks to itself, Wow, we can’t do anything right. Feel how this phrase begins to heavily weigh on your unconscious as you read through it.

While this message might make sense rationally to the Biden people, it is unbelievable to me that these so-called political professionals are so ignorant of the emotional burden that they lay on the reader.

Fear of Being Buried Alive, Slowly Suffocating to Death

This is probably a universal nightmare of human beings, given our association of burial with death. One of the most unconscious messaging vocabularies to avoid is what I call burying the reader alive — words that make the reader feel like he’s down in a hole and dirt is being thrown upon him.

“Stark racial disparities exist at every stage of our education system. These disparities compound and contribute to inequity in economic, health, housing, and criminal justice outcomes.”

The overall mood of the Biden promotional materials is funereal. The tone is somber, grave, and full of heavy significance. A feeling of torment. A feeling both compounding doom and gloom.

Remember, all of this would be fine if Biden had soothed the savage beast at the beginning of his presentation, and assured him that while some of this might seem difficult, bleak, or stark, the beast has nothing to fear. In fact, the beast has nothing but good times and sunny days ahead of him so long as he remains brave.

But without that overture, painting a picture that is stark, and grief is compounded at every stage, is a really bad idea.

My immediate reaction to the paragraph above is suffocation. We don’t tend to vote for the person who is smothering us to death. We tend to vote for the person who offers us oxygen. Remember the last democrat to win the presidency — Obama? There he was with his hope and change, offering us a breath of fresh air. There were ethics, of course, underneath his message. But the primary communication was hope.

We Have Already Failed

Another offender in the Biden message is the category of words that I call we suck vocabulary.

“It is far past time to put an end to systemic housing discrimination and other contributors to this disparity.”

Wow, we blew it. We should have fixed this a long time ago, but we didn’t. Why? Because we suck, I guess.

How do we achieve a racial utopia where all groups are treated fairly, equally, and none are left behind? Do we get there by saying, we suck, but let’s do this? No. We get there by saying, We’re smart, capable, good people, and we can do this. It can be achieved.

Vocabulary of Blame

Undoubtedly, the most significant communication misstep made by the left is by using a vocabulary of blame. The most prominent barrier to white Trump voters coming over to the Biden camp is created by the constant rhetoric that places white people at fault and blames white people for the problem of racial injustice.

For instance, the use of the term national reckoning squarely places the blame on white shoulders. A day of reckoning is defined as, the time when one is called to account for one’s actions, to pay one’s debts, or to fulfill one’s promises or obligations.

Here is a phrase from the Biden website that allows for a plentiful parcel of blame:

“We are also seeing a national reckoning on racial justice and the tragic human costs of systemic racism in the murder of George Floyd and so many other Black men, women, and children.”

It’s possible that white people’s collective racism was responsible for these tragedies, but the majority of white people do not feel the slightest bit responsible for police violence. The majority of white people are themselves afraid of the police and feel powerless to confront them. As for the other sins against Black people, such as slavery and discrimination, they feel like it was something in the past, and feel profoundly alienated when asked to be held to account or to pay for something they never did. They never owned a slave. They never called somebody the n-word. What do they have to pay for?

Of course, there is plenty of evidence that microaggression, unconscious bias, and systematic racism are very real. But do you fix those issues by blaming white people?

If we were engineers trying to solve a problem in an engine, the issue of who made the engine fail would not be nearly as important as what made the engine fail.

There can be no doubt that our social engine has failed. Though, I’m not sure all white people need to be vilified to fix it.

Trump, obviously, collected his cult-like following by attracting these very alienated white voters who felt unfairly singled out by liberal cries for racial justice and diversity. They felt that finally there was a politician who would look after their interests.

But my point, and the point the liberals should be making, is that racial equality is in their interests, for the reasons I stated above, that a racial utopia is a pleasure for all citizens to live in, not just people of color.

Whites are Fragile

The left responds to this critique by accusing whites of exhibiting white fragility, which is just another symptom of systematic racism. As whites attempt to respond to criticisms, this logic goes, they are once again making the issue about white people’s feelings, instead of real social injustice.

Well, I’ve got news for you. All people are fragile. As I pointed out above, we are fragile animals who are constantly in a state of paranoia, trying to decide if we should run away or fight to the death.

If there needed to be a day of reckoning, then that is fine, and let that day end and transition into a day of reconciliation. Joe Biden could be the leader of that reconciliation.

Joe could reach out to white voters with a positive message that assuages fears of white people, avoids painting an overly gloomy picture, and presents the possibility of a Utopian future.

The Two Key Principles of Positive Languaging

Everything Joe says should be framed in the language of possibility and ability. We are capable, change is possible. For example,

“There is nothing we can’t achieve if we put our minds to it. We can overcome racism and inequality in America. We put a man on the moon, for God’s sake. We can put a Black child in a good school, educate him and get him a good job so he can have a great life.”

These kinds of phrases activate the more confident cerebral cortex of the human-animal and put his reptilian brain stem into the background of this super confident, enlightened human thinker. By avoiding the failure-centric and gloom-spreading vocabulary, we don’t overwhelm the reader with the huge effort that achieving this result is going to take.

We bracket the effort because we want to bracket the fear.

Authenticity

When white people espouse woke ideas, they often seem inauthentic. They can sound like they are posing as some kind of white savior, speaking up for black people because they are virtuous whites, as opposed to the deplorable ones.

You can take the pat yourself on the back out of your speaking when you speak up for Black Lives Matter by adding that an America free of racism is a positive thing for you too as a white person. Without sounding too much like the author Ayn Rand, the truth is that it is a selfish act for white people to fight against racism. We are no islands. When one member of the body politic is suffering, the whole body suffers.

An example of this kind of language Biden could be using — but isn’t:

“I want to live in a country where nobody is left behind because of their skin color, their neighborhood, or their ethnicity. I don’t know about you, but I think a country where everybody has an equal shake is a great thing, and something we can easily achieve if we all work together.”

This message of an easily achievable, great America doesn’t put anybody down. It doesn’t crap on America. It doesn’t place blame. It is the language of a call to action: Let’s do this.

And let us be a little excited about it, too.