FAFO*: America’s Republican Base Is About to Have a Teachable Moment
It’s gonna hurt, a lot
Recently, I got into a little back-and-forth with a fellow named Gil Duran over at the FrameLab Substack. FrameLab is a site is devoted to the work of George Lakoff, a giant in the field of linguistics, whose research has focused on how our brains use metaphors and mental models, which he calls frames, to understand the world around us. Lakoff defines frames as:
“… mental structures that shape the way we see the world. As a result, they shape the goals we seek, the plans we make, the way we act, and what counts as a good or bad outcome of our actions.” (source, p. 10)
Lakoff believes that with regard to politics there are two basic frames through which Americans view the political world. Both are metaphorical, both employ the metaphor of the family, and both are grounded in a set of distinct moral principles. Conservatives tend to view the political world through a lens Lakoff calls Strict Father morality, which emphasizes the virtues of hierarchical order, respect for authority, obedience, and punishment for stepping out of line. Liberals, in contrast, tend to view politics more in terms of Nurturant Parent morality, which emphasizes values such as empathy, fairness, personal responsibility, and protecting the family from a dangerous world, rather than punishing it for dangerous thoughts. An excellent summary of Lakoff’s views on metaphors, morality, and politics can be found here.
Lakoff’s ideas have deep implications for understanding the rise of authoritarianism and the MAGA movement in America, which he has articulated at several points since the nation descended that golden escalator in 2015 (e.g., here, here, and here). However, those metaphors and their implications are not what this post is about, because my exchange with Gil Duran was not about frames, at least not directly. It was about how people learn.
Specifically, this is the question I raised: How can people like the MAGA faithful be persuaded to change their beliefs? Which is more likely to do the job: better messaging or lived experience?
The impetus for our exchange was a recent op ed in the New York Times by Ragin’ Cajun James Carville, in which he declared (in classic Carville style) that the best thing Democrats could do at this crucial moment was to “roll over and play dead”. Needless to say, this suggestion met a lot of pushback, including the post in FrameLab to which I responded (also, e.g., here, here).
Gil Duran was very upset with James Carville. In fact, he was so upset that he pretty much mischaracterized most of what Carville wrote. According to Duran, Carville is saying that “people will rationally decide that Republicans are incompetent if Democrats sit on their hands and do nothing.”
Duran cannot quite free himself from the idea that politics is something we experience in our minds, but not in our bodies.
I do not believe Carville is saying that people will “rationally decide” that Republicans are incompetent. I believe he is saying that Republican incompetence is a given, and as a result, people will suffer — physically, financially, emotionally — and that suffering, not Democratic messaging, is what will change their minds. Duran, on the other hand, believes that Democrats have the power to change voters’ minds, at least the ones they lost in 2024, by doing a better job of articulating and communicating Nurturant Parent values:
“Democrats must consistently activate frames of community, shared prosperity, and responsible governance. These aren’t just talking points — they’re the mental structures through which Americans interpret political reality.”
Democrats must “connect policy to values through compelling narratives that resonate with voters’ experiences.”
So far, how has that been going? Duran, like many commentators, seems to suffer selective amnesia when it comes to the 2024 Presidential campaign. Harris and her surrogates highlighted every Nurturant-Parent value he castigates them for ignoring, they also articulated over and over the danger that a second Trump Administration would pose to those values.
Before voters pronounced their verdict on November 5, mainstream media and liberal commentators were giddy about the focus and discipline of the Harris campaign. It was probably one of the best run Presidential campaigns in modern history. But it was all for naught. Harris did not lose by a lot, but she lost by a little almost everywhere. Whatever Harris was selling, the people she needed to reach were not buying. So here we are.
The irony in Duran’s critique is that someone who operates a website dedicated to the importance of metaphors fails to see that Carville is writing metaphorically. What his colorful metaphor means, I believe, is not that Democrats should literally “play dead.” Rather, I suspect he means “Democrats should not help Republicans destroy the Republic.”
What Carville specifically suggests is what he calls a “tactical pause”. As he explains it:
“get out of the hour-to-hour, day-to-day combat where one side (ours) is largely playing defense and struggling to defend politically charged positions (like explaining D.E.I. or persuading voters to care about foreign aid) and take time to regroup, look forward and make decisions about where we want to get to over the next two years.”
Can Democrats engage in this “tactical pause” and still continue to bear witness to the destruction, cruelty, and incompetence of this Administration? Of course they can. Will they? So far, their track record has been pretty poor. But some seasoned observers, like long-time Congressional expert Norm Ornstein, have laid out a number of practical actions Democrats can take. Ornstein acknowledges these actions cannot stop the Republican wrecking ball, but they can slow it down, put a spotlight on the damage being done, and warn the public about the next disaster being planned for them. So far, none of these steps have been taken in any kind of organized, disciplined way. But theoretically, they could. And if they did, what then?
The most important sentence in Carville’s post, the one I have yet to see one critic address, is this one:
“And there’s nothing Democrats can legitimately do to stop it, even if we wanted to.”
Nothing in Carville’s piece implies that Democrats should not be calling out Republican abominations. Nothing in Carville’s piece says Democrats should not be providing the American public with an ongoing, detailed account of this Administration’s corruption, criminality, and treason.
But Carville is acknowledging a truth that mainstream Dems find very hard to accept: whatever message Democrats concoct to counter the Trump 2.0 juggernaut, it is not likely to change anybody’s mind. First, the people they need to reach will most likely never hear the message because they live inside a right-wing media bubble (or if they do hear it, they are pre-conditioned to dismiss it out of hand). Second, any emphasis by Democrats on “messaging” instead of “action” will be seen by the Party’s own better-informed supporters as a sign of weakness and capitulation, and thus likely to cause even more erosion of Party support in 2026 and 2028 (assuming Trump 2.0 hasn’t freed us from the burden of voting by then).
The Democratic Party has yet to realize it is almost as toxic to the American public as the Republican Party.
Why? Because Democrats continue to nurse their own fantasy, that America politics is still a normal two-party competitive system in which something called “bipartisan agreement” is seen as (1) a valued goal of governing and (2) the best route to winning support in the next election. Neither of these beliefs has been supported by recent electoral results. Republicans are literally at war with Democrats, as well as every constituency they represent. Yet Democrats still talk about “bipartisanship” and “working across the aisle”. Their geriatric leadership is not the leadership America needs in this war.
Persuasion doesn’t change people’s minds — but lived experience does
I wrote a whole book about persuasion. My focus was on persuasion in marketing and advertising, but what I learned in writing that book is equally applicable to the world of politics. Consider the following two paragraphs from Intuitive Marketing. Simply replace “consumers” with “voters”, “product” with “candidate”, and “point of sale” with “voting booth” to see the challenge Democrats are facing as they try to persuade voters to “buy” their candidates in the next election:
“… the persuasive marketing model that has dominated marketing practice for decades has operated on two basic assumptions. First, consumers are essentially rational decision makers in the sense that they decide to buy one product rather than another based on a logical comparison of product benefits or attributes. And second, the preferences and behavior of these rational consumers can best be influenced using the following formula: first grab their attention, then communicate to them persuasive arguments that show why your product is superior to others, then repeat those arguments until they are committed to memory, then activate that memory when the consumer is at a point of sale.
“But … an overwhelming body of research across several brain science disciplines tells us unequivocally that these assumptions are wrong. Human beings are seldom rational decision makers — especially when they are acting as consumers — and direct persuasion is an effective way to influence their behavior only in limited circumstances — none of which apply in the majority of marketing contexts. Instead, brain science tells us that consumers are usually intuitive decision makers who do not pay much attention to marketing, resist explicit persuasive messaging, seldom make product choices based on information and logic, employ processes they are not consciously aware of to make decisions, and have extremely faulty memories.” (source, p. 18)
Today, MAGA lived experience with the political world is largely vicarious. MAGA cultists are experiencing national politics in a relatively benign and elite-mediated way. They are, on the whole, happy with what they’re experiencing. Their chosen leader has achieved a phoenix-like return to power and is now in the process of wreaking the revenge he has been promising for years. From the perspective of the MAGA faithful, all their feelings of anger and envy, all their fantasies of retribution and vengeance, are now being addressed. The libs are being owned. The deep state is being destroyed. What’s not to like?
If Democrats really believe they can pierce the MAGA bubble with messages about how bad this Administration is, they are delusional.
How does lived experience change beliefs?
Republicans need to begin living with the consequences of their beliefs. Trump and Musk, it now appears, are pathologically determined to give them the opportunity to do just that. Democrats need to let this betrayal play out, just as James Carville recommends. They need to accept it is no longer their job to save Republican office holders and voters from themselves. Democrats have been doing this for years and they keep getting punished for it. Perhaps they need be be reminded of that famous quote about insanity … you know, the one about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
Nothing the Democrats can say or argue is going to cause one MAGA voter to change their mind about voting for a GOP House or Senate candidate (or sit out the election) in their district/state in 2026. Only one thing will: personal lives so thoroughly disrupted by Trump/Musk policies and chaos, that they will vote for anyone on the other side.
What do I mean by thoroughly disrupted? Lost benefits, lost services, wage stagnation, lost jobs, small-business failures, rising prices on everything, food and commodity shortages, spiking interest rates, growing debt, disappearing retirement accounts (for the few who even have them), mortgage defaults, no home insurance, sick kids, hungry kids, forced pregnancies, doctors abandoning communities, hospitals closing, poisoned air and water, escalating climate disasters (fires, floods and super-storms), no FEMA to help, possibly sending our sons off to fight and die in imperialistic wars. All directed by a smirking, clueless, obnoxious “king” they put in place, but who no longer has any interest in the needs of the fools who voted for him. As far as he is concerned, the con has succeeded, the mark has been fleeced, and it’s time to move on to the next scheme.
Today, nobody is running a better advertisement for democracy than Donald Trump and his trusty sidekick Elon Musk. As the great late-20th century philosopher Joni Mitchell reminds us: you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone. And that is exactly the lesson the MAGA base is about to learn. They have been on a sugar-high of vicarious vengeance for about a decade. So far, they have remained relatively untouched in their personal lives. That is going to change, massively and consequentially, very soon.
Only lived experience, terrible, horrible lived experience, is going to awaken our low-information, spiteful, hateful Trump fans from the fever dream in which they’ve trapped themselves. Whatever the Dems say, the people they need to reach will neither hear them nor believe them. Republican voters, for their part, have insisted on touching the stove when they’ve been told over and over it will burn them. They’ve touched it anyway. This is the only way they will ever learn. The Dems’ biggest selling point is simply this: we’re not them. And their second biggest selling point — which they appear to be squandering at this very moment — is this: we couldn’t stop them from screwing you, but we didn’t help them either.
Notes
* You guessed right: it’s “f_ck around and find out”
