#problem solvers caucus

Shenker-Osorio says the left’s enemy isn’t the right, it’s cynicism. The problem isn’t that authoritarians want to erase the division between church and state, or take away our right to control our bodies. The problem is that this minority can get away with these unpopular proposals because the people who disagree with them think nothing can be done to stop them. For Shenker-Osorio, the tonic for this is to switch from the negative framing (“abolish ICE”) to positive ones: “respect all families.” Rather than saying “end the climate emergency,” she wants us to call for “ensuring clean, safe air to breathe and water to drink.” When the right says they want to cut taxes to improve the economy, we counter with, “we’ll raise wages and increase consumption, which is better for the economy.” Shenker-Osorio proposes a three-step method for changing minds. First, identify a shared value (“people who work for living ought to earn a living”). Move on to a problem (“our divisions distract us while rich people pick our pockets and hand the spoils to their corporate cronies”). And then, the solution: “rewrite the rules so that the wealthiest few pay what they owe and all of us have what we need for generations to come.”

The job of a convincer is to persuade the pizza eaters to go for the burger. For this, Shenker-Osorio says we should borrow from the right, whose most visible avatars deliberately set out to alienate their unpersuadable opponents. When far right figures say grotesque, unhinged things about “groomers” or “Jewish space lasers” or whatever, they’re trying to trick their opponents into repeating the statement: “Can you believe these bozos want to give teachers AR-15s?” Getting your opponents to repeat your message increases the chance that it will be heard by someone who finds it persuasive and switches from burgers to pizza. By this logic, the left increases its chances of taking power by saying bold things that trigger conservative Red Scare paranoiacs and religious maniacs. When they run around and say, “The left wants to take away your assault rifles, making housing and college free, and replace your 401(k) with a guaranteed pension,” they do our work for us.

At the center of Shenker-Osorio’s work is the notion of “persuadability.” For Shenker-Osorio, a “centrist” isn’t someone who wants a little bit of both; they’re someone who hasn’t made up their mind about which option they prefer. To illustrate this point, Shenker-Osorio asks us to imagine a family trying to decide what to order for dinner. Some members of the family want pizza, others want burgers. Could that family be satisfied with a pizzaburger? The point is, the family is undecided . It’s not that they want to converge on a compromise solution that mixes the two options. That won’t please everyone — it pleases no one.

This whole thing is a wildly bad idea. First, it’s politically unhinged. The Democrats aren’t extreme leftists. The party’s main policy planks barely rise to the level of liberalism. Anywhere else in the world, they’d be a center-right or just-plain-right party. The idea that “polarization” arises out of Democratic “extremism” doesn’t bear even the most cursory scrutiny. The real problem is that the GOP has swung to the most extreme right, to the point where it is appointing militiamen in its caucus to powerful committee roles, from which perch they promote surreal fantasies about the supreme legal authority of sheriffs. The Republican party isn’t subtle about wanting to disenfranchise its opponents, or its mission to create a white, Christian nation. The fact that the GOP manages to call the Democrats “socialists” for supporting any public services and the universal right to vote doesn’t make the Democrats into socialists. This is real “we have both kinds: country and western” politics.