If cast as rational rival to Cameron's man of emotion, Brown is sure to lose
The lessons of successive US elections are clear: voters want their leaders to appeal to the heart, not just the intellect
Jonathan Freedland
Wednesday July 11, 2007
The Guardian
Few people poked around in Gordon Brown's suitcase in the past, checking up on his holiday reading; but now he's in the top job, his summer book list is one more bit of privacy he's lost. So we know his choices include Engleby by Sebastian Faulkes, The Age of Turbulence by America's former central banker Alan Greenspan, and Al Gore's latest polemic, The Assault on Reason. That last choice worries me. Not because the Gore book isn't good - it is - but because of another new tome from the US, one that Brown should get FedExed across the Atlantic right away. As a longtime student of American politics, he'd enjoy it. More important, it could save his job.
The book is The Political Brain by Drew Westen, and it may prove to be one of the most important studies of political campaigning of recent times. Just published in the US, it's already making waves there, seized upon as a persuasive explanation of why Democrats keep losing elections - and how they can start winning them. But its message is more universal than that, which is why Brown needs to start devouring it pronto.
For this is no partisan rant of the Michael Moore variety. Westen is a professor of psychology and psychiatry with a specialist's grasp of the science of the mind, not least the cognitive processes by which people absorb information. Through clear, repeatable experiments, rather than focus group hunch or vox pop anecdote, he establishes that "the political brain is an emotional brain". Voters make up their minds not by weighing the competing claims of different parties and deciding which best suits their interests, but by how they feel. They are not "desiccated calculating machines", as Nye Bevan famously cast Hugh Gaitskell, rationally estimating the likely utility for themselves or society by choosing policy A over policy B. Instead, they think with their guts.
Westen's evidence comes from his measuring of the brain activity of people assessing political information. The circuits that are activated are not those associated with logical reasoning but those that regulate emotion. Nor is this confined to the politically unaware or under-educated. Research shows that smart people think with their guts as much as anyone else.
It means that when politicians speak, they trigger a neural network of associations, positive or negative, and these associations owe more to emotion than reason. Indeed, some of these are all but hardwired, the product of thousands of years of evolution. The trick for politicians is to ensure they tap into the positive while associating their opponents with the negative.
Perhaps this sounds like a statement of the obvious. Except Democrats don't seem to have understood it. In one bungled election after another, they have approached the voter as if he were the dispassionate mind revered by 17th century philosophy. They have fired off statistics, position papers, facts and figures - talking to the electorate's intellect, while the Republicans speak to the gut.
One only has to read the transcripts of Gore's answers in his debates with George Bush, or John Kerry's four years later, to see the point. The Democrats repeatedly banged on about percentages, studies or upcoming bills, while Bush, like Ronald Reagan, knew to speak in terms of values, which sit firmly on the emotional register. Westen breaks down Reagan's legendary "Morning in America" TV ad from his 1984 re-election campaign to show how the words and images touched the most deep-rooted neural associations: "family, simple living, strength, the innocence of children, brides and green neighbourhoods". The viewer could not help but feel warmly towards what he saw.
The likely response, especially in a British reader, is to deplore the Republican approach as dumbing down of the crudest kind. Surely, touchy-feely abstractions are so much fluff; far better to stick to "the issues". The trouble is, our brains simply don't work that way. Westen offers evidence that the only people to make decisions based purely on rational calculations of utility are those who have suffered brain damage. The electoral evidence is all too familiar: think of the low-income Americans who voted against their economic self-interest by choosing Bush over Kerry, apparently concluding that their paycheck mattered less than the prospect that, under Kerry, gay men might be able to marry each other in San Francisco.
Democrats don't have to be glum as they recognise this aspect of human nature. Progressive issues can stir the emotions too, so long as they are framed the right way. From guns, gays and abortion to Iraq and Guantánamo, Westen shows how the left can tap into all those positive neural networks - using religious language, for instance - and win American majorities to their cause.
You have to hope that whoever wins the Democratic nomination in 2008 will digest these vital lessons. Otherwise, he - or more likely she - could lose an election every indicator says the Democrats should win. That, after all, is what happened in 1988 and 2000.
But the message resonates in the UK too, not least because of the personalities who will compete at the next election. For it is uncomfortably easy to see Brown as the candidate of reason against Cameron the man of emotion.
Which is why I'm troubled by the prime minister's choice of summer reading. I admire Gore enormously. He has been right on almost all the key issues of the last two decades. But the very title of his new book suggests he has not quite understood the Democratic error, still wishing the electorate would listen to reason instead of accepting that progressives need to speak the language of emotion. (In fairness to Gore, his film An Inconvenient Truth operates on precisely the level Westen demands.)
More worrying still, Brown could easily be a British version of the Gore of 2000: in command of the facts, correct on all the big strategic questions, yet awkward with people and dull to listen to on TV. Meanwhile, Cameron maps easily on to Bush - a son of great privilege, born with a silver spoon, yet somehow able to present himself as an affable, regular guy. If Brown lets this perception settle, it could cost him dearly. (One troubling sign is that Washington rumour has it that Bob Shrum, the political consultant who advised Michael Dukakis, Gore and Kerry, and who boasts a staggering record of eight defeats in eight US presidential elections, is set to move to London - to advise his old pal, Brown.)
But the die is not cast. Brown is 10 times the strategist Cameron is. He just needs to frame his positions differently, appealing to our hearts, not our intellects. That doesn't mean adopting different policy, just different language. While he's at it, he needs to learn one more lesson from Westen's invaluable new book. We are, it seems, still primates beneath the surface, looking for strength in the gorilla who would lead our pack. That means any sign of weakness, especially taking abuse from one's opponent without hitting back, unsettles us in ways we may not even realise. Gore and Kerry both allowed themselves to be insulted by Bush and they paid for it. Last week, Brown seemed weak when he complained that he had only been in the job five days. If Cameron comes at him again, he needs to strike back.
A big clunking fist, yet equipped with emotional intelligence? It sounds a tall order, but no one said politics was easy.
