If you’re the gambling type, here are three sure bets for you today. The first: great odds on Trump tweeting something monumentally stupid and terrifying. The second: plenty of progressives will be outraged by said tweet. The third: plenty of other progressives will chide those outraged progressives for getting “distracted” by his Twitter account.
You can substitute tweeting for some other form of messaging, and you can even substitute Trump for one of his cohort—Kellyanne or Rudy or whoever is making the rounds today. But the above formula remains the same. Statement, outrage, chiding. Statement, outrage, chiding.
Maybe Trump is trying to distract us. Maybe he’s just an erratic, angry buffoon. Maybe both. I have no special insight into his thought process. I don’t know. But what I do know is this: a key tenet of organizing people is meeting them where they are.
In other words, telling people outraged by issue A to divert their attention to (an often more complicated and less tangible) issue B is a surefire losing strategy. It doesn’t matter if issue B is worse. Tactically, this approach almost always fails.
Yes, we should all care about Trumps shady business dealings, his kleptocratic tendencies, his unspeakably terrible appointments to every cabinet position. We should all be extremely invested in finding out exactly who is profiting off of his presidency (hint: it’s him.)
But we’re not all invested in it. Frankly, if everyone cared about that stuff we just wouldn't be where we are right now. And even among progressives, what drives us to outrage varies. Some people will be more outraged by his flag burning Tweet than by his financial fraud.1 Some people will be more bothered by the assertions of voter fraud than they are by the Trump University settlement. That shouldn’t be surprising. This is Human Nature 101. People have certain priorities that may not be reflective of yours. And if you want to reshape those priorities, you need to earn it.
Admonishing people for focusing on issue A is simply not convincing. At baseline, it’s patronizing. But it also creates distance where there is opportunity to do the opposite. The left has to build and organize, and this is not the way to do it.
There aren’t many things to admire about the right, but many of them seem to understand this, dare I say, more intuitively than a lot of progressives. You don't see Republicans saying "No silly Twitter Conservative, forget Beyonce's Black Panther Super Bowl outfit, it's not the real issue, you SHOULD be talking about Obamacare." The right encourages people's various catalysts and then they build around those. That’s part of the reason they managed to elect a reality TV star without a ground game.
The left faces an organizing challenge unprecedented in modern history, and we're playing defense on a crumbling cliff. We must stop with the "you're focused on the wrong thing and getting duped" narrative. It’s everywhere, among all age groups and races and classes, and it's lazy and ineffective.
There are mini culture wars within each faction of the bigger value battles, and vice versa. It’s dangerously easy to decide that what matters most to you should automatically matter most to everyone else. It’s dangerously stupid to think that you can rearrange someone’s priorities with a lecture.
It can’t be said enough: simply telling other progressives that they are wrong will never get enough people to issue B. If you want to convince people that something matters, put some time and effort into actually convincing them. Tell them a story. Relate it back. Make it relevant. Get outraged by what outrages them, and then connect it with what outrages you. Wagging your finger at people disgusted by the voter fraud tweet doesn't make them eager to find out about Trump’s other variations of fraud. All it does is create distance and squander an opportunity to build up a big picture for a bigger audience.
If we want to shift focus, we have to do the dirty work.
Don't spend the next four years doing what did not work for the past two years. Meet people where they are. It's the only way.
1 Also, the flag burning tweet is actually a really big deal.