Why you should think like your enemy
It makes YOU more powerful.
Please indulge me for a moment in a rant about political operatives who don’t understand how the other side thinks. My thesis: If you don’t understand how the other side thinks, REALLY understand it, you cannot formulate a strategy to defeat them.
On the issue of abortion, I grew up in a family of nine girls. We are all passionate about our duty to act in the world — which we each interpret quite differently.
Some of us PERFORM abortions and work for Planned Parenthood, and some of us lie down in the street to STOP abortions (and may have been members of Operation Rescue, not really sure about that one).
We all love each other very much and practice family unity — we were in fact all together at a lovely sisters’ tea the afternoon the Dobbs decision was released. While we don’t overtly argue with each other, we have sometimes discussed abortion across the aisle. So when I say I know how many of these people think, it’s because I routinely spend time with people who have ideas that are radically different from mine.
I really wish people in power in the the Democratic Party would spend time talking to and listening to people who have ideas different than theirs. (I think this about the Republican Party too, but they’re so crazy gone into fanaticism and wanting to destroy the world there’s no hope there). I understand the gerrymandering that has created extreme districts that has driven successful politicians to become more extreme. I understand that any successful politician has spent the majority of their time in office on hands and knees begging people for money, and the people who care enough about political issues to give money are more likely to be committed to one extreme or the other on an issue.
I get it, but it needs to change, if the successful politicians in future are going to be Democrats — and more of them.
And I’m not saying we should listen to each other in some kind of a “why can’t we all just get along?“ kumbaya way. I think the positions currently espoused by the Republican Party are abhorrent to human rights and human dignity, and I have zero interest in “getting along “ with that.
The point of listening to others is purely strategic. Democrats have been politically unable to hold the pro-choice line, and appear paralyzed in the face of the Dobbs decision. I’m just trying to offer some options here, based on my personal experience of understanding the opposition. If you are trying to persuade someone on the opposite side, you have to understand them. You have to walk in their shoes.
I am a litigator and mediator by training. You don’t win cases and you don’t settle cases without understanding what drives the other side. I didn’t make the money I have now by virtue of my pretty face and winning personality, although I forgive you if you thought that was the case. :) Rather, I practice in the area of employment discrimination, where traditionally a lawyer chooses one or the other side (management or employee) at the start of his or her practice and sticks with it. In a highly unusual and almost unique practice style, I have represented both employees and employers, and am now working as a neutral. I have experience with and intimate knowledge of what goes on in conversations in the back rooms. In a mediation where I say to the employer’s executive “The weeks leading up to trial are the most labor and cost intensive in the case, and your counsel has an incredible financial incentive to tell you not to settle now, and then miraculously on the eve of trial advise that you settle then because ‘We’ve had a chance to look at the evidence more in-depth’ or ‘We spoke to somebody who says this judge is a mofo on our issue.’ But the only person that delay benefits is your counsel, not you,” the look on the executive’s face tells me that she has experienced this before, and how could I possibly know that? This gives me a level of credibility with her that when I say, this case is worth X dollars, for Y reasons, so you should settle at X dollars today, she believes me and settles. I’ve solved her problem by giving her a specific, articulated basis to defend her decision when she goes back and is questioned about it by higher-ups.
How do I know what her counsel says to her? When it’s private and I wasn’t in the room? It’s because I’ve been in that room before, on the management side, where the head attorney is telling them that. Over and over again.
Because of this knowledge of how the other side works, as a settlement judge in a program at the EEOC, I had a 91% settlement rate in a program that has an average 55% settlement rate.
91% versus 55%. That’s the edge thinking like your opposition gives you.
In any other strategic endeavor, such as war or intelligence gathering, people pay dearly and sometimes with their lives to get information about how the other side is thinking.
But in political circles, the tendency is just to listen to the echo chamber of other people who are as passionate as you are, and in the same direction too, and there’s a rigid policing of the language used in any argument advanced that “seems to concede“ the arguments of the opposition. Oy vey.
That’s not how we win y’all. To win, you have to think like your enemy.
