When I was in my early 20s and starving for any kind of professional connections in New York City, where I was trying to make it as a writer, I met a fancy author who miraculously had an aunt who knew my mom through cultural organizing in my hometown of Colorado Springs.
I cannot recommend highly enough the book I’m reading right now, The Persuaders by Anand Giridharadas, about how persuasion is at the heart of democracy. I have to believe that the Club Q shooting is a symptom of our inability to hold faith with the power of conversation as the proper place to wrestle over our differences, instead replacing it with a belief that those who “oppose” us are irredeemable and incapable of change. From the latter perspective, everything is war and domination.
I read it! And very much appreciated the reporting. Though I did wonder why he didn't go deep on some conservative persuaders so we could learn more about a range of strategies, mindsets etc. What do you love about it Asha?
I agree with you that an in-depth analysis of a conservative persuader would have been interesting, but I also think he was coming at it from the perspective of someone on the progressive end of things who is dismayed by the tendency of some progressives to get hung up on ideological purity rather than figuring out how to broaden their movements. The conservatives, as he acknowledged, have been managing persuasion quite handily for some time, but progressives seem to really struggle with it.
I had two favorite parts. One, was his description of Loretta Ross' 90%/75%/50%, etc. approach for assessing what kind of work you can do with someone and where the leverage points are for persuading people to work in common cause with you. I also loved his analysis of Bernie Sanders vs. AOC in terms of the mechanics of their different persuasion tactics and how/why they came to them in regards to their ethnic/racial/gender/generational identities. Feeling like generationally I'm smack dab between the two of them (as is the author) I can see where we've been and where we need to go but I don't have the innate skill for where we need to go. (Social media sort of confounds me, for instance. Twitter especially. Though that may not matter for much longer.) So, having him break it all down piece by piece was really helpful for me. Like, Oh! I see how she's doing that!
Okay, finished! There are so many things I'd love to hear Anand talk about, but I think the thing I'd love to hear him lay out more explicitly is this: In the second half of the book he talks to folks doing political messaging, folks applying cult deprogramming on a wider level to people drawn in by QAnon and such, and folks doing deep canvassing. He does an admirable job of breaking down the mechanics of how they're talking to people, approaching them, but he rarely names that one thing they're avoiding (that the Right has no seeming hesitations about) is demonization and dehumanization, both of the people they oppose and the people they believe are the source of the problem. They're not shying away from naming the problem or pissing people off who are way on the other end of the political spectrum, but they're always focusing on behaviors and not anyone's inherent human value. This seems like a really crucial part of the equation. What does he have to say about this practice of persuasion which he implicitly seems to champion and how it hinges on rejecting demonization and dehumanization as a tactic and communication tool?
I’ve grown up in Texas and currently live in a deeply red, conservative town organizing and trying to expand the area (love the use of cultural shot!). I have so much love for this place and these people and I am forever embittered at the way red places are painted and ignored in the general discourse. humanness is just complicated and trying to boil it down to a dichotomy is never going to work.
I do a lot of outreach about different issues. I'm a researcher, and my "friendly" area is creativity and parenting so that makes me palatable to folks. But I spend most of my time on reproductive healthcare decision making. One example recently is bringing an organization to our city that focuses on getting emergency contraceptive to folks. It's been a wild ride (with a sanctuary for life city vote that just passed) but educating people on what that means and how it effects people's lives has helped a lot. I find that so often the people I talk with aren't as opposite as it seems; it's usually more that they just don't know for a variety of reasons.
Thanks so much for another brilliant example of your superlative writing. This recalls the outstanding essay and project that you did for me at Barnard on the epidemic of students suicides that swept the campus then. You show the same instinct for non-binary thinking that allows you to probe into a profoundly complex situation plaguing the U.S. As we know, it’s not only Colorado Springs that suffers from this terrible affliction. I’m in Portland, Oregon, a notably liberal city, especially in terms of gay rights, that nevertheless became severely divided during the extensive and excruciating BLM protests that I joined. I was born and raised in NJ, in a conservative area that bred fierce anti-communism. Today that same place goes for Trumpism. Binary thinking is there now as it was in the 1950’s.
I learned from this experience what you’ve eloquently expressed, that our culture is fraught with tangled complications beyond simple explanations. We look to intelligent and sensitive minds like yours for balanced insights. DD
Thanks again Courtney for this beautiful reflection on a complicated and tragic event and time in our nation's reckoning. Kudos to your mom, your bad ass editor, your long time friends who continue to work away there in Colorado Springs.
I grew up in a wealthy suburb of Minneapolis, Edina. I learned that we were "middle class", but later discovered that was the way the wealthy downplayed their wealth. In fact, we were quite wealthy. I left those environs and sought to carve my identify in places on the margins. I would often not admit where I actually came from.
I also lived in Fresno, CA - a bifurcated city of religiously conservative, middle and upper class whites and low income Latinos and other immigrants. Serving a religiously progressive church in that city was an important part of my journey. To take a pro-LGBT stance in the 90's meant something. Only 3-4 congregations out of 200 did so. I appreciated how being different than the mainstream helped define me.
I have spent the last 2 decades living in the self described progressive/liberal city of Madison, WI. I loved being in a place with so many like minded friends and colleagues. At the same time, as a newcomer it was much easier to see some of the short sightedness of the liberal/progressive way in the world. I felt like much of my job as a pastor was to ask us to be honest about both our deep convictions and our blind spots.
Mostly I've appreciated living in distinctly different places, learning that most of life is much more grey than black and white; that there is a beloved humanness everywhere and that the things I care most deeply about will come through compassion and not self righteousness.
Your writing continues to inspire me to as honest as I can with myself.
Wow, I love this accounting so much. It adds up to a pretty incredible life, got to say. Thank you for taking the time to write it down. I, of course, so relate to this in our very progressive Oakland: "At the same time, as a newcomer it was much easier to see some of the short sightedness of the liberal/progressive way in the world."
In my 20s, I lived in Denver, and I often drove to Colorado Springs with my new agey boyfriend, to see a hippie nutritionist who determined which vitamins you needed by pressing on your arm to gauge its resistance. We would drive by the soaring cathedral of the Air Force Academy, and the Focus on the Family HQ, which always spurred me into a hateful rant about James Dobson. "Dare to Discipline" was the only parenting manual my Evangelical parents had in their bookcase and suffice it to say, they dared! (Best part: Dr. Dobson describes beating his weiner dog, and then how the dog looked back at him with grateful eyes...) We liked to go to Manitou, too, to eat at the old-school veg cafe on the main drag and play skeeball at the open-air arcade before hiking around. Your essay provoked a lot of memories. When I heard about the shooting, I also thought, "of course." I think of Colorado Springs as an improbable confluence – military, the religious right, and preppy oil & gas richies putting around the pink Broadmoor, hippies, new agers, nature-lovers, and a fantastic liberal arts college...
I think you and my mom went to the same hippie nutritionist. HA! And are you talking about Adam's Mountain Cafe because I will never find a comparable veggie burger anywhere no matter how long I live? Skeeball for LIFE!
I'd recommend reading "Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation" by Kristin Du Men - she has a chapter in the book called "Pilgrims Progress in Camo" which is all about the rise of the evangelical movement in Colorado Springs. The chapter raises some interesting points about our home town.
I also grew up in Colorado Springs (might have been in high school around the same time you were—I graduated from Air Academy in 2005). My family was also made up of liberals who sought out other liberals and progressives—and the largest group they found them in was the big United Church of Christ church downtown. They were just looking for any decent-sized group of like-minded folks; the church part was far secondary.
I resonated with and recognized so much of what you said (shout out to Poor Richard’s and Boulder Street Coffee Roasters for being progressive oases!). But I especially resonated with how, yes, growing up in a liberal family in “The Evangelical Vatican” was a visceral experience of embattlement. Thank you for that word--it's right on.
Sometimes that embattlement almost felt, to my younger self, like being on teams competing against each other. Looking back, I don’t consider that to be a useful framework to carry forward. But back then, it helped me to feel like I could safely remain in close connection with my dear friends who were deeply in conservative evangelical culture. We could have a friendly sort of competition sometimes, because we were just “rooting for our teams”.
While that mentality got left in my teenage years, I do still carry with me a well-worn, almost unconscious internal posture in which I am always prepared to push against and push back for the sake of the values I hold dear and the people whose rights I seek to protect.
I wrote a piece for my community in response to the shooting at Club Q (I’m a UCC pastor now). The only way I could find to begin to speak about this was through my gut-level experience of dissonance in the conservative evangelical Christian culture I often was exposed to through dear friends of mine.
Thank you for your open-hearted way of bringing empathy and nuance to places of division and embattlement.
I cannot recommend highly enough the book I’m reading right now, The Persuaders by Anand Giridharadas, about how persuasion is at the heart of democracy. I have to believe that the Club Q shooting is a symptom of our inability to hold faith with the power of conversation as the proper place to wrestle over our differences, instead replacing it with a belief that those who “oppose” us are irredeemable and incapable of change. From the latter perspective, everything is war and domination.
I read it! And very much appreciated the reporting. Though I did wonder why he didn't go deep on some conservative persuaders so we could learn more about a range of strategies, mindsets etc. What do you love about it Asha?
I agree with you that an in-depth analysis of a conservative persuader would have been interesting, but I also think he was coming at it from the perspective of someone on the progressive end of things who is dismayed by the tendency of some progressives to get hung up on ideological purity rather than figuring out how to broaden their movements. The conservatives, as he acknowledged, have been managing persuasion quite handily for some time, but progressives seem to really struggle with it.
I had two favorite parts. One, was his description of Loretta Ross' 90%/75%/50%, etc. approach for assessing what kind of work you can do with someone and where the leverage points are for persuading people to work in common cause with you. I also loved his analysis of Bernie Sanders vs. AOC in terms of the mechanics of their different persuasion tactics and how/why they came to them in regards to their ethnic/racial/gender/generational identities. Feeling like generationally I'm smack dab between the two of them (as is the author) I can see where we've been and where we need to go but I don't have the innate skill for where we need to go. (Social media sort of confounds me, for instance. Twitter especially. Though that may not matter for much longer.) So, having him break it all down piece by piece was really helpful for me. Like, Oh! I see how she's doing that!
Such an intelligent take, thanks Asha. I'm likely going to do a 5 questions Friday thang with him. Is there one question you would want to ask him?
Oh, goodness! How exciting. I have about 100 pages left to go. Let me finish it and get back to you.
Great, keep me posted.
Okay, finished! There are so many things I'd love to hear Anand talk about, but I think the thing I'd love to hear him lay out more explicitly is this: In the second half of the book he talks to folks doing political messaging, folks applying cult deprogramming on a wider level to people drawn in by QAnon and such, and folks doing deep canvassing. He does an admirable job of breaking down the mechanics of how they're talking to people, approaching them, but he rarely names that one thing they're avoiding (that the Right has no seeming hesitations about) is demonization and dehumanization, both of the people they oppose and the people they believe are the source of the problem. They're not shying away from naming the problem or pissing people off who are way on the other end of the political spectrum, but they're always focusing on behaviors and not anyone's inherent human value. This seems like a really crucial part of the equation. What does he have to say about this practice of persuasion which he implicitly seems to champion and how it hinges on rejecting demonization and dehumanization as a tactic and communication tool?
I’ve grown up in Texas and currently live in a deeply red, conservative town organizing and trying to expand the area (love the use of cultural shot!). I have so much love for this place and these people and I am forever embittered at the way red places are painted and ignored in the general discourse. humanness is just complicated and trying to boil it down to a dichotomy is never going to work.
How are you "trying to expand the area"? Love to hear about these kinds of things.
I do a lot of outreach about different issues. I'm a researcher, and my "friendly" area is creativity and parenting so that makes me palatable to folks. But I spend most of my time on reproductive healthcare decision making. One example recently is bringing an organization to our city that focuses on getting emergency contraceptive to folks. It's been a wild ride (with a sanctuary for life city vote that just passed) but educating people on what that means and how it effects people's lives has helped a lot. I find that so often the people I talk with aren't as opposite as it seems; it's usually more that they just don't know for a variety of reasons.
Amazing! Thank you for the work you're doing. Sounds so critical.
Thanks so much for another brilliant example of your superlative writing. This recalls the outstanding essay and project that you did for me at Barnard on the epidemic of students suicides that swept the campus then. You show the same instinct for non-binary thinking that allows you to probe into a profoundly complex situation plaguing the U.S. As we know, it’s not only Colorado Springs that suffers from this terrible affliction. I’m in Portland, Oregon, a notably liberal city, especially in terms of gay rights, that nevertheless became severely divided during the extensive and excruciating BLM protests that I joined. I was born and raised in NJ, in a conservative area that bred fierce anti-communism. Today that same place goes for Trumpism. Binary thinking is there now as it was in the 1950’s.
I learned from this experience what you’ve eloquently expressed, that our culture is fraught with tangled complications beyond simple explanations. We look to intelligent and sensitive minds like yours for balanced insights. DD
Ahhhhhh Mia! Seeing her name in your piece felt like such a small-world moment. (I met her in Iowa City.)
Then you know what a bright light she is!
Thanks again Courtney for this beautiful reflection on a complicated and tragic event and time in our nation's reckoning. Kudos to your mom, your bad ass editor, your long time friends who continue to work away there in Colorado Springs.
I grew up in a wealthy suburb of Minneapolis, Edina. I learned that we were "middle class", but later discovered that was the way the wealthy downplayed their wealth. In fact, we were quite wealthy. I left those environs and sought to carve my identify in places on the margins. I would often not admit where I actually came from.
I also lived in Fresno, CA - a bifurcated city of religiously conservative, middle and upper class whites and low income Latinos and other immigrants. Serving a religiously progressive church in that city was an important part of my journey. To take a pro-LGBT stance in the 90's meant something. Only 3-4 congregations out of 200 did so. I appreciated how being different than the mainstream helped define me.
I have spent the last 2 decades living in the self described progressive/liberal city of Madison, WI. I loved being in a place with so many like minded friends and colleagues. At the same time, as a newcomer it was much easier to see some of the short sightedness of the liberal/progressive way in the world. I felt like much of my job as a pastor was to ask us to be honest about both our deep convictions and our blind spots.
Mostly I've appreciated living in distinctly different places, learning that most of life is much more grey than black and white; that there is a beloved humanness everywhere and that the things I care most deeply about will come through compassion and not self righteousness.
Your writing continues to inspire me to as honest as I can with myself.
Wow, I love this accounting so much. It adds up to a pretty incredible life, got to say. Thank you for taking the time to write it down. I, of course, so relate to this in our very progressive Oakland: "At the same time, as a newcomer it was much easier to see some of the short sightedness of the liberal/progressive way in the world."
Yes - Adam's. You gotta pile it high! With sprouts!
I think Manitou also had a thriving witch & satanist scene? Or at least in the fevered imaginations.
In my 20s, I lived in Denver, and I often drove to Colorado Springs with my new agey boyfriend, to see a hippie nutritionist who determined which vitamins you needed by pressing on your arm to gauge its resistance. We would drive by the soaring cathedral of the Air Force Academy, and the Focus on the Family HQ, which always spurred me into a hateful rant about James Dobson. "Dare to Discipline" was the only parenting manual my Evangelical parents had in their bookcase and suffice it to say, they dared! (Best part: Dr. Dobson describes beating his weiner dog, and then how the dog looked back at him with grateful eyes...) We liked to go to Manitou, too, to eat at the old-school veg cafe on the main drag and play skeeball at the open-air arcade before hiking around. Your essay provoked a lot of memories. When I heard about the shooting, I also thought, "of course." I think of Colorado Springs as an improbable confluence – military, the religious right, and preppy oil & gas richies putting around the pink Broadmoor, hippies, new agers, nature-lovers, and a fantastic liberal arts college...
I think you and my mom went to the same hippie nutritionist. HA! And are you talking about Adam's Mountain Cafe because I will never find a comparable veggie burger anywhere no matter how long I live? Skeeball for LIFE!
Look at my profile pic❤️
I'd recommend reading "Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation" by Kristin Du Men - she has a chapter in the book called "Pilgrims Progress in Camo" which is all about the rise of the evangelical movement in Colorado Springs. The chapter raises some interesting points about our home town.
I also grew up in Colorado Springs (might have been in high school around the same time you were—I graduated from Air Academy in 2005). My family was also made up of liberals who sought out other liberals and progressives—and the largest group they found them in was the big United Church of Christ church downtown. They were just looking for any decent-sized group of like-minded folks; the church part was far secondary.
I resonated with and recognized so much of what you said (shout out to Poor Richard’s and Boulder Street Coffee Roasters for being progressive oases!). But I especially resonated with how, yes, growing up in a liberal family in “The Evangelical Vatican” was a visceral experience of embattlement. Thank you for that word--it's right on.
Sometimes that embattlement almost felt, to my younger self, like being on teams competing against each other. Looking back, I don’t consider that to be a useful framework to carry forward. But back then, it helped me to feel like I could safely remain in close connection with my dear friends who were deeply in conservative evangelical culture. We could have a friendly sort of competition sometimes, because we were just “rooting for our teams”.
While that mentality got left in my teenage years, I do still carry with me a well-worn, almost unconscious internal posture in which I am always prepared to push against and push back for the sake of the values I hold dear and the people whose rights I seek to protect.
I wrote a piece for my community in response to the shooting at Club Q (I’m a UCC pastor now). The only way I could find to begin to speak about this was through my gut-level experience of dissonance in the conservative evangelical Christian culture I often was exposed to through dear friends of mine.
Thank you for your open-hearted way of bringing empathy and nuance to places of division and embattlement.