Shaping Narrative, Shifting Power: Part I

Dorian Warren and Anat Shenker-Osorio on the role of narrative in shifting power and building a more equitable society. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

What is “narrative”? How is narrative a form of power? And what are the dominant narratives standing in the way of change even as the COVID-19 pandemic dials up the volume on an ever-louder cacophany of major public policy failures by the day? To help answer some of these questions, this week and next, Off-Kilter is excited to air a special 2-part series of conversations produced in partnership with our friends at The Forge organizing journal, digging into the role of narrative in shifting the balance of power and building a more equitable society.

Part 1:

• Anat Shenker-Osorio — a longtime communications expert and consultant to progressive campaigns
• Dorian Warren — president of Community Change, one of the country’s leading community organizing projects, and a political scientist whose work focuses on race, class, and labor in the U.S.

In Part II, we dig in deeper to how progressive movement leaders are working to shift narratives in the workers’ rights and immigrant rights movements — with Andrea Dehlendorf, a Co-Director at United for Respect, and María Rodriguez, co-founding Executive Director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition.

TRANSCRIPT:

♪ I work and get paid like minimum wage

Sights to hit the clock by the end of the day

Hot from downtown into the hood where I slave

The only place I can afford ’cause my block ain’t safe

I spend most of my time working…. ♪

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off-Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality, and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas.

Hope you haven’t missed Off-Kilter too much while we’ve been on break, but we’ve been thinking a lot here at Off-Kilter about narrative. What is narrative? How is narrative a form of power? And what are the dominant narratives standing in the way of change even as the COVID-19 pandemic dials up the volume on an ever louder cacophony of major public policy failures, seemingly by the day?

To help answer some of those questions and many, many more this week and next, Off-Kilter is excited to air a special 2-part series of conversations produced in partnership with our friends at The Forge organizing journal, digging into the role of narrative in shifting the balance of power and building a more equitable society. So, for part one this week, my conversation with Anat Shenker-Osorio, a longtime communications expert and consultant to progressive campaigns who’s forgotten, to be totally honest, more about narrative than most of us who work on these issues could ever hope to learn and know. And Dorian Warren, president of Community Change, one of the country’s leading community organizing projects, and a political scientist whose work focuses on race, class, and labor in the U.S. Next week, for part two, we’ll dig in deeper to how progressive movement leaders have been working to shift narratives in the workers’ rights and immigrant rights movements specifically. And I want to give a shout-out to Jonathan Heller and Judith Barish, the guest editors of The Forge’s recent issue, Shaping Narratives, Shifting Power, which all of the guests on this 2-part series contributed to.

First, my conversation with Anat and Dorian. And while I’m introducing them, I just want to give a congratulations to Dorian, the rest of the Community Change team, and the recipients of this year’s Community Change Awards, who were all honored virtually earlier this week at Community Change’s Annual Celebration. Let’s take a listen.

Thanks to you both for taking the time to come on the show. This is just a total treat to have you both on the same episode.

DORIAN WARREN: [dog barks in the background] Thanks for having us.

ANAT SHENKER-OSORIO: Yeah!

WARREN: And if you hear my dog in the background, that’s just her agreeing.

SHENKER-OSORIO: [laughs] Yeah. Thank you so, so much. It’s a huge honor, honestly, to be with the both of you.

VALLAS: It’s really, really good to know that your dog is agreeing, Dorian, because any participation by my feline colleagues is mostly always, yeah, actually always disagreement. So, maybe that’s the difference [chuckling] between dogs and cats.

So, Anat, I think it really is imperative to start with you for this conversation, given your decades of work in this space and just how much you have thought and written and studied in the space that many call “narrative.” But given what a buzzword that has become and given how misused it frequently is, I’m going to ask you the question, what is narrative? But I know that, I think I know what your answer is going to be. So, there’s going to be some follow-up questions. But I think we’ve got to start with some of the definitional and kind of basic stuff upfront.

SHENKER-OSORIO: Sure. That’s fair. So, my off-the-cuff answer what is narrative is whatever the funder wants you to write in the report. That’s what narrative is because it’s become so hot and sexy. But I think that a pretty decent definition that we can largely agree on is that it’s the set of stories or perceptions or hidden ideas about quote-unquote “the way the world works,” which we are not even consciously aware but that structure our thought, that structure our preferences, that make us assume we definitely want this thing to happen, and people should behave in this way. Yeah. So, narrative is sort of the cognitive architecture that ties together our ideas and beliefs.

VALLAS: I love the phrasing you used, “our cognitive architecture” just to make this concrete for folks and because it is such an overused buzzword. And I asked the question because I knew what your answer would be, because I appreciate you kind of making the point about how much this has been something that people have been chasing and branding everything “narrative shift” in the progressive policy space for some time. And that’s maybe a subject for another podcast. But starting there, would love to actually have you offer a couple of examples. What are examples of narrative in use in a way that then connects to policymaking that people might understand kind of how that fits in?

SHENKER-OSORIO: Yeah. So, I think that one that is illustrative and perhaps useful is there was the dominant social narrative not that long ago. And in fact, we are coming up on the centennial of women having their right to vote honored. I don’t like to say “grant the right to vote” because the right was inherent! They just weren’t giving it to us. So, there was a perception and an idea. There was a story in our culture that women were simply too flighty or emotional or irrational or to use a favored term quote-unquote “hysterical” to be able to manage, to interact, and engage civically. And because there was that story, it made total sense that women should not be voting because that just did not fit. And over time and over a lot of organizing and effort, people were able to change that policy and change that story. And these things kind of go hand-in-hand where now, largely speaking, outside of some commentary about suburban housewives, I think most people in mainstream American thought would agree that, of course, women are capable of voting, capable of holding office, capable of doing all sorts of jobs outside of the home. And so, when you change that story, you also change the set of expectations and desires that the society has, which become the laws and the rules.

VALLAS: You also, I’ve heard you tell a story before. It’s the making of what some people call the N-word not a thing that is OK to use in a decent society anymore, as sort of an example, on a somewhat different scale, how even short-term wording changes can bring about just immense change that actually impacts people’s perceptions kind of in the same type of flow that you’re describing. Tell a little bit of that story of how a short-term wording change can actually alter society and also itself create longer-term perceptual change, to use your words.

SHENKER-OSORIO: Yeah. So, what we know is that the things that we say, the things we repeat, and the things that we hear repeated actually neurally imprint upon us as being true or correct or familiar. And because our brains seek out what we like to call cognitive ease, phrases and words that are familiar are rated to be more true. They are just felt as sort of more authentic and correct, regardless of the content of them. So, if you live within a society in which people speak epithets like the N-word just willy-nilly, and that’s a fine thing to say, nobody thinks anything of it, then that actually radically alters your perception of the group of people who are being called that name. And conversely, when a group of people who have been rendered that name and even who’ve been — It’s hard for me to even formulate the words, which is not a good idea in my profession to confess.

But when, conversely, people put a line in the sand and say, hey, there’s a set of things that you are allowed to call me, and there’s a set of things that you not allowed to call me, that in and of itself, even outside of what a particular word is, is actually an act of claiming control. It’s an act of claiming autonomy and agency. It’s a standing up for oneself and saying we get to define who we are. We get to define how we’re spoken about. Which alters perception of who this group is. And even if it’s at first grudging and people are annoyed by it, as they were at the time and calling it, you know, whatever the equivalent of the P.C. police, and why are you just focusing on a word? And it’s just a word, and who cares? The changing of those words and the changing of what we’re allowed to say about people actually alters our perceptions of who they are and what we want for them.

VALLAS: So, you’re explaining, I think, and offering examples of kind of , and without seeing it in these terms, why paying attention to narrative even matters. And I feel like it’s actually worth asking that question, because for all the people who have started to view narrative shift as a buzzword, for all the funding that’s happening in that space, for all of the folks who are out there maybe saying, “We need to change the narrative on X issue!” without maybe really understanding what that means, but knowing something needs to change and knowing “narrative” is now a buzzword that matters to a lot of people. I do actually find it valuable to talk about the why and to talk about the theory of change here and to talk about how narrative shift fits in with other levers, other components of the work, because it in and of itself is not enough.

And Dorian, here’s where I would really love to bring you in. I mean, I would say probably one third of the speaking engagements that you give, and I think that might actually be an underestimate, I have heard you talk about and I think it is so important, so I’m going to put you on the spot and ask you to just sort of explain it. You talk about four dimensions of power, and narrative power is one of those dimensions. But you talk about how they all kind of fit together and why thinking about narrative, thinking about dominant narratives that are out there and ones that might be good and ones that might be bad and ones that might need to shift, how does all of that fit together? And why is narrative something that you, as the head of an organization that focuses on organizing as a tool for community change, it is really focused on?

WARREN: Yeah. I appreciate the question, Rebecca. And I do think about power a lot. That’s sort of my starting place, and the multiple dimensions of power. I might add a fifth one today just for you. So, I think a lot about organizing power, right? The ability of ordinary people affected by a range of injustices and problems they want to solve in their communities and in society. How do people come together to enact collective power to change their lives and the rules of the game and conditions in their communities? So, that’s, but the coming together, right, that’s sort of organizing power. We often, some people refer to it as mobilizing when we see it in action, and it’s made visible. So, that’s like one form of power.

Electoral power is another form of power or dimension of power as we’re in election season, as we all know. There’s a third, which I think of as disruptive power, and that’s protests, strikes, non-cooperation, civil disobedience. And as we’re in a period where we’re memorializing the life and legacy of the great John Lewis, you might think of him as enacting all of these forms of power, right? He was an organizer with SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and in the Black freedom movement. Then he went to — And part of that was using disruptive power, of course, if you think about the Freedom Rides. Then he moved into electoral power, right, and the necessity of the vote in a democracy to try to empower ordinary people to change their communities and the country. And then we have narrative power, which is, you know, ideas. And to use Anat’s language, it’s the cognitive architecture of our beliefs, our attitudes, our ideas. Narrative power shapes one’s identity. It shapes ideas and perceptions about justice and injustice, about what change is possible. And it’s really important that I think all of these dimensions, whether it’s organizing power, electoral power, disruptive power, narrative power, they all have to come together. One of them by themselves is not enough, I would say. We need all of these dimensions of power, and we have to deploy them strategically.

The fifth one I want to add just for you that I’ve been thinking a lot about is, of course, governing power, right, and the ability of states and governments to enact rules and policies. I mean, there’s usually a narrative underneath governing power, right, around, do you believe in the role of government or not? Do you believe the role of government has to provide public goods or safety for people? And so, there’s usually stories underneath all of these dimensions of power, right — of organizing, electoral, disruptive, and governing — that’s about the narrative power. So, that’s one way to think about it. It’s not the only way to think about it. That’s just how I come to this question.

VALLAS: Well, and I really appreciate the framework because it feels to me like often, conversations happen in silos where you’re only talking about the organizing, or maybe people are talking a ton about governing power. I appreciate you adding that one. I think that’s especially timely, given the particular year that we find ourselves in. Or maybe people talk a lot about electoral power, for example, or actually disruptive power, something that has been receiving finally a lot more attention than I think it had for some time now with the return of the general strike and a lot of the unrest in the streets really starting to drive a lot of the conversations being had in the halls of other forms of power. So, I really do, for those reasons, appreciate the framework. But I want to dig in just a little bit deeper and then also bring Anat back in here, because inherent in a lot of what you’re describing and sort of unanswered, is a question that folks listening might have, which is, OK, great. We’re talking about shifting power. But if we’re thinking about narrative, then aren’t we talking about communicating with someone? And who is that someone? Who are we trying to talk to, and who’s doing the talking?

And Anat, this is a ton of what you have spent a lot of time thinking about and also really trying to shake progressives’ shoulders about for a long time in really being precise about how we’re thinking about this work. You often describe that what your life’s work is about is trying to move people towards quote, “the most progressive understanding they can have of the world, which is latent within them and keeping it up, up, up, top of mind so that is their default.” And I’m actually quoting there from how you phrase that in your interview with The Forge for this most recent issue that we’re releasing this episode in partnership with. I would love to hear you talk a little bit about what you what you mean by that. And then who are the people that we’re trying to reach here as we try to bring narrative into that larger framework of power building and power shifting?

SHENKER-OSORIO: Yeah, thanks for the question. So, what feels like eleven-ty billion years ago when I started doing more comprehensive quantitative research, I was doing a project with a strategist named Brian Clayton for America’s Voice on immigrant rights. And we were looking at dial test after dial test after dial test. And we were looking at Frank Luntz’s dial test, and we were looking at dial tests that had been done by Democratic pollsters. And we found this very odd pattern in that the Democratic pollsters dial tests, if I can describe it just with voice, since there’s no visual, looked like two lines trending upward. So, their base loving the heck out of what was being said. The persuadables or the swing voters, depending on how the test was characterized, on an upward trend. And sorry, three lines trending upward. So, three lines, the red line, the conservative line also trending upwards. And the pollster would say, “That’s it. That moment when all three of those lines are trending upwards, that’s the winning message.” The Republican dial tests, the conservative dial tests, did not look like that. They looked like a sideways V where two lines would trend up, or their base was dialing up, and the middle was dialing up, and progressives — folks like in this conversation — were dialing down.

And trying to figure this out, why was this happening? Why was the math different? I was just different math. Basically, had an exchange with Frank Luntz in which he summed it up by saying, “I dial for the red meat.” In essence, he was looking for the thing to say that his base would be ecstatic, not just to believe, but to repeat. Because what he knew, what he knows, is that if your words don’t spread, they don’t work. And while we trap ourselves in this tired canard of are we doing turnout? Are we doing persuasion? Are we doing turnout? Are we doing persuasion? In fact, the reality is that turnout is persuasion! If no one is repeating your message, it is by definition not persuasive because nobody heard it!

So, what the Trump campaign knew, to take a specific for instance, is that Make America Great Again doesn’t work as a slogan unless, if the only people saying it are the campaign. You’ve got to get the people wearing the red hat. Because the second thing to understand is that we’ve had a fundamental misunderstanding of quote-unquote “the middle” and how people come to political judgments. We’ve had an understanding that most folks, they want some sort of moderate in-between position. And what I would posit is that between immigrants contribute to our culture, community; we’re all the better for having them here, and let’s put babies in cages, there is no moderate position. There’s nothing between those two things. That’s an on-off switch. And what the research shows when we actually explore with people, not just in the U.S., but in other spaces where I’ve had the great fortune to do this work in New Zealand and Australia, in the UK, in some parts of the EU, what we actually see is that people in the middle — I call them the good point people — they’re like this, “Good point! But yeah! Good point! But also, good point!” In other words, they’re capable of believing and supporting incredibly regressive and unjust concepts and ideas about race, about class, about gender, etc., and they are capable of believing progressive ideas as well. And they believe those things almost in equal measure.

What ends up rising to the fore is what they hear repeated most frequently. And so, that has been the left’s fundamental mistake, at least within the framework of formal political parties. Not so much in activist circles, of course, which is, you know, the Democrats try to go for the middle, and Republicans try to go for the majority. And when you moderate your message to go for the middle, your base isn’t willing to repeat it because nobody gets out of bed in the morning thinking, I’m just really excited about the GDP, and I can’t wait to go out on the streets so we can grow the economy! So, when we tell them, “This policy is so we can grow the economy,” our base doesn’t want to repeat that, we reinforce the ideas of the opposition to the middle. And we actually just drive them into their corner. And so, what I mean by the question that you asked is that people are capable of believing these competing ideas. They have these competing concepts in their head. And it is our job to activate the most progressive ones and to keep those top of my mind so they become what is true and commonsense.

VALLAS: And staying with you for just a moment on that, there’s another dimension of this, right, which is — and you talk a lot about this — it is not just about trying to win hearts and minds, right? I mean, that’s, I think, what a lot of folks often think of when they think of narrative change, is just trying to change people’s opinions about something, their beliefs. But you are incredibly focused, and urge progressives to stay focused, on trying to actually change motivations and actions rather than just staying with the hearts and minds piece. And the way that you have described this, and I would really love to give you a chance to explain what you mean by this, is you said, “We need to take a public health approach to voting and understand that habit formation has a specific set of preconditions.” I’m quoting you there. What do you mean by that?

SHENKER-OSORIO: Yeah. So, voting is a very particular thing. And there’s a new book that’s out called Turnout! How to Mobilize an Emergency Election. And there’s a whole bunch of rock star contributors, and then they let me put in an essay. I guess they needed to fill space. And the title of my essay is Vote Is a Verb. And what I mean by that and what I mean in answer to your question, at the risk of sounding nonsensical, is that the reason that people don’t vote — with the giant caveat of massive amounts of voter suppression and massive amounts of deliberate intent to not allow African-Americans and Latinos and other people of color to vote, so taking that as given. And I don’t want to discount or sweep aside the relevancy of that — but when we’re looking at actually motivating behavior, when we’re talking about that facet of it, what’s under our control, people don’t vote because they don’t vote. By which I mean people who are habituated into voting, when we actually dig down with them in the research, it’s not ideological. People are like, “Why vote? Because I’m a voter, and I always vote. It’s an election, and I vote because I’m a person who votes.” People who vote, vote, and people who don’t vote, don’t vote. It’s a little bit like flossing or going to the gym. Everyone says they’re going to do it. Everyone says that they do do it. Very few people actually do.

So, by a public health approach what I mean by that is we need to understand what are the levers that we can pull to actually engender behavior, especially in the case of voting. And I would say even moreover, something that we’re seeing in the emerging research that really is one of the many things that keeps me up at night — I don’t know which things keep up Dorian at night — but vote by mail and people’s concerns and sort of not wanting to vote by mail, understandably. Their misgivings, we could talk about that if you want. But things that actually increase people’s propensity to vote are not issues. They’re not talking about issues, and they’re actually pretty rarely talking about candidates. They’re talking about voting itself. So, we know, for example, through years and years and years of research that telling people, asking people, “Will you be a voter,” versus “Will you vote,” increases the likelihood by significant portions that they will. Because identity precedes action. If a person has pledged, “I will be a voter,” they’re much more likely to take the action.

We know that social pressure, which seems creepy and terrible, basically the mailer that comes to your house and says, who you vote for is private, but whether or not you vote is a matter of public record. Your neighbors can know whether or not you voted, that has meaningful intervention in terms of increasing the number of people who vote. Again, not ideological. It’s not about an issue. It’s not about a candidate. It’s simply the neighbors will know. This is what people do. And then finally, social proof. Social proof is a little bit like social pressure. It’s essentially the notion that we are looking for cues in our environment to understand what is it that a my-kind-of-a-person does. So, every time we say things like, “It’s a really critical election” and “turnout’s been really low among young people” or “Latinos really don’t turn out that much,” in an earnest attempt to try to get people to kind of feel urgency and want to do it, that has a deep mobilizing effect. That actually makes fewer people in that category vote. Instead, when we apply social proof and say, “Latinos are turning out in record numbers. It’s an election like never before. And we’re taking to the streets and we’re taking to the ballots and we’re taking to mail in our votes. Join us as one of the new millions,” basically, you fake it till you make it. You say your kind of a person is doing this thing, and that it increases the likelihood that people vote. That’s what I mean by a public health approach. It’s understanding habit formation. It’s really not sort of looking for that perfect issue or ideological argument.

VALLAS: And there’s a ton more there. So, we’ll make sure there’s a link to your essay on our syllabus page so folks can dig in.

Dorian, I want to bring you back in here to sort of bring some of this into practice in the current moment. You have described neoliberalism as sort of the root or at the root of the dominant injustices and narratives that you are fighting and that working people are fighting. And when you talk about neoliberalism — and I’m going to make you explain some of the origins here and do a little bit of term definition as well, given that that’s another incredibly misused buzzword — I really want to start there before we start to talk about why we need narrative shift in this moment and what folks are working on and not what you’re working on. I would want to go back to you momentarily to talk about a specific project that’s actually showing up in this moment with really significant relevance. But, Dorian, neoliberalism. [laughs] Tell us about it. Why is it the root of what we’re fighting? Where does it come from? It has its origins not just in opposition to the New Deal, but also in white resistance to Black freedom and integration. Tell the story because there’s a lot of it that I think folks probably don’t know.

WARREN: Yeah. And let me say, there’s, you know, you ask 10 people, they’ll give you 10 different definitions of neoliberalism. So, this is mine, right? And so, just for simplicity’s sake, one of the core features of neoliberalism, of which there are several, is what others would call a market fundamentalism. So, a faith and belief that markets will solve all problems, and better than the government or governments. So, it’s partly then a delegitimizing of the role of governments and collective governance as solutions to big problems. It’s a delegitimizing of the role of government in providing public and social goods. And so, I think we’re seeing some of that now, for instance, in response to the multiple crises in which we’re living: the public health crisis brought on by COVID-19, the economic crisis brought on, right, by having to shut the economy, and then, frankly, the racial injustice crisis, right, brought on by police killings of Black people and the uprisings in the streets. And there is a story underneath that in terms of neoliberalism of saying these are private problems. The market can solve them best. There is no role for government. So, it’s the fundamental faith, in many ways that, frankly, government is bad. Market is always good.

Now secondly, there’s — and this is a oversimple application. So, there’s a lot more to add here — but secondly, there’s a common story, particularly on the left, that neoliberalism was brought on by 30 white guys who met at what was called Bretton Woods or the Montpellier Society. And they decided to come together and throw out the New Deal, right? And they had to come up with a story to do that, that said, the New Deal is bad. Markets are good. And so, what’s the broader narrative strategy to undermine the New Deal and, frankly, the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, I would argue? So, that’s not a new story. We’ve lived through this before in this period called the Lochner era roughly from the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction that went through the 1890s, early 1900s all the way up to the Great Depression where —

VALLAS: Lochner referring to [inaudible] Supreme Court case that was a huge part of what you’re describing.

WARREN: Yes.

VALLAS: We’ve actually, I’ll refer listeners to an episode, an oldie but goodie with Ian Milhiser, formerly of Think Progress, who spends about 30 minutes explaining Lochner! So, we won’t do it here. But I’m glad you’re bringing it up.

WARREN: Yeah. So, here’s the second part, and then I’ll, I’ll stop here. What’s left out of the dominant telling of what is the neoliberalism and how did it come about? In America, it was rooted in resistance to Black freedom in the South. It was part of white resistance in the sense of, think of it this way. So, the narrative of neoliberalism was used to mark off public space and redefine it as white public space. Neoliberalism was like the narrative material to justify the exclusion of Black people from white public space, right? “No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You cannot integrate our public schools. So, what we’re going to do is tell you a story about why that’s not only wrong. But then we’re going to say there’s private public schools for white people, and you Black folks can have the really crappy public system, right, as long as it’s segregated.” So, there’s, and it goes all the way. It starts as white resistance to the Civil Rights Movement. And you see it all the way.

Another moment in it was the launch of Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign in 1980 and his use of the welfare queen story. Remember, he launches his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, under the banner of states’ rights. And I kind of see states’ rights as part of a, it’s in the family of neoliberalism in a sense. But there was a focus on the federal government bad. [chuckles] States should have the right to do what they want to do when it comes to oppressing Black people. And so, that’s how Reagan launched his campaign: by telling the story of how, of the “abuse” quote-unquote of government by undeserving Black people and particularly Black women. I say all of that is connected to neoliberalism. You know, progressive economists, mostly white, tell a story about global neoliberalism and the move to get governments out of regulating markets or companies. I also see this white backlash dimension to neoliberalism. Like it has some Southern roots in the American context, which was about backlash from economic elites and whites against civil rights and Black freedom.

So, I know I just threw a lot at you there, but what’s underneath that — let me just say this final thing — is the story that somehow, white taxpaying dollars are providing government support to those deemed “other” by race and gender. And so therefore, we should eliminate that government support, and in fact, coerce people to work. And just to bring it back to now, we’re seeing the same kind of arguments around whether people should be eligible for unemployment insurance. There’s a story that we need market incentives to get people back to work. Government giving people money is bad because that disincentivizes people from going to work. We’re seeing this play out in real time. We’re seeing it play out in real time in terms of the story of austerity and the need for fiscal restraint to deal with the economic crisis. And so, we’re going to see more of this, especially at the state and local level, when governments and political leaders explicitly are going to be saying, oh, we can’t afford vital basic services, right? We can’t afford testing. Or we can’t afford hospitalization. Or oh, we can’t afford retrofitting public schools. There’s going to be this story about the lack of government resources. And that’s, again, part of, it’s a child of broader notions of neoliberalism.

VALLAS: I appreciate so much you drawing effectively what, as you’re talking, I’m sort of watching the straight line get drawn, right, straight from the origins up to the myth of the welfare queen and up to present day. It’s a lot of how I’ve been thinking about it as well. And in many ways, it’s sort of the entire, although not often enough, told story of the entire system of assistance and social insurance that we have in this country that has been beaten down, torn apart, and underfunded and neglected and tied up in red tape in every way that folks in power could, mostly conservative, could possibly come up with because this was a system that their narrative dictates is for other people funded by people like them. And so much of that just it has to get brought back up so people understand the broader story and that it’s not just about, hmm! Looks like Republicans are trying to cut food stamps again, right? They’re not separate conversations. One is a part of the larger other. And so much of it comes back to that us and them, which is so incredibly racialized and not, here’s where I want to bring you back in.

It feels, I think, important to give you an opportunity to tell the story behind some work I was referring to before that you have been one of the people at the helm of, also with Demos and Heather McGee and a handful of others, around trying to start to address some of the problem that Dorian’s describing. If these are the narratives that we’re up against, then what do we do with them, right? You’re often the person in the room with progressives saying, “We have to stop playing on their turf. Why are we just using different versions of their messaging? Why can’t we actually tell our own story?” You have been working on, and now we’re actually seeing it out kind of in use, a narrative that brings race and class together in a way that is, I understand it to be, sort of an attempt to develop an antidote to that kind of divide and conquer politics and framework that Dorian was describing and which is showing up in so much of our politics in this moment, and especially in an election year where I think we’re seeing racialized divide and conquer politics reach new heights, if that’s even still possible. Tell a little bit of the story behind that Race-Class Narrative work. And then I would love to come back to some of what Dorian was describing about the kind of missing piece of government in the progressive framework. So, race and class: what put you into the place of wanting to develop that framework, and how did it come together?

SHENKER-OSORIO: Yeah, I really appreciate the question, and I appreciate Dorian teeing it up so nicely. I don’t know if that was on purpose or just —

WARREN: Absolutely intentional and strategic, 100 percent.

SHENKER-OSORIO: He’s looking for some side money off of me. I’m not sure what’s going on. He talks, he denounces neoliberalism, but he’s trying to get a check from me. So, I don’t know.

VALLAS: Wait. We should probably mention: it’s important that people know that Dorian is not the CEO of Community Change because that would be too neoliberal.

SHENKER-OSORIO: That’s right.

WARREN: Exactly.

SHENKER-OSORIO: He’s the president because Community Change is a country.

WARREN: [laughs]

SHENKER-OSORIO: It’s the country I would want to live in. So, to be fair, I’m OK with it.

VALLAS: Same. Same.

SHENKER-OSORIO: So, basically, the Race-Class Narrative, RCN, I’d be totally remiss to not name and shout out real thought architects behind this whole notion: Ian Haney Lopéz who literally wrote the book Dog Whistle Politics and more recently Merge Left. Basically, Ian approached me because I was doing a bunch of work for Community Change! Lo and behold, we had done a bunch of narrative work on how to talk about poverty and how to bring those ideas to the fore. And in that, in keeping with Community Change’s ethos and how they do everything, we had put race front and center in that message. But it was still sort of underdeveloped, and we hadn’t confronted and looked kind of most squarely into how you tell the story. Ian had this idea, and rightly so, that there would be, there could be a powerful progressive message that would weave together issues of economic and racial justice in a way that didn’t make them an and, that made them intimately intertwined.

And also really critically, and I think this is something a lot of people miss in the Race-Class Narrative, that also wouldn’t just be talking about the existence of disparities. So, this kind of notion of targeted universalism, which we sometimes get handed to us, where if you take care of issues of class, right, if you raise wages, if you improve access to unions, if you provide universal healthcare, then somehow magically, that is going to help Black, Indigenous, other people of color a lot because they are the ones who have been held back and sort of barricaded from economic prosperity. And while that’s true, that is, of course, inadequate. $15 an hour is nice, but if the police are shooting you on the way to work, you ultimately are not collecting that check. So, what the Race-Class Narrative is and does and it was created through lots and lots of work, lots of analysis, lots of testing with Ian with Heather McGhee, who you rightly mentioned, who at the time was the president of that country, the rival country of Demos. We developed this framework alongside lots of other folks, SEIU, other partners.

And basically, what the Race-Class Narrative does is a couple of things. Number one, it speaks explicitly about race! It settles this question of whether or not we need to pull punches and be concerned about quote-unquote “identity politics,” that stupid right-wing idea that we’ve inadvertently embraced ourselves, and actually demonstrates that messages that speak explicitly about race are both more galvanizing to the base and more persuasive to the middle. And that’s true every time we test it. So, first of all, message. The message speaks explicitly about race all throughout. It begins very, very critically in a shared value and an insistence upon cross-racial unity. So, that opening value could sound like no matter what we look like, where we come from, most of us believe that people who work for living ought to earn a living. Or whether we’re Black or white, Latino or Asian, Native or newcomer, all of us want to see our families be healthy and whole. So, shared value explicitly names race.

And then it moves second to name the problem. This is a critical thing, the order. Progressive messages all too often fall into the trap of what I like to call boy, have I got a problem for you, or this is the Titanic. Would you like to buy a ticket?! And it turns out that most people do not want a ticket to the Titanic. So, it’s very important that, yes, we name names, we do not pull punches, but that we go into the problem second, after we’ve established that shared value first. Because what we want to do in our messages is we want to create cognitive dissonance. We want to call people up to their higher angels, their best selves, and then we want to introduce the problem as an abrogation of that shared value and, of course, a harm to the particular community. So, the narration of the problem sentence, which happens second, this is really the critical distinction.

Instead of just naming an economic issue, right — the wealthy few are hoarding all the spoils. The wealthy few are writing the rules in their favor and leaving the rest of us scrambling — we actually narrate the dog whistle. We expose the means by which everything Dorian just described. We expose that. And it turns out that when you expose the dog whistle, what we’ve seen in testing is it becomes much less effective. It becomes much less potent. So, when we say, “But today, a wealthy few are dividing us from each other based off of what we look like or where we live, so we don’t join together to demand proven solutions, or so we don’t join together to demand healthcare for all, or in order to distract us from their failures, or in the hopes we’ll look the other way so they can hand kickbacks to their wealthy friends.” You know, the nutshell that I sometimes offer for the Race-Class Narrative is point your finger at the bad guy, not the brown guy or the Black guy. That as long as we’re pointing our finger in the wrong direction, as long as they’re pitting us against each other and scapegoating essentially whoever they’ve selected as other, then we are not actually joining together in cross-racial solidarity to demand the changes that we want. And so, the message then turns third and finally to an insistence on cross-racial solidarity and unity across race and class for racial and economic justice. And that’s more or less the architecture of the message and the way that it works.

VALLAS: And so, to bring that sort of to what we’re watching in this moment, I would love to kind of — Dorian was starting to describe some of the narratives that we’re hearing right now amid the pandemic, the recession, the unrest in the streets in response to police killings of Black people — I would love to give both of you an opportunity to sort of talk a little bit about how those narratives are becoming visible, and Anat, you use the phrase “pulling back the curtain,” how the curtain is being pulled back. One of the ways that I think, Anat, you have described sort of the battle that we were watching between progressives and conservatives pre-pandemic was it was a fight over who loves the economy the most, right? I think I’m getting that right. As opposed to anyone actually stepping back and asking the question about maybe we should be thinking about people as opposed to just the economy. And maybe actually, we should start to explore the radical notion that people are people and not units of productive capacity. That’s a quote from you I’m borrowing there that I love and feels to me like sort of the fundamental question to be asking as we start to raise some of that cognitive dissonance or hope to.

What are the narratives right now? What does that narrative battle look like? And where are progressives maybe showing up and starting to flip this narrative on its head? And where are we, I would say, falling short, but maybe I’ll frame it positively and say, where do we have opportunities to go in the next several weeks so that we can actually start to do some of what you’re describing in a way that is pegged to the problems people are starting to understand and realize how widespread they were before the pandemic and translate that into the action that we need to see? Dorian, you’ve been starting to talk about a New Reconstruction. That’s also a frame we’ve been hearing from Reverend Barber of the new Poor People’s Campaign. Is that New Reconstruction, the narrative, is there more there? I’ll go to you first, Dorian, and then Anat, would love to give you an opportunity to respond as well.

WARREN: Yeah, I have been really struck and influenced and inspired by Reverend Barber, who has been talking about a third, the necessity for a third Reconstruction for a long time now. This is not a new idea. He’s been promoting it for many years, wrote a book about it. And it’s rooted in our own political traditions if you think of Reconstruction after the Civil War. And it was the full, the full title by the way, was an effort to reconstruct our democracy. And if you were to add to that our economy, that is what we did for a short period of time, right, before there was, frankly, white backlash in the mid-1870s. But it was the first time, for instance, that in the South, Black people got public schools. We built public schools for the first time on a large scale. And by the way, poor white people benefited from public school systems built in the South too as part of Reconstruction. So anyway, there was the whole period of Reconstruction. There’s been lots and lots and lots written about this. And then there was backlash.

And then we get to the Black Freedom Movement of the ’50s and ’60s, and Reverend Barber refers to that as the Second Reconstruction where, again, we enacted, we won through action and movement organizing, transformative reforms, right? Transformative policies around the right to vote, around housing, around employment, around public accommodations. And then there was backlash. And so, where Reverend Barber has really been leading us all to think about: what does a third Reconstruction look like? Now, that’s at a very, I would say, high conceptual level. I’m going to use a Anat’s framework for a second because I’m a very good student. And she would tell us, OK, how do we lead with values first, right? Not selling a ticket to all the problems we have, but how do we lead with values. And I would say, OK, well, no matter where we come from or what we look like, our lives are interconnected. And together, we can create an America where everyone has a life of dignity. And Reconstruction of America, therefore, means standing up for Black lives. It means true immigrant inclusion. It means building a caring economy that works for all of us. No exceptions, right? That’s the first part of the narrative.

Second is to really emphasize why this is a moment to affect change. Now it’s election season, so we might want to say something about why all of us can send a powerful message this election. Then what’s really important that Anat teaches us is, you’ve got to call out the villains. [laughs] You’ve got to call. You’ve got to name the problem, but also call out the actual people responsible, right? So, that that would go something like, frankly, the right, and I would even go further and say Republicans have failed America. They’ve been working to defund healthcare, to dismantle the immigration system, to disenfranchise voters for decades. And especially during the COVID-19 crisis, they have blocked much needed relief from our communities. They have failed to denounce the systemic racism that’s led to the death of numerous Black people. They’re more interested in lining the pockets of the already wealthy than in protecting the health and lives of millions. So, I would name, right? I would call out the use of strategic racism to harm Black and immigrant communities. I would call out the way in which they are lining the pockets of the wealthy few.

And then I think the fourth part that Anat teaches us is how do we come back to shared values in the call to action, right? So, we know that the well-being of one of us is inherently tied to that of our friends, our neighbors, and our families. We have to act together like we have in the past to elect leaders who reflect our values and who will work with us to reconstruct the economy and our democracy so it works for all of us, right? Something like that. I’m giving you kind of the framework and an example of what I mean by not only this reconstruction frame, but how to deploy it in a narrative that Anat teaches us so well on how to do that.

VALLAS: Well, and I know where our time is limited. But Anat, I’m going to give you kind of a tall order by throwing you this last question, which I guess is sort of my way of assuming that because you’re brilliant, you’re going to find a way to tie this all together! But if anyone can do it, it’s going to be you. So, in the last three minutes that we have, I referenced that — and I will note that this is a personal opinion, but I know I’m not alone in feeling this way among folks who follow the not just political debate, but policy debate especially around economic issues — something that the right has been incredibly good at for a long time. And you mentioned Frank Luntz. He’s a big part of why they are so good at this, is in packaging the role of government in pretty much every presentation of the conservative narrative around the economy. But there almost isn’t any sort of, I don’t want to say response because we shouldn’t be responding to the right. We need our own affirmative narrative, but there almost isn’t any real equivalent on the left. We don’t have the, you know, government must be as small as it could possibly be, and then let’s drown it in a bathtub, trickle down, kind of connections that are the things that then our base is reflexively able to connect.

So, in the last couple of minutes that we have, what is your recommendation, and what are you thinking about these days as trust in government, which is justifiably, understandably at record lows and not just for conservatives, right, in elected office, but across the aisle of elected officials of all different political stripes, especially at the federal level. How does trust in government fit into all of this if our goal is to move away from neoliberalism — Dorian wants to put the final nails in its coffin — and away from that obsession with market fundamentalism and towards an agenda that will take government, and that centers government actually, as a big part of producing the solutions that we’re fighting for?

SHENKER-OSORIO: Yeah! Thanks for that softball. Appreciate it. So, I have two things to say about this. The first is that if there is any silver lining, and it’s hard to see one and it’s hard to find one. And I, like many people listening, also have direct family members who unfortunately have died because of COVID. So, I say this not at all lightly when I’m seeking a silver lining. If there is one to COVID, it’s that we have on display examples of people standing up and caring in profound, just in profound ways that we have always had, but they’ve been much, much more backstage. And what we’re finding in terms of constructing a narrative for government, don’t think I forgot your question or I’m attempting to get away from it. I’m not. What we’re able to do in the storyline is instead of beginning with casting government as the main character, as the protagonist, we have to rehabilitate and restore who this character is. We have to remind people what government is made out of. And quite simply, theoretically in a democracy — although we know that that’s not how it functions in practical terms — but theoretically in a democracy, government is us. It is that collection of mutual care, right? Taxes are just the world’s oldest GoFundMe account. I mean, that’s what taxes are. They’re people pitching in together to buy stuff that we all need in a way that is far, far more efficient.

So, when we are able to show to people, hey, actually. Look around, we already pitch in for each other. We already go the extra mile. We already, especially in this time of unprecedented hardship, are making things happen for our health, for our families. You know, just watching myself and other public school parents go through the wrestling match of what it is we’re about to do in the fall, which I won’t go into because I’ll just break down. But we’re recreating government ourselves, in essence, by another name. And so, when we’re able to trace to people that thread and say, look at all of these folks standing up with and for each other. Look at the places locally where government is standing by our side and is helping. You know, it’s basically calling the question, who cares for us? And why don’t we have a government that’s as good as us? Look at all of us caring for each other. Why don’t we have a government who cares for us? And when we make that demand, when we sort of say this is who we are, this is how we behave, this is everything that we’re performing and achieving, government, step up! Get on our level. We see that we actually can create an opening and can create an appetite and a hunger for a bigger, better, more effective, more reflective democracy when we begin the story with sort of this mutual aid that we’re already giving. So, that’s one sort of promising direction.

And then the other is, I think if all bets are off — and I think this COVID and protest moment has shown us that all bets are off — and things that we deemed quote-unquote “impossible” are now happening daily over and over again, then it’s time to expand political imagination. If all bets are off, let’s clear the tables, and let’s get out there and demand way more. And let’s start to call the question, why have we monetized human existence? Why does it cost money? If we’re supposed to be the smart species, why have we done this to ourselves when there’s absolutely no reason for it? We have more than enough for every single one of us to have all that we need and all that we dare to dream. It’s just right now being held in far too few, far too white, far too wealthy hands. They took our money. We’re taking it back.

VALLAS: Anat, close out this conversation, I’m going to repeat your words, because I’ve learned from you over the years the importance of repetition. So, I’m also going to repeat the importance of repetition so that folks hear that and know that that’s part of what needs to happen. But to me, the words that I keep hearing of yours ringing in my ears in this particular moment is, “I like to think of progressivism as the radical notion that people are people and not units of productive capacity.” Words that I feel bear repeating many, many times a day, as we all do ask those questions about values and what might be on and off the table.

Dorian, we’re going to have to leave it there, so you’re not going to get a last word, much as I knew —

WARREN: [unclear] last words. I just say, amen, amen, amen.

VALLAS: [laughs] Anat Shenker-Osorio is a longtime communications expert, as you’ve been hearing, and a consultant to pretty much all the good progressive campaigns that have been out there over the years. Dorian Warren is the president, not the CEO, of Community Change and a political scientist, among other things. I appreciate the two of you so much for your work and for taking the time. And I have to say, this was a really fun conversation, although I wish we had two more hours because there is so much more to talk about. But thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

SHENKER-OSORIO: I’m running away, but thank you.

WARREN: Thank you! Anat, you’re one of three people in the world after Vallas that I always learn something new every time I hear you, so I appreciate you.

SHENKER-OSORIO: Aw, thank you. Thank you!

VALLAS: And that does it for this episode of Off-Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality, and everything they intersect with, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m Rebecca Vallas. The show is produced by Will Urquhart. Find us on the airwaves on the We Act Radio Network and the Progressive Voices Network, and say hi and send us your show pitches on Twitter @OffKilterShow. And of course, find us anytime on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. See you next time.

♪ I want freedom (freedom)

Freedom (freedom)

Now, I don’t know where it’s at

But it’s calling me back I feel my spirit is revealing,

And now we just trynta get freedom (freedom)

What we talkin’ bout…. ♪