Food For Biden’s Thought

This NYT Editorial provided good food for President-elect Biden’s thought on how to be the president for all Americans. I will add some of mine own. The number of ideas can be endless, but one thing is clear: Having more options is always better than no option. Biden can try to put some of them to work and then switch to others if those do not pan out well.

Speaking the Audience’s Language

I woke up last night and decided to watch the video on YouTube of Trump first rally after election. Honestly I could not finish the almost two hours of the event, but I think that is enough for me to get a grip of what — and how — he talked to his base.

What can Biden learn from Trump? Private citizens like me do not need to pay much attention to Trump’s lies and his extremely Narcissistic personality disorder. Mr. Biden however is in an unfortunate position without the luxury of ignoring that man. Biden will do this country a good service by learning something from Trump in order to effectively unify people.

In my view, the first thing is to speak the same language as the audience. Trump is the dumbest president with an extremely small size of the vocabulary. Unable to use any fancy and sophisticate terms, he ends up using the same dull words over and over again from his big mouth, words like “the greatest,” “magnificent,” “best,” “incredible,” and “unbelievable.” However, I feel that those words, which are understandable by perhaps a 6th grader, work well with his audience. At least they make one thing crystal clear: He definitely speaks differently from politicians, which has been interpreted in a positive way, given the generally low social rating of politicians, especially among some conservative people. It has become one of his selling points: Look, I am not politician, and I talk just like you do everyday.

His other trick is to simplify the matter to cut the fact into small & twisted bits and pieces for his rank and file base to swallow and to digest. Instead of giving the exact numbers or percentages he won in Florida, he simply said “We won Florida — by a lot!” And he repeated the phrase “a lot” for the other states. We have to admit that when you talk to ordinary people, simply saying “a lot” is good enough. Remember, he is not debating another politician but to talk to his own people.

The final trick is to repeat his “theme points” but to scatter them over different parts of his speech. In Georgia, one of the theme points is that “He won the presidential election”, and he has cut it apart into points like “We won Florida,” “We won Iowa, by a lot,” and “We won Georgia!” Believe it or not, repeating the same lie multiple times helps, as Nazi’s Goebbels had long told us.

There are other tricks of Trump, such as placing himself at a victim position by his opponents, ranging from the so called deep state to Mitt Romney, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and AOC. The purpose is earn sympathy from his base. Trump also leverages the sense of fears, like fearing for more taxes, for socialism, for losing Christmas holiday and for losing jobs to immigrants.

To clarify, Biden will not — and should not — lower himself to Trump’s level. And let’s face it, speakers who ignore bottom-lines and follow the strategy of “anything goes” do have some (short term) advantage over those who are morally bounded. That being said, it helps if Biden — or any speaker for that matter — stay mindful of his audience and speak in terms that his audience can related to.

A Domestic Digital Peace Corps?

Watching the video of Trump’s rally in Georgia also woke me up to one fact: As crazy as Trump is, he is not the craziest. There are people in the audience who are even more zealous, more extreme, and more intense than the speaker himself. These are the people who always responded to his most extreme lies and chanted “We love him!” spontaneously. Of course, guys like Lin Wood and Sydney Powell also go farther than Trump in legal terms, which Trump apparently felt the need to keep some distance from them.

Unlike Trump who has a personal agenda to rip people off, his followers are innocent to a large extent that they are victims of Trump’s lies and manipulations. But the challenge is how to teach them so they can shift their attention away from dirty politics and to constructive work. We can’t simply tell them “You have been cheated because you are ignorant!” as doing so would only drive them further away.

In some way this is like saving people from a cult religion where the followers have been brainwashed and manipulated by the cult leaders.

This is where I came to the idea of a domestic Peace Corps. Instead of listening to politicians like Biden, perhaps more meaningful changes can be brought about at the grassroot level, where ordinary citizens talk to each other. Instead of sending young volunteers away to other countries, we direct our attention to areas with little income growth, little changes from decades or even centuries ago, and little hope for the future. Finally, instead of sending people across borders, we send change agents (volunteers) to the people who need help mostly through digital connections. This is where Biden’s plan of investing $20 billion to establish digital infrastructure across the board can help. Like Peace Corps, this new program will be government funded and is subject to periodical audition to evaluate the impacts.

Details need to work out through trial projects but in general, this is similar to the field experiment conducted by political scientists that I cited in another blog, who invited people from different walks of life with different political orientations to a resort in Texas and just talked and listened to each other. It is also similar to this interesting case where a woman from Charlotte successfully brought a stranger back from the brink of suicide.

But doing it digitally has advantages. For one thing, it is way cheaper than otherwise. Citizens can also share online sources of information and just chat about issues they both are interested in. We can let everything and anything go on their own paths after people meet online: One could introduce some job to another, share some entrepreneurial ideas, give a digital tour of local community, watch movies they both like, or introduce new friends to each other. The idea is to break the local geographic limits and let people learn from each other’s lives.