I'm almost done reading Drew Westen's excellent The Political Brain. Short version: The enlightenment ideal of a rational mind (and, hence, a rational voter) is complete poppycock. Republicans know this and use it to beat the stuffing out of Democrats, who are distrustful of emotional appeals. There is nothing wrong, however, with making an emotional appeal. Republicans tend to make unprincipled emotional appeals (i.e. lying about their opponents record to getcha all riled up), Democrats need to make principled emotional appeals.
There's a shitload more to it than that, and a lot of interesting brain science backing up his points... including about how if you avoid issues that are thorny, you cede all of the territory to the opposition, how you have to hit back hard when you're attacked and not take the "high road" etc.
An example of what Westen's talking about... Yesterday, Ezra Klein asked "What Happened to the Moral Case For Health Reform?" it seems to me, after reading Westen's book, that this was an enormous error on the Democrats' part, to ignore, essentially the emotional appeal and the moral argument for universal health care. They got trapped into arguing about process and making a rational appeal-- that it would save us money. But this is doubly ridiculous, given that the Democrats never seriously considered any of the plans that would save us money because those plans do too much fundamental restructuring of our health care system. So now the Democrats are stuck looking somewhat like emotionless failures on an issue that the American People care a lot about. In fact, the Democrats are currently benefitting enormously from the fact that the American People already care a lot about this issue and agree with them. After a month of heavy advocacy from Republicans and insurers, however, that could change.
So... the arts. How do we make the emotional case for the arts? And more specifically for Government Arts Subsidy? It seems to me that, while there are some audiences where the "instrumental benefits" argument-- that the arts improve math scores and economic outlooks for communities-- will work. Certainly, if I were meeting with my congressman, I'd make that argument.
But that's not a very emotionally compelling argument. So what is?
I could make a fairly emotionally compelling argument for me but I don't know how persuasive it would be to other people. After all, I'm already supportive. I'm an artist. Etc.
You know how political groups and parties figure out the best emotion-based arguments? They carefully craft and then test and focus group the crap out of them. Frank Luntz is, of course, the Evil Genius of this, he helped figure out that Republicans should say "death tax" instead of "estate tax" and helped craft the Contract With America.
I'd like to see Americans for the Arts pour some serious resources behind figuring this answer out. Let's get some focus groups together, lets test a bunch of different messages, let's get some Op-Eds published and see how they play. Let's learn from the Think Tanks and successful advocacy efforts that other political constituencies use.
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