KEY 23: The taco truck, it is coming for you
Let me describe two events, and you choose which one you would like to attend.
Option 1. You and a guest are invited to the International Cultural Center to enjoy some wine and cheese and hear authentic Tibetan folk music introduced by an ethnomusicologist from the local university.
Option 2. Some of the guys are going to get together and drink beers and watch the Daytona 500.
Admittedly, it's possible we might have a couple of Nascar fans in the readership of this newsletter, and a greater number of beer fans. (I like beer too!) But even if you could imagine yourself going to event #2, you know exactly which kind of person you're going to see in each place.
We've been talking about the differences between liberal and conservative brains. One of the big differences, found in many studies, is between liberals' "openness to experience" and conservatives' "need for closure."
These two orientations are always presented as opposites of each other, but I'm realizing as I write this that it's a more complicated picture. When we say liberals are "open" and conservatives are "closed," we're actually talking about two different spectrums, and liberals and conservatives differ on both of them.
1. Experiences: Liberals are more interested in learning about new things that may be outside their own culture. Conservatives are more interested in re-experiencing the culture they're familiar with and protecting it from change. Liberals view diversity positively. Conservatives are threatened by it. Lee Greenwood concert good, drag-queen story hour bad.
2. Cognition: Liberals' mental process tends to embrace complexity. Conservatives' mental process tends to be based on absolutes. Liberals are like, "There are a lot of factors we have to consider ..." Conservatives are like, "You must hate America." When you go to college you're rewarded for papers that say there are a lot of factors to consider. When you go to an evangelical church you're rewarded for saying that you believe God's word. You wouldn't be able to stay if you didn't.
We should think about threading the needle in both of these areas. What I mean is, know when you're being open or closed and learn to be deliberate about it, targeting what you say to where you want to be in people's consciousness.
• How to talk about culture
Remember Marco Gutierrez, co-founder of "Latinos For Trump," who went on TV in 2016 and warned us of the nightmare scenario befalling our country? Mexicans are destroying the true American culture, he said, and "if you don't do something about it, you're going to have taco trucks on every corner."
This was the perfect cultural Rohrschach test. If you were a conservative, you may have said something like, "Thank God that Mexican feller is telling the truth about how they're taking over our country!" If you were a liberal, you said something like, "Mmm, yum, who doesn't like tacos?"
(This was such a defining moment that it has its own Wikipedia page!)
Polls done in the wake of taco-gate found that ... Americans are strongly pro-taco. And I just think that if the other side wants to attack popular things, then we should get on the right side of that and rant about it every day. Republicans do it — why don't Democrats? Republicans are thundering at their supporters about how Joe Biden is going to take away our precious gas stoves like it's the coming apocalypse, and Dems calmly explain, actually that's not a thing that's happening. But who got the mileage out of the issue? Not the quiet ones. The ones doing the scaring.
Meanwhile, where in our entire country was the Democrat willing to stand up and say, "I promise you, before God and everyone within the sound of my voice, if you want tacos, you're going to damn well have tacos!"
I think Democrats tend to avoid dealing in cultural outrages because (1) it's demagoguery, and (2) a lot of the outrages are trivial or fake. But as we ALWAYS talk about in this newsletter, we aren't running an intellectual campaign — we're running an emotional campaign. Don't think that voters are "too smart" to fall for ginned-up outrages.
(Historical note: I think I know the first person to get this wrong — Mike Dukakis in 1988. Republicans started to attack him for not using the power of the state to force public school teachers to say the Pledge of Allegiance in schools. This was in line with Supreme Court jurisprudence, in fact, so Dukakis was "right" on the issue. But right is irrelevant. Republicans spun this into "Mike Dukakis hates the American flag," and George Bush, a man who we've forgotten had no moral center, conducted the rest of his campaign from flag factories.
While Dems assumed that the demagoguery would fail because it was intellectually dishonest, so they just let it slide with sort of a “You can’t be serious,” some number of people — I remember them — literally decided their votes based on Mike Dukakis hates the flag.)
If you see a cultural issue like this that you can take a stand on, lean into it.
Takeaway: If you see a cultural issue that you can take a stand on, lean into it.
So coincidentally, JD Vance has just come out strongly against women with cats. You should come out 100% in favor of people with pets. "I'll tell you this," I would say if I were a candidate for office, "people with cats, people with dogs, people with fish, people with birds, people with rabbits, people with hamsters, people with snakes, people with geckos, people with ant farms, JD Vance can hate you for your choice of pets, but he cannot get you for it. Whatever kind of animal you love, I will not let him take away your right to vote. Or your pets."
• How to deal with cognitive closure
Next time.