Let's Start the New Year Right!!!

The following was submitted by Pete Stenson.

Jack Conway penned the following in reaction to an article forwarded to him by Nate Hans.  That article, entitled "The art of non-persuasion" by Tom Asacker, can be found at http://www.acleareye.com/sandbox_wisdom/2010/12/the-art-of-non-persuasion.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+acleareye+%28A+Clear+Eye%29. 

Asacker's article refers to an interview with screenwriter Robert McKee in which McKee maintains there are three ways for business people to persuade someone: Rhetoric, Story and Coercion and concludes that Story is the most effective.

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Jack's eloquent observations (shared with his permission) are as follows:

Persuasion in politics is different from persuasion in the business world because the bottom line has as much to do with perception as reality. 

There is a book by Murray Edelman called 'Constructing the Political Spectacle' in which he breaks the political process down into three related components:

1. identifying social problems,

2. constructing leaders and

3. constructing enemies.

He uses this framework to show how politics works in an age of mass media and diverse new forms of communication.

This is only one way to look at politics but it is a useful way to think about the last year in East Greenbush. In Edelman's framework, problems are evoked to assign blame and praise and lay the groundwork for the construction of leaders and enemies.

Was junk bond status caused by mismanagement or the downturn in the economy and the rising cost of government, including energy costs, health and other benefit increases, rising contractual obligations, etc. If mismanagement, was it the responsibility of the supervisor or the town board or both?

Activists on both sides try to affect the perception of voters by identifying problems in such a way that blame and praise can be used to construct a vision of leaders and enemies that will resonate with residents. The most important part of Edelman's book for East Greenbush is his argument that contemporary politics requires leadership to be defined in opposition to perceived 'enemies'.

The public spectacle of politics now seems to require that those who disagree with you are seen as 'enemies' rather than opponents and I can think of no better example than our town and this last election. Emotions ran so high because both sides perceived that to lose would yield power to people of a virtually malevolent nature, not just those with different technical solutions to the problems of government.

This is why I argue for civility and a perception that we are all neighbors at the end of the day. The division of the political landscape into leaders and enemies has been a profoundly counter-productive development in American politics and has poisoned our political discourse. Persuading people who see you as the enemy is nearly impossible. I think the solution to our problems lies less in a formula for persuasion than in a reinterpretation of those with whom you have differences.

We have to learn to concede the same humanity to people who disagree with us as we do to ourselves.

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Thank you for allowing us to share your observations, Jack. 

I’d like to add this quote from Gov. Andrew Cuomo's Inaugural Address:

President Lincoln said in this city on his way to his inauguration, “Citizens may swear allegiance to one party or the other and believe with all their might that they are right, but once an election is passed, and until the next election, they should be one people.”

Pete Stenson