Drew Westen, a professor of psychology in Atlanta, US, struggled with a political question in the early 2000s. Why was it that surveys showed American people agreeing with Democrats on most issues, but when it came to voting, Democrats were doing poorly?
To understand this, he conducted political experiments on the brain in 2004. He showed political messages to Democrat and Republican supporters and scanned their brains to see how the brain reacts. He found that the human brain responds to politics more through emotion than reason.
When a Democrat supporter was shown a message depicting a Democratic Party leader in a bad light, the brain quickly found ways to rationalise it, and once that was done, the emotional part of the brain lit up again.
The experiments proved that “confirmation bias” had a scientific basis and why politically partisan people loved fake news like a drug addiction. But they also explained what Democrats had been doing wrong and the Republicans had been doing right: using emotions in political messaging.
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Slave to emotion
From these experiments came out the book The Political Brain in 2007. It immediately became a rage in the Democratic circles and influenced the Democratic Party’s thinking about its messaging around the time of the first Obama campaign. Westen did not directly work on the Obama campaign, but Joe Biden and Bill Clinton were among the people who asked Democrats to take the book seriously. Westen wrote a pamphlet for Democrats titled, “Message Handbook for Progressives from Left to Center”.
Since then, The Political Brain has become a hugely influential book in politics across the world. It could not be more relevant in today’s India. You can replace Democrats with the Congress and Republicans with the BJP and book would make a lot of sense in India.
Westen writes in his book, “The brain registers the conflict between data and desire and begins to search for ways to turn off the spigot of unpleasant emotion.” Which is why “the political brain is an emotional brain. It is not a dispassionate calculating machine, objectively searching for the right facts, figures, and policies to make a reasoned decision”.
Westen cites a lot of research to prove his point, but philosopher David Hume said it nearly three centuries ago: reason is a slave to emotion/passion. Democrats, Westen writes, have an “irrational emotional commitment to rationality”.
Emotion makes us reason
The human mind uses both emotion and reason together. People who have lost one of these faculties in accidents, for instance, are unable to function normally. To sell reason, liberals will have to use emotion first.
Westen writes: “We do not pay attention to arguments unless they engender our interest, enthusiasm, fear, anger, or contempt. We are not moved by leaders with whom we do not feel an emotional resonance. We do not find policies worth debating if they don’t touch on the emotional implications for ourselves, our families, or things we hold dear. From the standpoint of research in neuroscience, the more purely “rational” an appeal, the less it is likely to activate the emotion circuits that regulate voting behaviour.”
Think of every successful politician or for that matter any public figure. You will see that they evoke emotions in people, and they do so partly because they use emotions in their messaging. This is true of Narendra Modi or Shah Rukh Khan, Steve Jobs or Benazir Bhutto. One politician who just doesn’t appeal to emotion at all is Rahul Gandhi.
The hesitation in using emotions is a major reason why the Congress, and liberal politics in India at large have lost the ability to influence the masses.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi channelises emotions so often that sometimes his eyes become moist. Whether or not it is an act, it is definitely a political design. He especially gets emotional when he talks about his humble roots.
The Congress is the party of Mahatma Gandhi, the father of the nation; of Jawaharlal Nehru, the maker of modern India; of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, who gave up their lives for India. Yet, the BJP manages to own nationalism partly because the Congress doesn’t use emotions while reaching out to the people with its ideas and icons.
The Congress party, and especially Rahul Gandhi try to appeal to reason. Rahul Gandhi’s big failure has been the inability evoke emotions in people. Arvind Kejriwal’s decline in national politics has mirrored the decline in his ability to emotionally charge-up people.
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It’s the way you make me feel
“In politics, when reason and emotion collide, emotion invariably wins,” Westen writes. The trouble is that liberals have come to associate emotional messaging with right-wing demagoguery and fascism. In doing so, liberals are denying science. They are denying how the human brain works.
Westen writes, “It is clear that “feelings” are millions of years older than the kind of conscious thought processes we call “reason” and they have been guiding behaviour for far longer”.
The use of emotion is not always evil. It doesn’t have to be designed to make people discriminate and kill. “Emotions channel behaviour in directions that maximise our survival, reproduction, and care for the welfare of others in whom we are emotionally invested,” Westen writes.
A good comparison here would be how Modi sells the Ujjwala scheme to give free gas cylinders to households and how the Congress has (not) sold the Right to Food or indeed any of the UPA’s rights-based schemes. Modi will remind you of the suffering of mothers, the Congress will give you a statistic.
The day India can find a liberal politician who knows how to use emotions in messaging, Narendra Modi and the BJP will start losing elections. Take the ongoing economic slowdown and rising unemployment rates, for instance.
Have you heard any opposition leader trying to make you feel what it is like to be unemployed? Has a single opposition leader made you empathise with the automobile factory worker who has returned to his/her village after losing the job, and doesn’t know what s/he can do to earn a living again? The day an opposition leader can make you feel for the dispossessed in Modi’s India, the Modi story will be over.
Westen writes, “You know you have a good candidate when he or she can make you laugh, move you to tears, enunciate your shared values in a way that puts a shiver down your spine, deliver a eulogy or address a national tragedy in a way that puts a lump in your throat, criticise the other side with a sharp joke that is so disarming that you barely realise it’s more than a scratch until you see the bandage, and elicit moral outrage so powerful you want to go to the polls tomorrow.”
Also read: How liberals lost Gandhi as they lost their own intellectual moorings
Views are personal.