Actions Change Minds, Not the Other Way Around

Focus more on implementing antifascism, less on debating it

The US, as many have noticed, is currently wallowing in an apparently depthless swamp of fascism, hate, corruption, and awfulness. Those who despise fascism, hate, corruption, and awfulness are obviously desperate to get out of said swamp. But how?

One common argument is that we need more and better persuasion. A majority of the electorate voted for an ignorant racist pile of shit as president in 2024. It seems like we need a bigger tent, and the only way to get more people in that bigger tent is to reach out to fascist voters and convince them to vote for the less fascist option. Thus, Gavin Newsom doing deferential podcasts with Ben Shapiro and Steve Bannon; thus Kamala Harris rushing to assure the right that she’s willing to co-sign some bigotry against trans people; thus Elisa Slotkin emitting confused racist dogwhistles.

When you have to convince fascists to vote for you, an obvious approach is to try to meet some of those fascists halfway on immigration, on Zionism, on trans people, on Ben Shapiro fandom. At the least, the argument goes, we need to use more faith-based language, or field white male candidates, or find some way to tailor our policies and messaging to all those people who don’t agree with us, but who we need to agree with us to get to a majority.

I think this approach is misguided for a range of reasons. One big one is that the theory of how people change their views on political matters is, I think, confused. People don’t necessarily change their minds and then change their actions. Often it’s the other way around; when people act differently, they change their minds. And if that’s the case, what you want to do is implement your core policies to build support for them, rather than abandoning your antifascist program in hopes that the fascists will be seduced by your weakness and join your coalition.

Belief is often downstream of behavior

It’s worth pointing out, first of all, that a good number of Trump voters have noticed that their lives are worse off now and have forsworn their orange pustule votes. More, Democrats are blowing our Republicans in special elections—a Florida Democrat flipped the state legislative district that contains Mar-A-Lago with a twenty point swing at the end of last month., as just one example. The panicked search for Trump voters to convince is largely superfluous at this point; Trump’s failures are doing all the convincing Democrats’ need.

But how do we create a consistent antifascist consensus? What can you do to get people to remember fascism’s failures for more than a hot minute when fascists are out of power?

So-called popularists, like Matt Yglesias and his Third Wave coterie, seem to believe that the best approach is to make only timid changes in line with the latest polls, thereby ensuring that everyone stays onside and no one gets annoyed. But if you look at how big shifts in public consensus occur, this is rarely the formula.

One famous example of a massive swing in opinion in the electorate is on support of marriage equality. In 1988, marriage equality had only about 10% approval. That built through the 90s, however, and continued to rise as states began to legalize gay and lesbian marriages in the mid 2000s—and rose more after the Supreme Court decision in 2015 legalizing them nationally.

The story here is a complicated one of advances and backlash. But there seems little doubt that the growing support for LGBT people and legal victories complemented each other. Images of happy gay and lesbian couples, and the increasing public visibility of same, was a powerful refutation of arguments that gay weddings would destroy the institution of marriage. Legal victories could then increase support for LGBT people, which prepared the ground for more legal victories, and so forth.

This is consistent with much research suggesting that desegregation, and increased contact with people from marginalized groups, tends to decrease prejudice. Even today, after a brutal attack on LGBT rights from the right, Republican support for gay marriage is still barely under 50%. Independent support is at 74% and Democratic support at 83%.

You can also see this kind of shift on an individual level. Liz Cheney, for example, was a very conservative Republican who was, nonetheless, horrified by January 6 and Trump’s attack on the Constitution. She redefined her political identity around opposition to Trump and endorsed Kamala Harris for president in 2024.

Harris’ appearances with Cheney enraged many on the left. But the fact is, Cheney did not ask for policy concessions for her support. On the contrary, endorsing Harris, and entering the anti-Trump coalition, pushed her firmly leftwards on key policies. She even, shockingly embraced Harris’ position on abortion. “I have been troubled by the extent to which you have women who – as the vice-president said, in some cases have died – who can’t get medical treatment that they need because providers are worried about criminal liability,” Cheney said.

Cheney still claimed to be anti abortion. But her rhetoric and policy positions aren’t anti abortion. Her opposition to Trump led her to change her views on other issues, rather than her views on other issues changing her views on Trump. She was not convinced to endorse Harris by compromising on abortion. She endorsed Harris and then adopted Harris’ views on abortion as well.

Maybe use your power rather than pre-compromising

The takeaway here is that a lot of our intuitions about the relationship between belief and action are backwards. We know that people will do bad things and then back and fill justifications. But that also holds when people do good things. If you can get people to, say, go to a a desegregated school, motivated reasoning will often lead them to belief that desegregation is good, even if they did not believe that previously.

This suggests that the way to handle our fascism problem is not to try to hand fascists policy victories in advance. When you give fascists policy victories—when, for example, you ramp up draconian anti immigrant policies as Obama did—people tend to start to think that immigrants are bad and must deserve persecution—as Daniel Denvir argues in his book All-American Nativism. If you rush to push trans athletes out of sports, people will start to believe the discrimination is justified and that trans people are dangerous infiltrators. Signal someone out, and people will believe they should be signaled out.

In contrast, if you take a stand for immigrants—if you are willing to insist that undocumented people deserve reparations and citizenship, for example—people will start to notice that the world has not ended and maybe their neighbors deserve to be treated as neighbors. Rather than retreat to the lowest common denominator, take a stand which brings everyone along and gives people an opportunity to have events push them towards their best selves.

In short, rather than trying to beg people to be less fascist in hopes that they will vote for fewer fascists, maybe do what you need to when in power to create a less fascist country—expand the Supreme Court, enfranchise DC, abolish ICE—and recognize that that can lead people to believe that antifascism works and is good.

I’m not saying this will always work, and the fascists aren’t just going to roll over, obviously. And, as Trump has shown, if you put into place policies that immiserate people, that will in fact cause a backlash. But a theory of change which ignores the power of actually changing things is a theory of change which cedes so much ground to the fascists that you might as well just give up and bury yourself. Winning and fighting to extend those wins has its own power. Don’t cede that by giving up before you start in order to tempt Steve Bannon onto your podcast.