Thom Hartmann: How Liberals Can Speak Without Boring Everyone to Tears

By Onnesha Roychoudhuri, AlterNet. Posted December 6, 2007.

"SCHIP" according to Thom Hartmann, "sounds like something you want to avoid stepping in as you're walking through a cow pasture." Referring to a program to provide healthcare coverage to children nationwide with the hollow acronym SCHIP is just one of many failures of imagination on the part of the Democratic Party. Chart the difference between "SCHIP" and "The Clear Skies Act" and you'll get some sense of the dissonance that has progressives throughout the country scratching their heads in bewilderment.

You may know Hartmann as the host of a progressive radio program on Air America. What you may not know about are his previous gigs in advertising and as the director of a residential treatment center for children. It is this background in advertising and psychology that informs Hartmann's insight into the ability of a politician to connect with Americans. His new book Cracking the Code: The Art and Science of Political Persuasion, is written with the intention of providing progressive Americans with the tools that the advertising industry has mastered: How to tell the story behind your vision in such a way that people can't help but listen.

Will the book spur a revolution among Democratic leadership? Probably not. For Hartmann, that's not the goal. "We need to become the media," he argues, appealing instead to individual Americans. "That," says Hartmann, "is where the action is." At a time when many Americans sense a radical disconnect between the policies of those in power and their best interests, Hartmann's message is one of hope and individual empowerment.

Hartmann sat down with AlterNet to explain the tools that enable us, as well as our Democratic leadership if they care to listen, to speak without boring anyone to tears. As Hartmann's overarching message makes clear, what we've got to say is just too important.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri: What was the impetus for the book?

Thom Hartmann: It was the confluence of information and realization. I worked for more than a decade in the advertising industry and about that long in the psychology industry. I've spent six years doing progressive talk radio in the politics business. I've seen, starting with Newt Gingrich seizing power and bringing in Frank Lutz, that the Republicans got very professional about messaging. The Democrats never did.

One of the reasons that the Democrats never did is because the Democratic Party is small "d" democratic. Chris Matthews makes the joke about how the Republicans want a leader and the Democrats want to have a meeting. It's true. The conservative mindset is one that is more calibrated for hierarchy and top-down control. The Democratic mindset, the liberal mindset, reflects the notions that "we're all in this together," "a chain is only as strong as its weakest link" and "we're a community." It's the old Will Rogers joke, "I don't belong to any organized party. I'm a Democrat."

Gingrich, and Reagan's advisers before that, decided to really focus the party and bring in professionals in the fields of psychology and marketing to refashion their message. The Democrats didn't do that. Oddly enough, the strength of the Democratic Party is that it is small "d" democratic. But it's also, in this case, a weakness.

The Republican Party was captured in the 1870s by the railroad barons and turned from the reform party that Abe Lincoln had run on the platform of, into the party of inherited wealth and corporate interests. Since Reagan, they have successfully reinvented themselves as the party of soft bigotry and "NASCAR average guys." They have gone out of their way to reach out mostly to frightened disenfranchised white males and scare them. Take Rush Limbaugh with his supposedly funny ad about the Hillary Clinton testicle lock box that you now can get for your husband.

OR: You trace the core tenets of Republican and Democratic ideology to Hobbes and Locke. Can you explain how these thinkers impact our modern-day conception of conservative and liberal ideology?

TH: They are the origin of both the modern-day conservative and modern-day liberal movements. By the way, I use liberal instead of progressive. I like Bernie Sanders' definition: Progressives are liberals who are actually doing something, whereas liberals are the folks who have the understanding of the worldview. Progressives are the activists.

The origin of both the liberal and conservative worldviews really was with Thomas Hobbes who, in Leviathan, put forth two really radical proposals. The first was that humans can govern themselves, that they don't need a god-ordained leader. That was the basis of modern liberalism. The second major idea was that people are fundamentally evil and that if they're not restrained by the iron fist of church or state, that life would be nasty, short and brutish. That's the basis of the modern conservative worldview -- that everybody is fundamentally evil.

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Onnesha Roychoudhuri is a San Francisco-based writer and editor. She has written for AlterNet, the American Prospect, Salon, Mother Jones, Truthdig, In These Times, Huffington Post and Women's eNews.

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