In his new book, Cracking the Code: How to Win Hearts, Change Minds, and Restore America’s Original Vision, Air America radio personality Thom Hartmann offers a how-to manual for expressing political viewpoints. He says the Left’s contemporary struggles are not the fault of liberalism as an ideology; the problem is that many liberal politicians simply don’t know how to talk to people.

Part self-help book, part populist polemic, Hartmann’s Code puts our country’s political discourse under the knife, dissecting the way master communicators such as Bill Clinton, John Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan won elections by talking their way deep into voters’ consciousnesses. Hartmann spoke with contributing writer JB Powell.

JBP: The poet Muriel Rukeyser said, “The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” You have a similar view of the political universe, don’t you?

TH: Story is the way we transmit culture. Story is the way we remember things … [And] the story we call politics is the story of how to best to accomplish the common good.

Your book traces the lineages of the modern conservative and liberal “stories” to two philosophers, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke…

The conservative worldview is grounded in Hobbes’s Leviathan. You could argue that the Adam and Eve story is an early articulation of it as well. This [story] suggests that people are intrinsically evil, and because of that, we have to find the most meritorious—the few who are good—and put them in charge. It follows that small “d” democracy, where a lot of people participate, is not such a good idea…

The liberal story came out of John Locke, but also Rousseau and eventually Thomas Jefferson. It says the vast majority of people are good and therefore collective wisdom can be trusted. The more people participate in democracy, the better. That’s why the Founders of this country wrote “We the People” as the very first three words of the Constitution. It wasn’t “We the meritorious few,” or “We the ones who are in charge.” It was: “We the People”!

You say that after 9-11, George Bush was able to get even liberals to buy into the conservative story. Do you believe it’s still a powerful enough narrative to bring another Republican into the White House?

Yes, it’s possible, particularly if Democrats won’t stand up and say: “I’m not afraid anymore.” I’m still waiting for a Democrat to stand up like Franklin Roosevelt did and say: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself and we will not be frightened.”

We’re wired for survival first and foremost. The reptile brain is the most primitive part of our brain; it’s where fear is processed and it’s all powerful. So those people who motivate us with fear and danger are, over the short term anyway, typically going to have success. The problem is, it’s sort of like whipping a horse, these “moving away from pain” strategies: the more you whip a horse, the faster it’s going to go until it hits a limit and falls over dead… At some point, people say: “Wait a minute, you’re fear mongering. You’re the little boy who cried wolf.”

You speak in the book about effective communication inducing a kind of trance.

If you want to teach somebody something, they have to be in a kind of trance state. I refer to the techniques for bringing that on as “inducing the learning trance.” Mostly these [techniques] have to do with pacing and using different modalities as you speak.

The big mistake that John Kerry made against George Bush in 2004 was that he induced a boredom trance while Bush induced a feeling trance. Bush communicated feelings. They were clumsy, yes, but that [clumsiness] made it more intense, frankly. Kerry communicated ideas and concepts, but people don’t vote on ideas and concepts. They vote based on their feelings.

Ronald Reagan was pretty much the master at appealing to emotion, wasn’t he?

Ronald Reagan, FDR, and Jack Kennedy were three of the greatest communicators that we’ve had in the White House… What made them great was, first of all, their ability to be multimodal in their communication. They talked about their vision for America, they talked about their story of America, and they gave America a sense of what they thought it could be.

Number two, they all principally used “moving toward pleasure” strategies instead of “moving away from fear” or “pain avoidance” strategies. In other words, they held up an ideal of what we wanted to move toward as a country and made us proud of ourselves.

Number three, they communicated emotion and always used story and emotion to pass along information.

You point out how Reagan actually picked up one of Kennedy’s themes, which Kennedy himself picked up from John Winthrop—the “America as a city on a hill” theme…, except Reagan inserted a key word into its phrasing, didn’t he?

Yes, “shining.” He dramatically improved the “America as a city on the hill” metaphor by making us a “shining” city on a hill. He put that word in and it gave the image even more power. What’s interesting is… Reagan’s notion of America as the city on the hill was very different than Kennedy’s. John Kennedy’s idea was that the entire world is looking at [America] and every single one of us in the country is part of it— from the highest and best to the poorest economically, we are all part of that city on the hill and we welcome people to participate in it. Reagan on the other hand, his version of the city on the hill was, we’re the castle, we’re the fortress, we’re the place where Cinderella, the lowly commoner, hopes one day to get in and dance with the prince.

I read that you campaigned for Barry Goldwater in your youth. Is that true?

When I was 13 years old my dad was active in the local Republican Party and I went door to door with him. I read [Goldwater’s] autobiography Conscience of a Conservative …I even went to a John Birch Society meeting. I was convinced that the communists had infiltrated the State Department and they were coming to get us. But within two years, I had completely shaken myself out of that trance. There’s nothing like growing up, going off to college and discovering that you’re of draft age and your government wants to kill you. Not to mention being exposed to ideas beyond what I had learned up to that point, [like] the core concepts of the Enlightenment.

So you heard a different “story.”

Exactly, and I lived a different story. I really saw America differently the first time one of my friends came back in a box from Vietnam.

My mother is a big fan of your radio show. But she lives in San Diego and the Air America affiliate there is either going off the air or has already gone off the air.

It went off the air last week, actually… The first two or three years that conservative talk radio was on the air, it struggled terribly. But then it reached the point where advertisers realized they were getting results and program directors realized that they had a core listenership and it started to take off…

In the next year or few years, I think there’s going to be a broad perception shift across radio-dom, that beyond the ongoing feast and famine of Air America, liberal talk radio is here to stay… Right now, the conventional wisdom [for program directors] is, “nobody ever got fired for putting Rush Limbaugh on the air.” When the conventional wisdom becomes, “nobody ever got fired for putting Thom Hartmann on the air,” then everything will change and I think we’re very close to that.

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An excerpt from the introduction of Cracking the Code:

There is a different story, however, a story of a world that is
interconnected and of people who are fundamentally good. This is
the traditional American liberal story, which has been understood
since its first telling during the Enlightenment by thinkers like Jean
Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, and Thomas Jefferson. It’s the story
that reaches directly back to the founding of this country…

——
JB Powell is the author of The Republic: A Novel.