Winning the Moral High Ground: Five Rules for Effective Messaging

Winning the Moral High Ground: Five Rules for Political Messaging (full series)
Worldviews, Values, and Will to Survive | Struggle for the Moral High Ground
Five Rules for Effective Messaging | Getting Off Defense

Five Rules for Effective Messaging

Rule 1: Effective messaging controls the moral high ground for your candidate or position and denies that high ground to your opposition.

Looking back at Figure 1 and at Haidt’s theory, it becomes clear that the first goal of effective political messaging is to frame your policy position in terms of a positive, compelling moral vision of the kind of society which your position will promote. The most sophisticated points about a policy will have little appeal if you cannot clearly highlight the path from that policy to a morally desirable outcome.

The first question conservatives should always ask is, “Have we made a better moral case for our position than the opposition has for theirs?” That means understanding the moral issues underneath the political positions not only from your perspective but also from the opposition’s. That also means listening for and exposing the implicit assumptions in the Left’s claims. For example, a major talking point for the Left is the quest for equality, but what does their vision of equality look like in practice? Who gets the power to decide who gains and who loses in order to bring about that vision of equality? What would keep those in power from simply rewarding their like-minded allies and penalizing their opponents?

As Lakoff notes, every political campaign or debate about an issue tells a story within a framework of villains, victims, and heroes. Someone is being harmed, someone or something is causing it, and someone has a solution that will help. Border security, crime, poverty, election integrity, education, riots, and other issues in American politics all fit the pattern of a story, and the political debate on each issue can be seen as a contest between two different versions of the story told by conservatives and by the Left. Be very clear in your mind about those two stories and the moral issues at stake. What are the problems people are facing? Who or what is causing those problems? And who has a better solution?

At the most practical level, Haidt’s theory described above can help in understanding the competing moral narratives of Left and Right and in shaping the way you talk about your political beliefs. A few questions to ask yourself include:

• Who is being harmed by current conditions or policies, and who or what is causing the harm? How do your policies demonstrate caring or concern for people and their well-being?
• Where are authority, power, and position being abused or used unfairly? Who is suffering as a result? Whose rights and dignity are being violated by the abuse? How will you ensure that authority and power are used fairly, without bias, and for the good of all and not just a privileged few?
• What conditions or policies are unfair and where are standards being applied inconsistently? Who is harmed and how are they harmed when standards are applied inconsistently?
• Where are people being denied the rightful fruits of their labor, and where are people avoiding the rightful consequences of bad behavior? What will you do to restore the sense of balance between action and consequences?

As you consider those and similar questions, paying attention to how the Left will answer those questions can help you to recognize where the Left’s arguments might be most vulnerable and also to recognize where your own arguments might need better framing.

Rule 2: A defensive message is a losing message, so stay on offense.

You will never win the political argument from a defensive position. Regardless of the quality of your defense, a defensive argument is a losing argument because you are working from the assumptions inherent in the opponent’s frame. You win the argument by going on offense and making the moral case for your position. Consider:

Leftist: Do you think hate speech should be allowed?

Conservative: I support the First Amendment’s protection of the right to express one’s opinions, even if those opinions offend someone.

Not bad, but notice that the appeal to the Constitution will probably appeal mostly to conservatives who already support freedom of speech. Note also that the response leaves the leftist on offense. The leftist’s next move will be to offer a particularly egregious and offensive example, and now the conservative will have to justify the right to be offensive. But consider:

Leftist: Do you think hate speech should be allowed?

Conservative: What if I find your question hateful? Would that mean you don’t have the right to ask it?

That response is not about being slick or tricky. By recognizing and exposing the Left’s implicit assumption—that there is no right to make a statement that someone finds hateful—the leftist can either submit to having their own speech cancelled or they can concede that taking offense does not cancel someone else’s right to express an idea.

Rule 3: Effective messaging is goal-oriented. Be clear on which audience or audiences you are trying to reach and what you are trying to accomplish with each before you start crafting your message. And don’t get wonky!

It is easy to think of political communication as, “This is what I want to say about that.” But political communication should always be goal-oriented. The tactical message always should have a strategic purpose. The more we care about an issue and the more we know about the details, the easier it can be to fall into the trap of focusing on what we know and what we want to say about an issue before stopping to think about what we are trying to accomplish, who we need to reach in order to accomplish it, and why the issue should be important to them.

You may have a core message that is morally grounded, say, about the dangers to public health and safety as well as election integrity represented by open borders. But you may need to focus on different aspects of the message for different audiences. What do you want the conservative base to know and to do? Why should persuadable undecideds care about this issue? With elected officials, how will you make the case that it is in their self-interest to support your position?

Once you are clear on your audiences and goals, you can then focus on developing your message and figuring out how adapt your core message to each audience.

Rule 4: Simple, concrete messages work better than complex, abstract ones. Use words, images, and metaphors that frame your position in moral terms and make your position emotionally relevant to the concerns of the audience.

In my earlier piece I discussed the importance of word choice in shaping unconscious reactions to a political idea. For now, consider the following message about promoting Critical Race Theory (CRT) in tax-funded schools as an example:

Promoting CRT in schools violates the basic principle taught by Dr. King that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. It lays a burden of victimhood or guilt on the backs of innocent children based purely on the color of their skin and creates division and suspicion where there should be friendship based on common interests.

The appeal to Dr. King’s vision in the first part of the message is simple, positive, and morally compelling. Adding the image of a “burden of victimhood or guilt on the backs of innocent children” evokes a visceral image of being weighed down with something that should not be there.

A good exercise is to list the words and images that you want associated with your candidate or position and for the opposition’s candidate or position, focus on the moral issues associated with those words and images, look for common themes, and then develop your specific messages to target audiences from there.

Rule 5: Set the agenda in multiple channels through repetition, repetition, repetition.

It has long been established in psychology that the best way to establish an association between two ideas or among a network of ideas is simply to repeatedly present those ideas together. The Left has mastered this technique by repeatedly linking ideas such as racist and Republican or extremist with conservative, and they have an effective Pavlovian echo chamber to push those associations because of their dominance in the old news media, the schools, and even the entertainment industry.

Furthermore, constant repetition not only builds a network of mental and emotional associations in the minds of listeners but is also an important tool in setting the political agenda. The more people hear about an issue, the more important they think it is. That’s why the Left hammers simple phrases like “climate change,” “the science is settled,” or various forms of “privilege” until people can hear them in their sleep.

In the next installment, our survival as a free nation is threatened, but that is also an opportunity and a challenge for conservatives.