AUGUST 31, 2025
Mike Phipps reviews Don’t Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st Century Minds, by Sarah Stein Lubrano, published by Bloomsbury Continuum.
Is politics a ‘marketplace of ideas’, where the free competition of different political perspectives allows the best ones to win? Or a ‘battle of ideas’, where different viewpoints are debated out until the more superior one triumphs?
Neither, argues Sarah Stein Lubrano, in this intriguing new book. These models are not helpful in explaining how people are likely to change their views. They fail to take account of how we seek confirmation bias for the views we already hold or experience cognitive dissonance when views contradict each other or clash with our behaviour.
Why argue?
In the modern world, our political views are often part of our identity, so changing your mind about something can mean re-thinking who you are, which many people would find difficult. Put like that, it seems obvious: the refusal of some Americans to alter their support for gun ownership relates to their stance being part of their cultural identity.
Worse, political debate functions to polarise positions and force people to pick a side. Nuance is sacrificed along with consensus. The author cites the debate on trans rights: “As writer Shon Faye points out, endless sweat and ink are spilled over s few transgender swimmers or the rare case of a transgender person in a prison or a domestic violence shelter, whereas the most pressing issues facing transgender people are lack of employment, healthcare and housing – all issues that are hardly specific to trans people and are indeed crucial to cis women in particular, whose well-being is often held up as a reason for denying trans people recognition or inclusion.”
Political debate also makes competing views look more ‘even’ than they might be. Broadcasters hold debates about whether climate change is happening, with sceptics platformed in the interests of balance, despite the overwhelming scientific consensus.
Yet as the author herself concedes, in critiquing these ways of doing politics, one must be careful not to reject the whole idea of rational argumentation, even if it may not be the main way people alter their views.
Why protest?
If debate plays little part in changing people’s views, what about protest? Evidence suggests that the biggest impact of protests is on the protesters themselves, rather than politicians or the general public. After two years of demonstrating against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, it certainly seems that the political class is determined to ignore the largest mass movement in a generation.
But I wouldn’t be so sure. Without the protests, the government would feel no pressure to issue statements of condemnation or reduce their ties with the Israeli apartheid regime, however limited these steps may be. And while the colossal movement against the invasion of Iraq failed to stop that war, it was arguably still in the minds of Labour MPs a decade later when they refused to support the Coalition’s plans to intervene militarily in Syria – which effectively scuppered the whole venture.
The effect of protests on their participants, however, is significant, changing their lives and giving them political agency. Being determines consciousness, and thus attempts to change aspects of government policy give us a clearer understanding about how other parts of the system work – particularly, for protesters, the repressive apparatus of the state.
The threat of a good example
Action versus words: “To change people’s views on the importance of climate change, for example, it may be more effective to provide incentives for them to install a solar panel on their roof than argue with anyone about climate change. Having done something towards the cause of decarbonising, they are far more likely to be receptive to environmentalism as a whole.”
There’s a lesson there for government: do the right things on the environment and people will adjust and approve.
Similarly, our views are more likely to change, less as a consequence of rational discussion, and more because of the relationships and friends we have. The author cites consciousness raising in the early feminist movement and ‘deep canvassing’ as examples of how this process might work.
Sarah Stein Lubrano believes we have to find new ways to connect with people, rebuilding a strong social infrastructure to overcome the degradation of the public sphere and the atomisation of people – wrought, some would say, by neoliberalism – and intensified by the rise of social media and the Covid pandemic.
Social atrophy is on the increase. “Today, more than half of all Americans have no or minimal access to ‘civic infrastructure’. A fifth report no access at all to space where they could meet or talk to neighbours.”
Social trust is lower in countries which have greater inequality and the poorer you are, the more isolated and alienated you may be. The far right’s exploitation of these phenomena via social media is noteworthy here, but the problem is wider. As the author says, “We are facing a choice about whether we allow capitalism to atrophy social spaces, shrink our brains and make us more paranoid and withdrawn from each other.”
The way forward? Rebuild communities. Organise people. The Black Panthers understood that when they organised free school lunches in the community. What’s more, eventually the government started doing the same.
As the author acknowledges, all of this is harder than talking and takes time. But writing on this site earlier this year, she says: “But it’s also very fulfilling, because it permanently orients one in a world of meaning, and connects one back to others.”
After reading this thought-provoking book, I was not entirely convinced. A recent study showed that the decades-long boycott of the Sun newspaper in Liverpool, which began in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster in 1989 when the newspaper vilified the football fans, has resulted in people in the city being more left wing than otherwise. I was left wondering whether these left-wing tendencies were the result of not reading the newspaper, or a shared sense of an active community boycott. Perhaps a bit of both?
Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.
