This is a lightly edited transcript of the October 23 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: Good morning, or maybe good afternoon, depending on where you are. Because our guest is in London right now, and I think it’s the afternoon there. Sarah Stein Lubrano is an author and a public intellectual. She has a Substack that I enjoy reading. But we’re going to talk mainly about her book, which is a great title for this podcast. The book is titled Don’t Talk About Politics: How to Change Minds in the Twenty-First Century. So Sarah, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
Sarah Stein Lubrano: Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited.
Bacon: I spend a lot of time—in fact, I’ve spent my entire professional career, so more than 20 years, talking and writing about politics. I talk about politics in casual settings as well. So I want to break down—I think you’re not saying, “Don’t talk about politics because it’s bad.” You’re saying the way to change people’s minds is not to talk about politics, and we’re going to talk about what you mean by that.
But the first chapter of your book talks about this marketplace for ideas. We have this idea, the marketplace for ideas, and this is how ideas are spread. And the way to change people’s minds or to influence them, I think, is often suggested as, you enter the marketplace of ideas.
So you write your New York Times op-ed, and somebody writes theirs in The Guardian, and somebody else writes somewhere else, and this changes people’s minds. Talk about why that might be an improper framing of how ideas and political liberation are shared.
Stein Lubrano: Yeah, there’s a kind of irony where I ended up writing an op-ed for The Guardian about my book, and it says something like, “This op-ed won’t change your mind, but here’s why.”
One of the things I wanted to do in this book is look at the reality of how people actually think about political ideas, and what does and doesn’t cause them to change their mind about politics. And I think many of us, even if we’re skeptical, still have in our heads a model that democracy is basically people thinking on their own for themselves, doing their own research about political ideas in the abstract, and maybe they’re encountering ideas on the internet or whatever, in the newspaper, and then slowly they come to the right conclusion, and that the best ideas will probably rise to the top over time and we’ll all gravitate towards reality.
Now look, if you’re living in 2026, you may no longer believe this myth exactly, but I think it’s worth noting that it’s still incredibly powerful. It’s still more or less the way elections are framed. It’s still more or less the way parliamentary debate works in the United Kingdom where I live, although I’m an American, and the idea behind a lot of congressional debate. It’s why we have debates publicized in the media.
And to be clear, I’m in no way trying to quash free speech. My point is more that it turns out when you look empirically at how people think about politics, most of that stuff doesn’t seem to shift the dial at all in either direction.
So one of the most interesting and remarkable studies in the book, which I profile in chapter two, is just that a bunch of social scientists, professors, I think at Princeton, did this kind of study where they looked at debates, public political debates that were livestreamed and/or televised, and whether public opinion changed in a marked way the day after people watched the debate.
So if debates were important, you would expect to see a larger jump in people’s opinion one way or the other the day after they watch a debate. But actually, you don’t. You see a very small shift.
When you see something like, “Oh, Joe Biden is two points up in the polls,” that’s actually a non-piece of news, because it turns out that Joe Biden is up or down by about two points in the polls any given day in an election cycle. That’s just random statistical luck. They found essentially no effect to watching debates.
And similarly, although these things are obviously a little bit difficult to measure, there’s very little evidence that people are changing their minds, even in a self-reported way. Most people, if you ask them in studies, “Have you changed your mind about something reading on the internet in the last year?” they’ll say no.
Now, people do sometimes get radicalized on the internet through a more long-term process, usually where they join communities. But in terms of just imbibing ideas and then shifting our minds, it turns out people are really not doing that through abstract thought. And this might all sound incredibly pessimistic, but as I get you through the rest of the book—
Bacon: Let me slow you down a little bit. Let me stop you there for a second. People do read stuff. People watch videos. They watch TikToks. So they’re getting lots of media, they’re reading articles. So what are they doing when they read these articles?
The New York Times publishes op-eds every day. I publish lots of op-ed articles. What are people doing if they’re not changing their mind? What are they reading and doing then?
Stein Lubrano: What they’re often doing is affirming their own opinion.
Bacon: That’s true. That’s what I thought you were going to say.
Stein Lubrano: They’re reading it and they’re like, “Perry is completely correct.” And also what they’re often doing, if they are enjoying your writing—and I obviously say this with grief about myself, because when people repost me, they’re doing the same thing. They’re like, “Yes, this.”
And as somebody who weirdly, after I made this book, became an Instagram personality just about the stuff I write about, not the other parts of my life, that’s what people do when they repost me. And Instagram lets you see. They repost a reel that I’ve made, and they’re like, “This lady’s correct, and actually this is why I’m also correct.” And that’s more or less what people seem to be doing. Sometimes they read you to disagree with you, and you probably have those reply guys also.
Bacon: But either way, they’re not going from, I thought wealth taxes are bad, and now I think they are good. That’s probably not happening very often.
Stein Lubrano: Not so much. Not in a measurable, important way.
Bacon: So at the politician level, they watch a debate. They might learn new facts. “Kamala Harris, who I was already going to vote against anyway, I also learn thinks this thing.” But they’re not changing their mind about the actual issue, you’re saying.
Stein Lubrano: Yeah, you can totally learn new facts. One of the more interesting bits of study in this is—I write about the study where they just look at whether people change their mind about non-political things. Obviously everything can be linked to politics, but if I try to convince you that you should plant different trees in your backyard and it’s not tied to any of your political ideas, you may well be convinced.
It’s not that we are stubborn about everything. It turns out we’re just stubborn about politics. And that’s because it’s tied to our sense of self and our sense of ourselves as good people and capable agents in the world, basically.
Bacon: In the book, you’re also implying that if I sit down with my mother and try to change her mind, I’m also not going to be successful there either, right?
Stein Lubrano: Yeah. I’m sorry. As someone who’s had to talk to many family members. But that’s interestingly what most people want to do when they come to my courses, for example. They’ll say, “How do I have the conversation with my annoying uncle?” And, good luck.
Bacon: And that is for the same reason? I think it’s more obvious a big politician cannot change minds. But why can’t I change my mother’s mind with a rational argument? To give a real example, when I told my mom that police funding should be reduced, she did not change her opinion about what I said, even though I gave very rational arguments for funding here being reduced. And this is a real example.
Stein Lubrano: I don’t know your mom, so obviously I’m going to have to guess. But I would suggest that probably it’s a combination of things related to her sense of herself as a good person, and her own experiences.
So perhaps she’s had better experiences than the average Black lady with the police. Who knows? Maybe her friends and her community actually really believe in the police, and if she were to change her mind, it would in some way estrange her from her relationships with other people, as we’ll get into. It might be that she says, “I can’t talk about that in church,” or whatever, the knitting club, or I don’t know. I’m making your mom too quaint. She’s probably really fierce.
But it might be that there’s something about her sense of herself as a good citizen that means she can’t imagine that, and she needs to, understandably, feel that is her sense of agency in the world, that she supports law and order, for example.
And also, I’ve listened to quite a few—they often are Black commentators, who will say, “Actually, Black people often want more police because they have experienced more crime,” and that sucks.
So in this case her lived experience of crime happens to have shifted her in that particular direction, but obviously it can go either way. There are also people of whatever ethnic background who say, “Now that I’ve had a bad experience with the police, I’m done with them,” obviously.
Bacon: I think you mentioned there’s something democratic about the idea that we are debating ideas and the best idea wins, and that’s why you’re writing this. And Donald Trump is president, so it seems obvious that the smartest, most articulate best arguer is not winning. But I think people are like, “Well, only a few years ago, we had the smartest person, Barack Obama. He made good arguments. We’ve had an aberration, but Barack Obama’s smart. We might have Buttigieg in two years, and he’s smart, too.” That’s not my preferred candidate. I’m just saying that he does come off as thoughtful and so on.
And so I think it’s embedded in us, that people should lead because they’re good at argument and good at debate, and it’s a quality. I think there’s something attractive to this for us, too, that democracy means we have rational debate, and we choose the best at rational debate. There’s something attractive about that, right?
Stein Lubrano: Yeah. Look, as I very carefully say throughout the book, this is a book that is sympathetic to liberals that are becoming disillusioned, because probably on an earlier timeline than some others, I was once also—I went to both Obama inaugurations. My parents took me to the first one, and we stood there in the cold, and we cried.
And I think America is eternally—I wouldn’t even say in this instance, although we are certainly in this instance—coming round again and again to the reality that there are parts of liberalism, that are like liberal ideology as a whole rather than any specific tenet, that are not accurate. They’re not good representations of reality.
And one of the most beautiful ideas in liberalism that is also false is that the best ideas are going to win. And I think Donald Trump’s presidency is a very clear indicator of that. How could we be living in a world where the best ideas inevitably win out if we’re here with him, right?
Bacon: Twice.
Stein Lubrano: Twice. And you know what? He was very much elected the second time by any system.
And I think in order for us to become more thoughtful political agents, all of us, in America especially, and I’m very passionate about this as you might imagine, we have to get over that romanticism. We have to get over that myth of a marketplace of ideas that ultimately leads us the right direction.
If ideas win, as I say by the end of the book, they win because people make them alive in the world, and they make them alive through laborious, intensive organizing and relationship building and taking action, and not just talking, and often not talking in the direct sense at all.
Bacon: OK. So what does change people’s minds? I think you’re hinting at this. Let’s go into that a little bit. Why don’t I let you open? What are some things that change people’s minds?
Let me give an example. I read the book a few months ago, so let me refer to—it looks like for some period, the Black Lives Matter protest did move public opinion. Do you consider that a real change? And talk about why that might be the case.
Stein Lubrano: Yeah, they did. It’s actually really interesting.
There are people that specialize intensively on just this point about protests, but I’m going to do my best, and then if someone wants to correct us because they’re a researcher of movements specifically, they can.
But the general thing is, first of all, it’s a little bit difficult, obviously, to disentangle the instances of police violence that happened and the actual protests themselves. And so obviously there were loads of people, Black and/or otherwise, who saw what happened to George Floyd and others, and they were, let’s say, brought round to consciousness about how awful and brutal the police can be, and obviously how prejudiced they are structurally and otherwise.
Bacon: But if you’re saying the videos versus the protests, either way that’s not a person came on TV and said, “The police are meanies.” So neither one of those would go to the theory that it’s about arguments. Watching the videos or seeing the protests or participating in the protests are all not debates, right?
Stein Lubrano: I think that’s correct, yeah. They’re not debates.
And I think the best sociological suggestion here is that essentially what happens is that people get activated, right? This is also true when I talk about how the far right kind of activates people on the internet. There’s a kind of moment where people almost don’t really have an opinion, and then their social network—essentially, literally not just their online network, but their actual network of humans they know—gets activated with a kind of, “We need to come round to this.”
So for example, as a white lady living in the UK, there were friends of mine who were like, “We’re doing a reading group now.” I don’t know why, that was like the white people response in whatever year it was. And everyone had a reading group, and we all had to learn about structural racism and also unconscious bias and whatever.
And that’s not to say bad, by the way. But it’s not like I just took that independently. It’s because my network of friends became concerned and they said, “Oh, we should do this thing,” right?
And so what’s very likely, when you look at this graph—there’s a graph of what happened to public opinion about Black Lives Matter and police violence in the US, and what happens is that at first there’s a big bump where a lot of people suddenly start agreeing, like the police need to be defunded, or at least there’s far too much police violence, et cetera. And then over time it goes back down until it hits its baseline again after a few years.
And what’s likely happening there is that people get activated by their social network, they care for a while, but then other forces in their life begin to pull them in other directions. So essentially the radicalization, so to speak, is short-lived, because other forces in our lives that persist for longer pull us back in other directions. Maybe the people that did the reading group five years ago get sunk back into their network of white people who express more skepticism about this, or whatever else happens.
And actually, if you look at the data right now, I believe that what we now see in the US is that there is no long-term shift in public opinion about the police, sadly. And in fact, white people are a little bit more in favor of the police, and everyone else is a little bit less in favor of the police. But overall, we’re in no better, in my view, position. We are no more skeptical of the police, and that’s shocking in some ways. But it’s because protests are short-lived. They have an enormous effect on the people in the protest movement, but otherwise most people get pulled back to their baseline by a variety of other sociological factors.
Bacon: So that was one I just had in my head. What are some things that do change people’s minds about politics?
Stein Lubrano: Basically, as I put it in the book, the best evidence relates to either relationships of all kinds, but especially friendships and meaningful connections with people that somewhat disagree with us or have had different life experiences, and also with our own actions and experiences in the world.
And I have a chapter on each one. I have a chapter basically on how our friends change our minds, and how really that’s a beautiful thing in a lot of ways if you think about it, and then how our own actions and experiences seem to shift us quite a lot in the long run.
And both of these relate to cognitive dissonance theory, which is what I wrote my PhD on. They relate to the way our minds try to juggle contradictions. And very often what happens is we’re juggling contradictory thoughts the whole time, right? We think, “Oh, but that one police officer was nice, but also this is horrifying, but also I don’t know if we could live without police.” All these contradictory thoughts. And then what tends to happen is that we end up aligning our beliefs with our actions and with our relationships. That’s what sorts us out from the chaos.
Bacon: Let me just pause you to say, did I misunderstand, then, when I said I didn’t convince my mom about policing? In reality, we’re going to have some influence on our friends and the people around us just by talking about politics. Talking about politics with the people in our circle might make some difference, or no?
Stein Lubrano: It might, yeah. But I think it’s important to think about it as a sort of long-term network effect. I don’t know about your relationship with your mother, and I don’t know who else is in her life, but I’m a left-wing Jew, right?
If I talk to some of the people in my community about Gaza, they might be influenced by how I think, but they have a lot of other people saying other things in their ear. And a lot of other community relationships at stake, and it takes a long time to get round to people and say, “Look, we have to…”
We could go on this for ages, but you get the idea. So I don’t know what’s going on in your mom’s life exactly, but probably a similar set of questions about where the relationships are in her life.
Bacon: But the network can change people’s minds is what you’re getting at, right? It’s not one argument with one isolated person, but the network comes to have a different point of view, and that might make a difference.
Stein Lubrano: Yes, especially because our friends do a couple of things. So one of the things friends seem to be the best at, and this is touching, is they help us overcome prejudice.
And there’s a lot of evidence that essentially there’s what’s called social contact theory, or intergroup contact theory, which is that if people exist as equals within institutions, relative equals, and if especially certain conditions are met where they’re actually treated like equals, where they have shared goals, which I think is a really interesting qualifier, then they begin to be less prejudiced against groups.
The original studies were on the integration of the US military, actually. And the white people in that group, actually both groups, became less prejudiced against each other, but obviously the white people are more concerning in this case.
But similarly, people become much less prejudiced against gay people once they have gay friends, or when their friends come out to them. There’s lots of evidence for that. So one of the main things that happens is our friends help us overcome our prejudice.
And interestingly, it doesn’t just seem to be that we meet one person and think they’re great and so we decide the whole group is great, although that can happen. It seems to be also that our friends are like our metric of trust. So one of my favorite little statistics about this is, let’s say that we’re talking about overcoming Islamophobia or something, right? If I have a Muslim friend, sociologically I become less Islamophobic. Great. But it turns out that if you’re my friend and you have a Muslim friend, I also become less Islamophobic.
Bacon: Oh, interesting.
Stein Lubrano: Because my brain is doing a thing where essentially it’s like, Perry has good judgment and he likes Mohammed—sorry, that’s a horribly cliche name.
Bacon: No, that’s fine.
Stein Lubrano: It is the most common Muslim name in the world. I’m like, cool, maybe Muslims are all right because Perry thinks so, right? So friends are like these metrics of trust.
Perry Bacon: So our actions change our minds. Talk about why that might be the case.
Stein Lubrano: Yeah. This one is interesting and it’s complicated, and I think it’s both lovely and a kind of a dark science at the same time. But in my chapter on actions and experiences, I look at a lot of data that suggests that people in general tend to move their beliefs towards their actions rather than the other way around, which is not necessarily our intuitive model of how people think.
Many of us think, “Oh, I’m going to think for a while, and then when I come to a decision or a belief, then I’ll act in accordance with that decision or belief,” which sounds great, and maybe that is actually how you picked, I don’t know, the software for your company or something. But in terms of our political views, it seems that it often works the other way around.
So I’ll give you a couple of weird examples. One of them has to do with abortion. There’s actually this long-term study of what happens to people that are denied abortions that they want in the United States. I think it is the United States.
Anyway, denied abortions that they want, and they pair up people that are otherwise identical, but for whatever reason, this person couldn’t get an abortion. Usually they’re slightly past the date they thought they were or whatever. God knows it’s hard to get one now in the US in some places.
And they track what happened to these mostly women, of course, over time. And what happens interestingly is that by a small margin, but a noticeable margin, the women that were denied abortions become somewhat less in favor of abortion as a right. And the women that have got the abortions they wanted become slightly more in favor of abortion.
Basically, what’s happening is that a person experiences some contradiction between their lived experience and actions and their existing belief system, and they’re moved somewhat towards their actions, because cognitive dissonance is, remember, the discomfort between those two things, and we find ways to shift our beliefs around.
In general, we shift our beliefs towards our actions because our actions are more or less—I don’t want to say fully structurally determined here, I’m not that kind of thinker, but there are a lot of structural constraints. In this case, literally the person just couldn’t receive an abortion that they wanted, right?
And it turns out that similar findings happen throughout the literature. In particular, if people are about to experience a legal change that they think is irreversible, they will often interestingly become very much in favor of it as soon as it’s passed, even if they didn’t like it beforehand, and I put lots of evidence about that in the book as well.
So it seems like a lot of us are shifting our beliefs to get on board with how our life has actually gone, whether or not it was a good thing for us. And this is a controversial thing to say, by the way, because it’s an unfashionable view among political theorists of the left of a certain age anyway, to say people have false consciousness in some way, or they get on board with their own oppression.
But there is a lot of evidence that many people do essentially end up embracing the terms of oppressive life experiences, because in a way it perhaps gives them a sense that there is still something in their control, or else that they aren’t to be blamed for things that have gone wrong for them.
There’s some really interesting stuff about race in—oh, I’m forgetting his name right now. It’ll come back to me. There’s a great psychologist who did a bunch of studies on how darker skinned Black people are a bit more likely to endorse the system in some cases, and especially in the South where they’re treated worse. There are people who say, “No, the system either couldn’t possibly be different, or it is actually fair this way.” And that perhaps gives them back a sense of agency in some way, for better or worse.
Bacon: So if you wanted to change people’s minds, how does that work then? If you have actions, so you want people to—if we make people volunteer, what does that look like in action?
Stein Lubrano: Yeah, I think it’s really interesting that this is the sticking point for so many people when they get to this part of the book. They’re like, “But I can’t imagine what I would do otherwise,” right? Their model of political action is basically a speech, and they can’t imagine anything else.
And I want to say that my next book that I’m writing, which will come out very far away because it’s a hard book to write and publishing industries are slow, is partially about this.
And it is to say that, look, what I say in the book that’s already come out is, in order to change someone’s mind, you have to change their life. You have to change their life. You have to change their network of friends and connections. You need to change the experiences they’ve had in the world.
There is a lot of evidence that people that, for example, joined the Black Lives Matter movement, they changed their opinions for good. And most people who join protest movements do, because their whole social network gets rearranged, especially if that movement is good at keeping them in the movement after the actual protest, which unfortunately movements are not usually that good at doing.
And so essentially what I’m arguing for is a form of—we could add different words to this pile, but a pile that includes activism, long-term community organizing, having an actual political party, and I mean a membership-based party, not a top-down party like the Democratic Party basically is right now or whatever. And really being deeply involved and embedded in a long-term process of political change with other people. But there are lots of ways to get into that, and it doesn’t always look like immediately joining a membership-based party.
Bacon: So one thing I read in one of your pieces, you wrote, “Join a consumer union or a co-op with your neighbors.” Why would that matter?
Stein Lubrano: I’ll tell you, because I’m in one. So in the process of writing this book, I’m in a cooperative union, so to speak, so basically a food co-op in my neighborhood, that was set up by my friend, actually. He got really interested after he read my book, because I interview this person in the book called Shiri Chami, and she runs something called Cooperation Town, which is basically a consumer union.
Every week people get together with their neighbors and they order vegetables and other things in bulk, and it gets delivered to this distribution hub, and then someone comes and picks it up. I’m actually getting my groceries this evening. And you get pretty much—I wouldn’t say all the groceries you need for the week, but a lot of the groceries you need for the week, for about £5. Which is very little, right?
But as Shiri puts it in the book, and to me as well, she says, “I don’t really care about food. I’m an anti-fascist organizer. And the reason I want these co-ops to exist—of course, I want people to have cheaper food, but what I really want is that they know all their neighbors, because one day something else is going to happen,” right?
So I’m a pretty bougie lady, but look, a lot of people in these food cooperatives are not, and they’re getting evicted. What happens when you’re getting evicted? You need 10 of your neighbors to show up and sit in the house with you so that the bailiffs can’t get you out. And if you have people that you order vegetables with every week, they’re going to do that for you.
So it’s a process of kind of reknitting the social fabric together, which is of course what my next book is about really in a lot of ways. And also of people beginning to recognize that they have shared political concerns, because I think a lot of people have trouble understanding that until they’re deeply involved in each other’s lives in a way that is now unusual.
Bacon: Let’s see what else you wrote here. Create gateway actions.
Stein Lubrano: Yes. Yeah, let’s talk about gateway actions. This is drawn from this kind of niche sociology literature, but there was a debate among certain kinds of sociologists about whether small actions that are political lead people to larger political involvement, or whether they see it as like a getaway. “Oh, I recycled. I don’t need to fly less. I don’t need to join a climate march,” right?
Obviously, people can go either way technically, but on the whole, increasingly research suggests that these gateway actions, these small actions, genuinely lead people to larger political action. And that makes sense if you think about cognitive dissonance literature. One of the things I continuously do throughout this book is connect different areas of empirical study and say, “What’s the larger theory here? What’s the connection?”
A small action shifts our beliefs a little bit, and then we do another action, and we shift our beliefs a little bit more, and we get deeply involved. By the way, that can also happen for bad groups. The far right uses this tactic in a lot of ways.
But if you’re an organizer, I think a lot of people are tempted to think, “OK, I’m going to be political. I’m going to go argue with people and tell them why they’re wrong.” But actually, it’s often much more effective to say, “Oh, let me take someone with me to do a gateway action.”
If you want to convince your mom, bring her to a vigil for somebody that has been harmed or worse, killed by the police. Bring her to help people who’ve been arrested by the police. You can do arrestee support. It’s an interesting activity. You learn a lot about how people were treated, right?
These are just examples, but those are examples of gateway actions. And successful movements—successful in the sense that they achieve political ends, not necessarily that we agree with every single thing they do—but many successful political organizations have a system of gateway actions.
You go through the first gateway and then the second gateway, and then you’re climbing the ladder. I think there’s actually a word for this in movement literature somewhere that I’m forgetting, but there’s a kind of increasing circle of actions that you do until you’re fully in the movement.
Bacon: Rebuild a third place that is actually accessible to most people.
Stein Lubrano: Yes. So the third place is a term also from sociology, I think.
Bacon: Meaning basically not a business and not your house, right?
Stein Lubrano: Yeah, it’s usually defined as neither the private home nor the workplace, right? Because if you think about it, the home is an exclusive space by necessity, basically. My home is full of weirdos staying over all the time because I’m a weird person. But look, most people are living in a private family home. That’s a very private space. You’re not really going to do political life in the same way. There’s still a politics to the home, but that’s a different question.
Similarly, in the workplace, it’s not as exclusive, although it is somewhat exclusive, but it’s also hierarchical almost by necessity. Even the best workers’ co-ops, there’s still stuff going on.
Whereas a third place is interesting because it’s a place where people are more or less equals unless they really misbehave. Like a bar, a coffee shop, the PTA meeting even can in a certain way be like a third space.
These are places where everyone is assumed to be more or less equals, and you are interacting with each other in a way that essentially encourages a kind of democratic life, where you begin to have to take each other’s considerations seriously perhaps. You’re going to meet new kinds of people and different kinds of people.
The reality is that in the US especially, but in other places also, we’ve seen the shrinking of third places, especially cheap or free ones, over the last really 50 years, because of the rise of the cost of living, because of increased basically rent seeking. There was an amazing study I use in the book where this company that rents robotic lawnmowers and chainsaws, which sound terrifying but whatever, they just want to see, OK, is there green space in cities around the world?
And they use satellites to look at the green space that’s publicly accessible, and it shrinks in these cities every year. So even parks and little spaces where you could go outside are increasingly privatized and closed off and built up and developed by capitalism. And as a result, we have very few places to go and even meet our fellow citizens without paying a lot of money.
Bacon: Organize movements that don’t just engage in demonstrations, and which ask a lot of you. Why is that important? Or how can that change—
Stein Lubrano: Yes, exactly. So this goes back to the stuff about protesters, right? One of the things I say in the book, and this pisses people off, and I’m really sorry to people that are pissed off. Many of the things I say obviously would piss off the right.
I’m so left-wing I would fall off the Overton window, right? But this pisses off the left, because many people on the left are very committed to nonviolent demonstration as their method of political change. They want to go and basically hold a sign.
And if you look at the literature on whether those nonviolent demonstrations change public opinion in the long term, as we already visited with the data on the Black Lives Matter movement, that was the best data that sociologists had, by the way. For a little while, they were like, “Oh, maybe this one is going to change things.” But it did the same thing that all these other movements do. It went back to baseline for general public opinion.
Similarly, there is not really good data that governments change their policies directly based on protests alone, demonstrations alone. I’ve got to be more careful. I want to use demonstrations specifically, because there’s a lot of kinds of protests, right?
And I encourage readers to think about it this way, which is to say, if you’re a government official, you already have very good reasons to have the policy you have. Good for your own interests anyway. You have your rich buddies you want to help, or maybe you generally think it’s the right thing to do. You see a bunch of weirdos in the street with signs, this is not going to be a great reason for you to change your mind, and you often are able to dismiss them immediately as, “These are the weirdos who have time on a Tuesday to be in the cold. What are they doing?”
Generally speaking, to shift the balance of power, you need to essentially hold something hostage that the people in power want, that they can’t get until they give you something you want. That is unfortunately the reality of political change. So there are other forms of protests that have been shown to be effective.
Obviously, it’s always a gamble, but you can go on strike, then you’re holding labor hostage. You can block a road. There are complicated backlash issues there, but it could work. You could fill up the prisons, as they tried to do in this country with the climate movement, and see if you can really inconvenience the whole justice system until something else happens. There are lots of material—
Bacon: I guess a boycott fits this, if you boycott the right people who have the right income.
Stein Lubrano: Yeah. And I would say that it’s very complicated to analyze why the civil rights movement succeeded, but I would suggest that the evidence is strongly that it was not a matter of shifting public opinion, even though some people’s opinions did change in the long run, because when they succeeded, they were still very unpopular with the general population, and even with the politicians who made these decisions, some of which were made essentially because it was going to be too inconvenient not to, right?
If you can hold up the whole transit system, eventually they think, “OK, I guess we have to throw these people a bone.” Or realistically, many people who study movements say really they gave them some stuff because they were worried that otherwise the Black Panthers would just go and arm everyone. And so you think, “OK, let’s give these more reasonable Black people this thing, so we don’t get armed revolt in the street.”
And these are material forms of protests that are more effective in the long run, I would argue, than anything about a demonstration itself. But that doesn’t mean a demonstration has nothing to do, because it’s very often an excellent place to recruit people and to mobilize them, and sometimes to give them emotional support. It’s just that I fear that we’ve lost the sense that in the long run, you have to do something besides have a demonstration.
If you look at No Kings or something like that—not only are there maybe other issues with them, but where are you taking those people afterward? We live in an age of networked protests, that people join protest movements, and then they go on the march because they found out online, and then they leave, and they don’t even have anyone else’s phone number. We need to be able to mobilize in a much more strategic, long-term way, where we’re holding stuff that people in power want hostage. And that’s going to take a real shift in how we think about this stuff.
Bacon: So for our audience, how does the Democratic Party win more elections and win over people from Trump or MAGA or the Republicans? That’s the core question. We save democracy by winning. We can debate that question.
But if Ken Martin or Hakeem Jeffries or Chuck Schumer said—not in, elections are three weeks. So what is a long-term plan, four or five years, maybe by 2028 even, two years? What’s a long-term plan to move people, change people who are voting Republican, get them to vote Democratic? How do you change their minds or change their behavior?
Stein Lubrano: Oh, yeah. Look, this is not my theory of change. I just want to say this first, but I’m very disappointed by the Democratic Party, like many Americans. But I also don’t think my theory of how things could get better comes through the Democratic Party at all.
That said, if they, I don’t know, put me in prison and were like, “You have to be our advisor,” OK, fine. And I can only speak truth. So I would say I think you need to rebuild the membership base of the Democratic Party, and you need to do it in ways that commit people deeply to serving others in their community. And realistically now is too late. Forget it. Do whatever dumb stunts you’re going to do for the next three weeks.
Bacon: That’s what I mean. That’s why I said not in the next three weeks, or maybe in the next two years. But long term.
Stein Lubrano: Look, Mamdani has been very successful at winning. Why? Because he has used many of these tactics. Then you can always argue about whether you like this or that thing that he did. Who cares?
The point is, he was actually pretty good at essentially using a series of relational and community organizing tactics to mobilize people through their social networks to come out and vote, right? And he had lots of other interesting and important tactics. But you need to be basically doing organizing on the ground with people’s networks.
And also, and I think this is very important and incredibly neglected, you need to also provide some material stuff for people. Even in little ways that might not seem that important. That particular administration, is what you’d call Mamdani’s government, they have done little material things that actually mean a lot to people.
Like where they’ve set up, for example, not just the potholes or whatever, but they set up these little stations for all the delivery drivers to come and charge their phones. And if you’re a worker who works incredibly long hours and you’re also constantly shut out of even the McDonald’s bathroom unless you make a purchase, and you can’t charge anything, something like that is a huge deal.
You essentially need gateway actions to just show people, “Hey, we’ve got your back. We’re thinking about you. We’re on your side,” in this very, honestly, difficult and brutal world.
Bacon: You said organization on the ground, and I don’t know how old you are, but you’re not 70. So I assume you use the internet and have an iPhone. You’ve heard of TikTok. You’ve heard of Instagram. All I hear every day is, the world is all online. So why do you think having things on the ground matter?
Stein Lubrano: Because the evidence that people change their minds when they’re on the internet is very little, and the evidence they change their mind when they hang out with people in person is pretty good.
And I’m looking at this a lot now for my next book, which is on social isolation. But even putting politics aside for one half of a second, the evidence that our friendships are much stronger when we’re in person is also pretty good. In ways that are weird.
One of the things I looked at recently was just about smell and social contact, which might sound really weird, but it turns out people who can smell better also do much better at social cues, because we are, in fact, just weird little animals like our dogs and cats, and we need to smell each other to know how each other feel.
We are basically much more effective at learning from each other and existing with each other when we do it offline. And that doesn’t mean there isn’t a role for online life. Again, I am an Instagram influencer, for lack of a better word. It’s just that should be the beginning of a funnel where you get people offline.
And if you want to hear a really bleak thing, you know who else knows that? Steve Bannon, and I quote him at the end of the book. He says, “Yeah, I use the internet to excite people, but then I get them offline. I give them little tasks to do. I send them to their local government, and I get them going.” And we can’t replicate everything the far right does, by the way, but some of that is indeed replicable and important.
Bacon: Two last questions. You’ve got an essay that I was reading that came out last week. I’m on the progressive end. I want to reduce police funding and do a wealth tax and all those other things, too. But I’m very skeptical of this idea that’s really strong on the left right now, which is, I think the term Odell uses now is deliverism.
This basic idea is like, if Zohran makes life more affordable, if we have cheaper housing prices, or we have free buses or free college, AOC should run on these economic policies. That we are in an affordability crisis. The working class cannot afford their lives. They’re mad. That’s why they’re voting for the right.
And so I agree with all the policies, but I find myself being skeptical that this will result in different election outcomes, and I think you are, too. In part because the evidence is not that—if the poor people in America all voted for Trump, then the Black people would’ve, because the Black people have the lowest incomes on average, and they mostly didn’t. Overwhelmingly didn’t. And so Trump voting is not really aligned with economics particularly well at all.
Stein Lubrano: Yeah, and people really struggle with that finding. Let’s talk about it. I have a couple of thoughts.
First of all, I think it’s worth saying I wrote quite a long and thoughtful piece that is available for my paid Substack subscribers. Sorry to paywall anything, but that’s how it works sometimes. And is also in the journal Renewal, which is actually a UK journal, but it has the same question at heart, which is, can we do deliverism and then we save democracy?
And the problem, and this is why I believe fundamentally, by the way, that we have to use some empirical data and science about psychology in the way we look at political issues, is that people are incredibly bad at attributing improvements in their life even to things that have been delivered to them by governments, right?
In particular, there’s all kinds of evidence that if their lives get better, they attribute that to themselves. They’re like, “Oh, my boss is paying me a bit more. That must be me.” That’s the market on it.
Whereas if something goes wrong, even if the government couldn’t possibly have prevented it—there’s a study on shark attacks, and when shark attacks increase, then people think the government’s worse. Which is, I really don’t think they’re in charge of that. So people just have all kinds of weird, deranged psychological responses to events, and they’re not that good at responding to that stuff.
One of the things I argue in this piece that I’m mentioning is that interestingly, people radically underestimate, for example, how much social contact is going to make their lives better, but then when they experience it, they do feel happier.
So there are interesting experiments to be had potentially with increasing the level of socializing people have. Because interestingly, I believe it’s something like a 5 percent increase in socializing is as good as a 10 percent increase in income in terms of your happiness. It’s huge. I’ve got that data slightly off the cuff here, but something like that.
First of all, the question is, what are we delivering? I actually think the Mamdani campaign has done reasonably well at choosing things that are extremely clear that they come from the government, right? It’s impossible not to think your free bus isn’t from the government. I actually think the way they happen to have done the grocery store policy is not a good use of resources compared to other things you could do to make groceries cheap. But again, you can really see it’s from the government in that case, which is interesting.
But overall I think the important thing about deliverism is, it’s not that a policy wonk somewhere should be able to verify that the person’s life was improved through a policy. Because as someone who grew up in the liberal bubble in DC, I have seen how poorly that works, right? Here we are, we’ve got Trump.
It’s more that I think you want to be thinking about what you deliver in a way that pulls people back into a world where they see they have shared interests and commitments with other people, and could potentially even get recruited into your party, of whatever kind of party that is. So it’s not just about improving their life, it’s about improving life in a way that also shifts the little actions they engage in day to day, the relationships they’re going to form. And that more than anything is going to bring their politics at least into a new and interesting place.
Bacon: So you’re a materialist on policy, but you’ve used the word social and relational a lot of times. And those are the things you’re saying are important.
Stein Lubrano: Yeah. Look, I am a Marxian sociologist in my commitments, right? I think that much of our politics is fundamentally about the structure of the economy. And a lot of people’s beliefs rest on top of that, whether they recognize it or not, sadly.
Bacon: So I’ll finish with—you wrote a few months ago about Robert Putnam, and I think he’s this social theorist who wrote this famous book called Bowling Alone, for the audience. And you seem to share some of his concerns that people are too socially isolated.
So tell me about what you think he might be getting wrong, because his book has been very influential. There’s a lot of talk about the idea, is America going through, particularly men are going through this sort of loneliness crisis, and the implication is men are lonely, they’re on the internet too long, and they’re voting for Trump, and that’s the decline of America, and maybe the far right is rising all over the world because of this. So talk about this problem in the Robert Putnam thesis and your thesis. They might be different.
Stein Lubrano: Yes. So look, obviously many people really revere Robert Putnam because he wrote some very important stuff documenting with great detail and lots of graphs, which he loves, how much Americans are spending time alone compared to previous generations, how they are not part of membership associations anymore. And that is a genuine and very serious problem.
However, before we get to critiquing Putnam, I think it’s worth saying we’re not actually facing a loneliness crisis, because people don’t report feeling much lonelier. The feeling of loneliness is not at stake here. It has not changed much in the last 20 or 40 years according to most metrics, and lots of other measurements that are there are off as well.
Instead, we just see that especially the last 15 years, but even before that, people are increasingly spending their time alone, and that they are no longer part of groups as much, essentially.
Bacon: So people are alone more. They’re not necessarily saying they’re lonely more. That’s interesting. This is an important distinction.
Sarah Stein Lubrano: Which is very different. And my next book is about this, and how what we’re actually experiencing is what you might call social atrophy, which are these quite shocking changes in the brain that happen when people are alone but don’t necessarily involve the feeling of loneliness.
But the problem with Putnam’s stuff, to be honest, and we need to respectfully gesture to him and then also say, “But people who have done important research can also be wrong about stuff,” right? Putnam is a deep moralist. He’s a sentimental guy. If you watch the interviews with him, he cries, and he cries about everything. And look, I also cry about everything, so part of me is like, “Yeah, solidarity, Robert.”
But look, he thinks that the solution to this problem is basically that we all have to go and become moral people. He has, as he acknowledges himself, the unfashionable among social scientists and political theorists view that fundamentally you just need a moral revolution, and then you save everyone through your moral convictions. And I do not believe this at all, and I think the evidence for it is also extremely weak, especially in this area.
Bacon: He means moral, not religious, right? He’s saying something different, right?
Stein Lubrano: No. He means—I don’t even know if he has a religion. I think he converted to baseline Judaism for his wife or something. But he means we need to care about each other. And look, I also want us to care about each other, no problem. If you believe in God, that’s fine too.
But he thinks that basically we just need to convince each other of the moral importance of other people, and that is the pathway forward as organizers, and even puts these rules for organizers, be moral in the way you campaign. And I think it’s a misguided approach, because fundamentally if it worked, we would be in a different place.
And if you look at the data on why people have increasingly stayed in their houses, every single time you see a contraction in the economy, that’s when people stay in their houses. And then after that contraction, whether it’s 2008 or COVID, they basically never go back to the level of socializing they had before.
And there are interesting neuroscience reasons for that, but there’s also just straight up economic reasons. Let’s say that you have an economic crisis. You learn to live with less. You learn to go to the pub less. Your friendships that you used to have dissipate during that period where none of you can afford to go out and drink together or whatever you do, and you lose your memberships to stuff, and then eventually the club that you had a membership to actually closes because no one’s a member anymore.
And meanwhile, you’ve got a Netflix subscription that’s cheaper and you’re staying at home. Even when the world reopens after COVID, there’s just never the same infrastructure for social life again. And also, as I write about in another of my pieces, your brain has changed, and you no longer feel like that level of socializing is even feasible for you.
So that’s a structural problem. It’s not a good problem to moralize about. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t have moral significance. Our lack of connection to other people is deeply morally significant, but it’s something that has to be addressed not purely through moral conviction, but through structural change. And Putnam regularly discounts that.
He will often offhand be like, “Oh yeah, I guess there were some economic reforms that helped with this,” but he really doesn’t see the importance of the economics in this calculus. And I think his approach is fundamentally misguided in a way that is very dangerous in an age where the economic contractions we’re facing are likely to lead to greater and greater authoritarianism and votes for the far right.
Bacon: So we need to have economic change and these social changes too?
Stein Lubrano: Yeah, of course. Look, our lives are important as human beings not because we have money, but because we have friends. I don’t know how else to put it. That’s my politics, in a way. But it’s very dangerous to disentangle the two, because they’re profoundly intertwined, especially in the kind of economy we live in.
Bacon: So your essay is called “Centering the Social: Towards a New Politics of Connection.” Give us a little bit on that and we’ll end there.
Stein Lubrano: Yeah. Something that people often tell me about my writing is that they appreciate that even though I am, again, the leftiest lefty in certain respects, I’m not a profound pessimist. And as much as I just said something difficult about Robert Putnam, who’s like America’s grandpa, I’m not actually on a campaign to destroy people either. I try to always show something appreciative about them. Even Putnam, he’s obviously an important guy.
So I often try to put forward specific things that we can do, because I think it’s so difficult in this age of reduced political imagination. So many people have never even known someone who was in a social movement that asked a lot of them. They can’t imagine what they could do next. I have, by the way, a piece on my Substack about the social skills you can cultivate that will help you be a revolutionary.
But there’s all kinds of things we need to do. In “Centering the Social,” I’m trying to rethink the question of deliverism that you’ve asked, which is, what could governments do that would actually make people happier? And according to all of the best available evidence, the thing that really determines your quality of life is the quality of the relationships that you have with other people.
Past a certain baseline of getting out of poverty. But after that, the amount of money that you have has almost no effect on how happy you are, whereas almost any increase in the number of deep, meaningful, good relationships that you have radically improves your quality of life.
And governments—look, I’m not a huge believer in governments are going to save us. I really am not. Nevertheless, I thought it would be an interesting experiment to think about, what could governments do that would increase the likelihood that people have deep, meaningful relationships, friendships, connections with their neighbors.
There’s lots of things. But I think one of the main things to think about, especially because it can be done outside of any particular governmental system, is the increasing need for, of course, as we say, third places, and third places that are both social and political.
And one of the examples that I give is that in Europe we have a problem that is less common in the US, which is that people don’t have air conditioning, and it gets really hot and people die. And actually, more people in Europe die every summer of heat deaths now than die of gun deaths in the US. It’s just a much quieter epidemic, because everything is infrastructurally built wrong, and unfortunately, old and disabled people especially can really struggle with the heat and die.
In any case, as a result, various municipalities especially—I believe in both Warsaw and Barcelona, but Barcelona has the more prominent example—have built these cooling spaces. Anywhere you live, there’s 10 minutes from where you walk, there’s a cooling space. And you can go during the day, and it either has literal air conditioning or another system that cools down a building, and you can escape the heat.
But what I would love to see is that spaces like this become a place where perhaps that’s also where you can go and get help with your various bureaucratic problems. Maybe that’s also a place where there’s a playgroup for kids, because parenting is exhausting. Maybe that’s also a place where you get your cheap groceries from your food co-op. And the more that these places become places where we reconnect with people and learn essentially to trust them again, the better.
And if a government helps us with this, wonderful, and if it doesn’t help us with this, then we do it as a social movement. But I wanted to think about how we could recenter social life as a real political priority, because I think without doing that, we’re never going to regain the skills that we need to make radical political changes that are required for us to essentially survive the next 75 years.
Bacon: So I’m left with a contradiction, which is that I feel as if I want AOC to have a politics of connection platform in her presidential campaign. My immediate thought even when you were talking was, I should write an op-ed calling for AOC to have a—but you’re hinting that may not be a very effective way to influence AOC or anyone else. So I need to find AOC’s friends?
If your job is to write essays about politics to change people’s minds, and you’ve been told that is not going to work, what other tools are in the toolbox? The social part you’ve mentioned is important. AOC’s not a good example for me, but I get the point. The point is, do we need to have other tools in our toolbox?
Stein Lubrano: Yes. And I think that’s part of what I wanted to achieve in this book, is to say we have a diminished idea of what a political individual is. If you ask a lot of people, they’ll say, “Oh, it’s a person who’s read all the policy stuff and they vote.” I don’t want that to be our image of politics. Politics is about your commitments that you have to other people, your ability to analyze the power structures in your life and do something about them. It’s a different thing.
But in any case, to go back to your question about what should we do. Look, first of all, I’m a writer, right? So I’m a hypocrite. I love writing. But I think it’s worth saying writing does a lot of other things. Writing is how I discover what I think. Writing is how I reach a community of other thinkers and we can think together.
I actually put this in the book. There’s a wonderful quote by this guy from several centuries ago. He says, “I write not to persuade people, but to tell my enemies that I still disagree.” There is a kind of thing it’s doing that matters. They haven’t won yet. I don’t agree with them. I don’t agree with the Trump administration.
But yeah, look, write the op-ed, especially if someone’s going to pay you for it. But then think about, who’s going to send this op-ed to AOC’s policy guy? And make friends with that guy and be like, “Hey dude, lady, whoever.”
That is realistically—if you ask people how they actually get stuff done, of course it is the social relationships. And that means that people with social skills, for better and worse, are the people that tend to, alongside many other material concerns, get stuff done politically when it’s needed.
Bacon: Sarah, I appreciate you joining me. This was a great conversation. I think it was educational too. So tell people where they can get your book and where they can read your Substack.
Stein Lubrano: Yes. My Substack is called My Sub Schtick, the Yiddish phrase. You can just Google my name. It will come up. I really encourage everyone to hang out with me on Substack, and obviously here on the Substack Live you can see me. But also my book is available in all the best bookstores, as they say. You can order it online. Maybe don’t order it from Amazon if you can help it. If you have to, it’s there. And I’d love to hear people’s thoughts. I’m also on Instagram, and I encourage viewers to watch my weird little videos every day. You could hear more things about Robert Putnam.
Bacon: Great to see you. Thanks for taking the time. Bye-bye.
Stein Lubrano: Thank you so much. This was a pleasure.
