Episode Transcript
Antifascist Dad Podcast
Episode 10 – Don’t Talk About Politics (Part 2 with Sarah Stein Lubrano)
Host: Matthew Remski
Guest: Dr. Sarah Stein Lubrano
[00:00:10] Matthew: Welcome, Patreons, to part two of episode 10, “Don’t Talk About Politics,” with Sarah Stein Lubrano. I’m really grateful for your support, and I hope this project brings some joy, hope, and utility to your ears and to your works and days.
In part one of my discussion with Sarah, we explored her central argument from Don’t Talk About Politics, which is that debates, podcasts, and rational, persuasive techniques rarely change anyone’s core political beliefs.
She talked about how people certainly learn information from political media, including things like this podcast, but learning is not the same as transformation.
Political commitments are rooted in identity, belonging, and social networks. Without altering the material fabric of life, new arguments might just bounce off a person like rain off a raincoat.
Lubrano says that meaningful political change tends to arise from two things: relationships on the one hand, and lived experience on the other.
When people join mutual food efforts, when they volunteer at food banks, when they work alongside others, when they enter new communities, their sense of the world can shift.
So instead of telling someone to think differently, or debating them until they relent, we could invite them to live differently. And that might actually even be antifascist.
We also talked about something a little vulnerable for me, given my past years working on “critical thinking” in a number of my endeavors, and how this often operates as a class-coded ideal shaped by academic habits: independent analysis, essays, debate. You know, what you do in college, what you do in high school.
Lubrano emphasized that political consciousness historically develops through action, shared struggle, and friendship, not solitary intellectual work.
To truly change someone’s political orientation, they need not only information but a new world to step into. That’s what we need if we’re going to change the way we see things now.
Lubrano draws on cognitive dissonance and system justification theory to explain why people sometimes defend systems that oppress them, and how abandoning those beliefs without a replacement community can be really psychologically destabilizing.
We connected this to cult dynamics: how people rarely leave until they have somewhere else to go, even if they’re in a terrible situation.
Political transformation, like exit from a cult, requires an off-ramp and, more importantly, a landing place. A social landing place.
So here’s part two. We’re picking it up from a discussion of what really changes our minds. If it’s not book learning, if it’s not middle-class university essay writing, what really radicalizes us?
[00:03:26] Sarah: When I think about it, and I tell this to the people in the movement school all the time, I ask: when did you really change your mind on something? I’ll tell you when I changed my mind on things.
Number one: one of my students was raped. Then the police also got involved, and they were not very helpful. That was bad. That changed my mind about a lot of things.
What else happened? I taught in prisons, and I met the people in prisons, and I said, “Oh, wow, these women… firstly, they’re here a lot because of their boyfriends. And secondly, many of them can’t read.” That changed my mind a lot.
I could go on and on, but I don’t think any amount of abstract knowledge would have made me truly more interested and passionate about pulling apart the system at its roots. I was doing fine. I was at a fancy university having a perfectly nice time.
[00:04:05] Matthew: Yeah.
[00:04:06] Sarah: No, I needed something else. I needed to really see that something was rotten at the core. A lot of people need that experience, and that’s fine. That’s how we learn.
[00:04:13] Matthew: For me, I’ll just say that the most radicalizing thing that happened was becoming the parent of an autistic kid, whose brilliance and challenges really put into stark perspective who the world is made for and who is excluded from it, and what people who are neurotypical are generally trying to enforce with regard to the standards of social production and capitalist adventurism.
There is nothing more radicalizing than the day-to-day reality of: this is what we have to do, this is how we have to learn something in a new way, this is how my own understanding of time and accomplishment and learning and creativity is going to unfold.
And it’s not going to be according to the benchmarks that have been set forth by public schooling, for example.
[00:05:12] Sarah: Yeah. And you know what? I honestly think this is fine. One of the things that I want to say over and over again, when people come to me and say, “But this sounds really hard. It sounds like I’m going to have to do a lot of stuff that doesn’t involve any writing,” is: yes, that’s right.
You’re going to have to go into the world and you’re going to have to use a set of skills that you were not taught in school, skills that are about everything from talking to people different from yourself to doing a bunch of labor with your hands, or having feelings.
I don’t want to tell you about parenting, because you are a parent and I’m not a parent. But a lot of parenting is not just intellectual. There is an intellectual element to parenting, and there should be, but there’s also a lot that is affective. It’s about love.
[00:05:53] Matthew: Right.
[00:05:54] Sarah: It’s about love, and it’s about labor, and it’s about getting up at 3 a.m. over and over again for someone who is not grateful because they are too busy being two years old. And on and on and on.
I was not a neurotypical kid either, certainly, and I had no idea what my parents were doing for me. They did a good job. My parents and I obviously have our issues sometimes, because that’s family life, but they did a pretty good job with this bit especially.
In any case, the point is: it required a set of skills that are somewhat cognitive and intellectual, but also embodied. Those are the same skills we need a lot of the time for political change, because they are about loving people and adjusting to them and trying things out, bringing people along on the journey, remaining motivated, doing physical labor, getting up early, and all the other horrible hard things that are also super meaningful.
[00:06:42] Sarah: I think that’s thinking too. That is thinking about politics correctly.
[00:06:47] Matthew: I want to touch on two major centerpiece ideas in your book before I round down my questions, because I think they’re really important. One involves your framework for how the marketplace of ideas does not actually encourage people to try new things. The other is your criticism of “reasoning as warfare,” in which I think you’re implying that the Jubilee series on YouTube doesn’t really work.
[00:07:15] Sarah: Yeah. If you want to start with that first, I just wrote an essay for Zeteo, on Mehdi Hasan’s network, about why it doesn’t work.
[00:07:23] Matthew: Right.
[00:07:24] Matthew: And are you addressing it to him? Because, of course, he just had a big learning curve on that show.
[00:07:31] Sarah: He had a big learning curve, but I think not a very smart one. I want to be kind to him, but he didn’t seem to be fully aware, according to his own account, of what exactly the setup was before he entered that arena.
[00:07:42] Sarah: First of all, he was essentially scammed, because he was not discussing anything with “Trump supporters” as such. He was discussing things with very hard far-right people who are already quite experienced in being on platforms. It’s not like they mis-sold him the experience.
But the other point I want to make, which is slightly different: lots of people have correctly and importantly pointed out that you never debate fascists because then you platform them. That’s true and important.
But even if these people weren’t fascists, this might not be the right use of our time.
[00:08:12] Matthew: Right.
[00:08:12] Sarah: Debate is great entertainment, but it does not change people’s minds. There’s a lot of data on this. One of the things I go into very early on in my book is just a bunch of data on whether people who watch televised debates—whether they’re decided or undecided on the issue or the vote—change their voting intention afterward.
And I know that everyone will immediately think, “Oh my gosh, what about Kennedy vs. Nixon? What about Biden vs. Trump?”
[00:08:34] Matthew: Exactly.
[00:08:34] Sarah: Right. Cool. I find that weird also.
But when people do meta-analyses—when they look at all the debates we can find data on, in multiple countries, over the last 50 or 60 years—and see if we can observe meaningful shifts after a debate, the answer is no.
That means when you see a result after a debate, it’s basically a random statistical walk.
[00:09:00] Matthew: But it also becomes very attractive to the person who believes this is how we change minds. If we have a Kennedy–Nixon moment or a Biden–Trump moment, we can really fix on those as “the gladiatorial system actually worked,” and think, “Let’s see how we can make it work again.”
[00:09:23] Sarah: Firstly, you’re right. People don’t want to accept that statistical analysis, because if they see even a tiny move, they think, “Wow, I did such a cool thing. Yay, I feel so powerful because I, too, can debate.” There’s an interesting false agency there.
But we have to follow that logic all the way down the rabbit hole. Imagine if it were true that, as long as there’s been a debate, whatever the outcome is, it’s probably good, because the best ideas will always win.
Where are we now? Do we think the ideas that are currently in power in the United States are the best ideas? Did they win because we debated them in a marketplace of ideas and the best ideas rose to the top? Is the best idea that we have military control over Washington, D.C., at its lowest point of crime in 20 years? I mean, come on.
It’s almost preposterous on the surface of it, which is sometimes how you know that you’re deep in ideology.
[00:10:07] Matthew: That particular logic flow I haven’t heard before, but it seems irrefutable.
Is anybody else saying that? Is anybody else saying, “Wait a minute, doesn’t the marketplace-of-ideas notion guarantee that what we have is the best we could possibly have?”
[00:10:30] Sarah: Most ideology doesn’t surface as hardcore singular claims. Sometimes it does, but it often doesn’t.
I will say that as a person who suddenly gained about twelve thousand Instagram followers in the last two months, I get this. I get people who see my videos, who aren’t “triggered,” and then write me long essays about how I must be wrong and debate is actually the perfect epitome of democracy. I get those people.
But the more important question is about why all of us are a little bit anxious about the idea that debate doesn’t work. Even I’m still anxious, and I wrote this book.
It’s not just that we all explicitly hold this belief, because some of us don’t and some of us are ambivalent. It’s baked into all of our institutions.
What do you learn when you go to school to write an essay in America? You basically learn to debate on a piece of paper.
How does our legal system work? People debate each other. How does our parliamentary system work in the UK? People debate each other. How do presidential elections work? People debate each other. How does Congress work? People debate each other.
It’s baked into absolutely everything. It’s baked into the dinner table now.
So even if people are not explicitly making that argument, many of us are conforming to it all the time.
At the end of the book, I talk about this again, and I give the example—obviously unrelated directly—of beauty culture. There are many women, including myself, and many men, who would explicitly say, “No one owes anyone pretty. Expectations of a specific kind of beauty are oppressive and bad.” Then we go and put on makeup, go to the gym, shave, whatever.
I’m not saying those people are bad or wrong. It’s actually a really complicated question what you do in a world that still rewards certain kinds of physical beauty.
But that’s how ideology works. It’s not just about your explicitly stated beliefs. It’s about how the system works, what it rewards, and how that becomes embodied in the way you think and act day to day, so that you almost can’t get out of it.
I find myself wanting to get into the Instagram comments with people and debate them, because I think, “No, I have the data, look at the data!” You have to always be deprogramming yourself from ideology. And this is a piece of liberal ideology.
[00:12:35] Sarah: It’s still not a fascist ideology. I would not say the desire to find justice through debate is inherently fascist. But it’s getting in our way.
[00:12:42] Matthew: Going back to Sartre, fascists aren’t actually interested in the mechanics of debate. They don’t give a shit. They want to dominate through words they don’t actually believe in.
Maybe that’s the primary liberal mistake: not recognizing the point at which, “Oh, I’m trying to speak sense here, and the person I’m talking to is laughing at that whole idea.”
[00:13:08] Sarah: I think that’s the secondary liberal mistake. The number one liberal mistake, Matthew—sorry, I’ve persuaded myself so well—is actually not about fascists at all.
It’s about the fact that if you want… we would never say that doing family life well is primarily about telling people the right words.
[00:13:29] Matthew: Right.
[00:13:29] Sarah: We would never say that being a good family member, or a good friend, or a good comrade is just about saying the right things. It’s about also doing the actions.
Frankly, why would anyone care what you think or what words you have to say if you’re not doing something for them, if you’re not profoundly invested, through your actions, in their wellbeing?
That’s why I talk about food co-ops in the book. That’s why I talk about mutual aid. It’s people’s actions and their relationships first, and all the words downstream of that.
If the words come beforehand, they’re useless in a way, because that’s not how human beings are set up to care about or entertain ideas. We entertain ideas by doing them, and by noticing that other people care about us.
[00:14:21] Matthew: We’re in an age of protest. You argue that protest works as a process—as a horizontal process—as much as a zero-sum game of achieving the protest goal.
So the question is: why protest if it’s unlikely that the protest itself will change the opinions of those who view it from the outside, or will change a policy or outcome? Why should we protest?
[00:14:46] Sarah: Let me just review what I say, and what a huge swath of data says.
When we look at protests, the question is: what is the protest for? Let’s think for a minute about protest in a narrower sense, which is demonstration. You could argue that blocking roads is protest—and it is—but that’s holding something hostage that the state or a corporation wants until they give you what you want. That’s different.
[00:15:14] Matthew: Direct action.
[00:15:15] Sarah: It’s direct action, yeah. Direct action is also having a bad time lately, but that’s another story.
If we’re thinking about protest as a form of discourse, where you get on the street and you make demands and show that a lot of people believe the same thing, with signs and chants, that is a form of discourse.
People might say, “The protest works because it changes the government’s mind. Maybe it intimidates them because they see a lot of people believe this.” Or they might say, “Protest changes the public’s mind because the public sees these signs, entertains the ideas, and then changes their mind.”
These are wonderful theories. The unfortunate reality is that there is not good evidence for either of them.
There’s a lot of evidence that protest movements do not change the public’s mind, especially in the long term, and they don’t change the government’s mind, maybe even more so.
The closest thing we have to an example of a protest movement that changed people’s minds for a bit is Black Lives Matter, but that really lasted about four or five years. We’re now back to the same baseline beliefs we had before that movement.
That’s very common for protest movements. They might briefly shift people’s views a little bit, and then people go back to their baseline.
[00:16:22] Sarah: Similarly, governments are not particularly inspired to respond to protests, especially now, because protest movements are often basically upswells of excitement on social media that recede within a week or two.
Governments are doing the policies they’re doing for the reasons they’re doing them, often in the interests of the top ten percent of earners, who are their donors. Unless there’s something really important in the way that forces them not to do what is otherwise strategically best for them, why would they care what a bunch of people in the street are saying? Especially if those people wouldn’t vote for them anyway.
George W. Bush said about the Iraq War protests that listening to them would be like deciding foreign policy based on a focus group. And this was a focus group of people he already didn’t like, who would never vote for him anyway.
So that suggests that protest, just like debate, doesn’t change minds—for most groups of people.
But there is one group of people who do change their minds, and that’s the protesters.
[00:17:14] Matthew: Right.
[00:17:14] Sarah: People who join protest movements, in the long run, are changed in a lot of ways. They’re changed quite profoundly.
When I list this series of effects, people often groan in the audience. People who join protest movements, compared to other people who had the same set of beliefs beforehand but don’t join those movements, and who are in similar demographic situations, become more likely to get divorced, less likely to be parents, more likely to go back to graduate school—which is a terrible idea. They become more likely to work in low-paid jobs in the public interest.
They really shift a lot as human beings, and they also hold onto different political beliefs than people who didn’t join that social movement.
[00:17:52] Matthew: Right.
[00:17:53] Sarah: They are changed for good, which is actually kind of beautiful, if you think about it.
But that also points to the fact that if our theory of change is that people make a lot of noise in the street, that is probably a poor theory of change.
If we think, however, that protests are a way to recruit people into long-form relationships with the social movement for the rest of their lives—and that those people then go and create new experiences in the community, and build relationships that people didn’t have before—that might be a workable theory of change.
[00:18:23] Matthew: I just interviewed, the other day, a woman named Sarah Rasik, who is one of the primary spokespeople for the Occupy for Palestine encampment at the University of Toronto. She’s a graduate student in social justice ethics.
She described exactly this. Even though the encampment was eventually dismantled—and they did that in advance of the court injunction and in advance of any police intervention—the actual interpersonal experience was transformative for everybody involved.
They were doing potluck dinners every night.
The aunties were showing up with minivans full of food.
They were doing seder and Passover meals; they were doing all kinds of prayer rituals and teach-ins and things like that.
The actual outcome of the stated strategy for the encampment didn’t turn out the way they would have wanted it to, and of course the disaster is ongoing.
At the same time, I was hearing a very clear account of a movement becoming long term and intergenerational.
[00:19:45] Sarah: Yeah. The point is: the protesters get changed for life.
But I think the important thing is that you have a strategy that includes that as part of your analysis.
A lot of movements fail precisely because they don’t do this. The best strategy, I would argue, for a group like this is to say: do we have everyone’s email who was in the encampment? What are we asking them to do now?
Also, what do they need? A lot of the point of social movements is that they hold the activist tightly enough that they’re okay.
[00:20:14] Matthew: Right.
[00:20:15] Sarah: That’s especially hard now, because we’re living under increasingly authoritarian governments that are especially hostile to Palestine supporters.
So the question is: how much is that figured into what you’re going to do? But yes, people are changed for life, and that’s beautiful.
The truth is, I don’t know about you, but I have an optimism of the will. I honestly wake up most days pretty happy—unless one of my lovers is mad at me or something. I’m pretty happy in my life.
But I’m not an optimist about what I will see before I die. I don’t think we’re going to have a “nice” century. We’re going to have a really tough century in terms of progress against fascism, climate problems, and other stuff.
Yet I’m an optimist about what those of us involved in the struggle can do for each other. I think we can have really good lives, because we can make the definition of a good life about taking care of each other and understanding the world better together, and knowing that another world is possible.
This is what we have. We don’t have the assurance of winning. In fact, I think for now we have the assurance of losing for a long time.
[00:21:34] Matthew: Right.
[00:21:35] Sarah: But we have the assurance of building a different world between ourselves. We can do that any day. They cannot stop us. They really cannot.
And I’m up for that.
[00:21:43] Matthew: That was maybe the answer to my last question. Maybe you want to add something to this, because what I’ve got down here is: what would you tell the 15-year-old about how to enter the practice of “don’t talk about politics”?
[00:21:59] Sarah: One of the things I say in the book is that the person who does politics well is, in many ways, not that far away from the person who is a good friend. This is a very old idea, held by very unfashionable people like Aristotle.
I’m not coining this idea from scratch, and all good ideas are recycled anyway, in my opinion. Aristotle thought we should own slaves, so we should not worship him, but the point is that some of the virtues involved in politics are the same as the virtues involved in friendship.
If you want to use a virtue framework, you can, but you can use any framework you like to get to the same point.
A good friend is not a good friend because they are really sharp with their arguments.
[00:22:32] Matthew: Right.
[00:22:33] Sarah: Maybe that’s fun to have in a friend, but we don’t need it. They’re a good friend because they listen to us, because they are involved in a non-transactional relationship with us that can stand the test of time, because they’re there when things get hard, because they’re there when things are easy, because they’re full of joy in a certain sense—or if they’re not, then they can live through the sadness with us.
It’s a beautiful, profound question of the good life, which might sound out of place when we “should” be talking about, I don’t know, the superstructure or something, but actually I think that’s the level at which you get through struggle for the rest of your life: at the level of friendship.
The good news—and I feel like I’m a Christian missionary here—is that people who are involved in long-term struggle like that are happier than people who have the same beliefs but are not as involved. People who have good friendships are happier than people who don’t. We basically have to commit to both those things, and then lots of other things seem not to matter very much at all.
If you have good relationships with people, the amount of money you make is not that important. Am I sad for the people who join a protest movement and earn less money? No. They’re doing great. They are genuinely happier and better off according to every metric they give us and anything we can measure from the outside. It is a good trade. It is good hard, and I’m really interested in that good hard.
So what I would tell the 15-year-old is: go and learn how to be a really good friend. Then go and find a part of the world that is broken that you want to fix, and know that you’re going to spend the rest of your life doing that, and that is a great use of your human life.
Do it joyfully. Not every moment of it is going to be joyful. If you’re dealing with something like Palestine, it’s not a joyful thing in many aspects; it couldn’t be.
But something I’ve really come to in the last few years, based both on this research and on being a human being in this world, is that if you cannot make it joyful and sometimes even fun, you are going to burn out.
So I think the joy is really important. I used to think this was a frivolous, stupid idea that only hippies in paisley pants believed. But I actually think it’s true for all of us. We are going to have to make it fun so we can keep doing it.
That’s what I’d say to the 15-year-old: go have fun, go learn to be a good friend, find something that’s broken that gets you up every single morning because you care about it that much. You will, in a certain sense, never work a day in your life—but in a very different way than the capitalist motto means.
[00:24:51] Matthew: Sarah, thank you so much for your time. It’s a great book.
I hope that a lot of people get to know it. And thank you so much for your work.
[00:25:00] Sarah: Thank you so much for having me on. It was a pleasure.
[00:25:06] Matthew: I want to close with just a little anecdote about meeting my episode nine guest, Sarah Rose Kaplan, in person the day before that episode came out.
Most of my writing life is in solitude, and a lot of the closest professional connections I have are online. Often there are thousands of physical miles between us.
I’ve worked with my colleague Derek Beres on Conspirituality Podcast for going on six years now. I’ve never met him in person, which seems very strange and a little bit haunting, because our relationship is close enough that every once in a while I’ll get this premonition that he’s vulnerable or something. He’s riding his bike and maybe he’s got a flat tire, maybe he crashed. He’s a cancer survivor; maybe his cancer comes back.
This is never true. I don’t have any sort of clairvoyance, and I don’t believe in that. I think what my brain is doing is trying to make contact with someone that I should be in contact with in a different way.
Maybe I’m trying to envision the circumstances in which I would have to make the decision that I’m going to fly to Portland tomorrow to visit and hug my friend Derek. If you’re listening to this, Derek, this is not a death wish on you, I promise.
I just think it’s an unconscious way of asking: why can’t I reach out and touch this guy on the shoulder? I’m so close to him, and yet there’s so much distance.
This is a long way of saying it’s rare that I get to meet my online people.
So I get to meet Sarah, and it was great to hang out and have some Ethiopian food and to realize that, yes, I do feel relaxed around this person. It wasn’t an illusion. They are who I expected them to be. We had a nice time.
But here’s the story.
We’re the only folks in the restaurant, one table in use.
Sarah has just been telling me about how improv music and comedy has always been a kind of lifeline for her sense of social trust. It has always helped her overcome hesitation and reticence. One of her favorite things is to improvise Broadway-style musicals in a troupe she performs with.
Someone in the crowd calls out a random topic for a musical and then the piano player starts. As soon as the piano is four bars in, Sarah knows she just has to jump in and sing.
She finishes the story and we’re about to pay. Then three kids walk into the restaurant and we hear them tell the host that they’re hungry and ask for bread.
The host looks them over and nods and goes back to the kitchen. We think she’s going to bring some bread.
Sarah asks them if they’re okay and they repeat that they’re hungry and not close to home. I ask, “Do you live in Toronto, guys?” and they kind of hem and haw and aren’t clear.
So Sarah says, “If you wait for a few minutes, I can take you to get burgers or something.”
[00:28:15] Matthew: They had been outside and were shivering from the cold. They weren’t fully winter-dressed, but the clothes they did have were okay, and they didn’t look uncared for.
I wondered if they were staying at a shelter nearby and had access to clothes and showers.
At first I thought they were white kids, but possibly they were First Nations kids as well. Maybe they had come from up north, but I didn’t ask any other questions.
[00:28:47] Matthew: Then the host comes back with a full plate of Ethiopian food on that flat, spongy bread, injera.
The kids had been gearing up for Sarah’s burgers or whatever they were going to go find. I don’t think they’d ever seen Ethiopian food before, and it looked like they were going to turn their noses up at it, especially the salad part.
At this point I had to get going, so I was putting on my coat and starting to say goodbye.
When I went to give Sarah a hug, I said, “This is kind of like your improv life, this spontaneous intervention. You don’t know what’s going to come of it.” And she said, “Yeah, that’s for sure.”
As I left, I heard Sarah encouraging the kids to try the food so as not to be rude to the women who had offered it to them.
The next day I followed up with Sarah online. She said they did eat enough to thank the women, and then they were really happy to go out and get some burgers afterwards on Sarah’s dime.
So it all worked out.
She wrote in the DM: “They were very nice, these kids, and they seemed to take it to heart when I told them the best way they could make it up to me was to buy food for some other hungry kids once they were adults with a bit of expendable money.”
[00:30:13] Matthew: As I thought more about this, it got deeper, because Sarah is here in Toronto in part because the U.S. is increasingly unsafe for her as a trans person.
And there she is, improvising with hungry kids and actually taking a chance that there are no bigots around to accuse her of something weird.
[00:30:42] Matthew: I saw the moment when she started. It was like hearing the four bars of music, I think, because she didn’t hesitate, even though there were a lot of questions you could have asked about these kids.
I had to get home to my own kids, but she had the time, and the improv god gave her a scene, and she jumped into it.
Three kids with stories we do not know, who were lonely in the cold, got some sense of warmth from these adults who themselves were so far from home.
That made me think of the other Sarah’s dictum—the Sarah from this episode—how Lubrano says that it is the experience of new social moments that can change people’s lives.
And I just got to watch that happen, maybe.
Thanks for listening, everybody. Take care of each other.
