An insider account of activists, politicians, educators, and everyday citizens working to change minds, bridge divisions, and save democracy. As the book's subjects grapple with how to call out threats and injustices while calling in those who don't agree with them but just might one day, they point a way to healing, and changing, a fracturing country.
This isn’t a book-length argument for centrism, insisting that political persuasion is all about watering down one’s positions and meeting others halfway ... Emotions turn out to be a core part of this book. People don’t like to feel dismissed or condescended to — and nobody likes to feel stupid. You cannot persuade anyone by browbeating that person into submission ... He’s mostly writing as a champion — not necessarily a bad mode, though much of the book consists of Giridharadas handing over the mike, allowing his subjects to describe their own philosophies of persuasion. I usually want more friction in a book, but given his subject — how to save our imperiled democracy — perhaps reality has supplied more than enough of it. While the world seems to counsel despair, The Persuaders is animated by a sense of possibility.
Unlike the pungent writing of [Giridharadas'] last book, Winners Take All,...The Persuaders exhibits a more searching, even sentimental, tone ... Lament alternates with hope stemming from figures who find the words and the moments to overcome this fatalism. Indeed, Giridharadas is so taken with his subjects that he is content to let them speak at length; a substantial proportion of the text is quoted material from his interviews. Perhaps as a result, much of the division he sees in our country seems to exist on the terrain of language ... The Persuaders grapples with...paradox.
A thinky book on a subject many of us may feel we’ve heard too much about already ... As it turns out, The Persuaders is, well, persuasive, with a mission to find solutions for all this by identifying strategists, activists and thought leaders who have broken through entrenched political indifference or partisanship to build bridges or win over new fan ... The book grapples with the dangers of political purity and how to persuade people from the centre right and flabby middle to the left without diluting the cause. Despite the occasional cuts-job vibe of books by busy media operators, I found it a useful, thoughtful and interesting read ... Which is not to say it didn’t annoy me. That’s the point, I suppose. The clever thing about Giridharadas’s approach is that while dissecting the prejudices of others, he flushes out your own kneejerk reactions ... The effect of this, deliberately or otherwise, is to underscore the need for everyone to consider the alternative view ... The most skippable stretch of the book is a long, Wikipediaesque biography of Ocasio-Cortez, all well-rehearsed information by this point. And there are occasional, inadvertently funny passages ... This enjoyable, helpful read may, paradoxically, suspend our solipsism for long enough to better prosecute that recruitment.
