American Consequences - August 2017

He says, “I’m not a professor. I’m still kind of liberal, but I’m not who I thought I was because conservatives are not who I thought they were.” And we always lose because we connect with the head and never the heart. And we’re always confused because we feel liberals connect with the heart and never the head. What we have to do is understand that there is an emotional language. In fact, there’s two different languages. One he outlines in his book, The Righteous Mind , and there’s another one from a business book that I read called Tribal Leadership . And we are broken up into tribes and there are different stages of those tribes of where they are emotionally and so what they can hear and what they can’t hear. Last week, I had dinner with all these guys from either Hollywood or Silicon Valley... some of the biggest names in the entertainment and information world. My only request was, you can come, I don’t care what you believe, but you can’t be “wearing a jersey.” You can’t say, “the Democrats are always right,” or, “the Republicans are always right.” So it was me and about 30 liberals and very deeply progressive liberals. And we started talking... I started by first talking about the mistakes that I have made and the viewpoints that I have come to over the years. And I started talking about the events of the day using their language... When you can speak their language, the language of the heart, and be good at telling a story, you can at least break through enough

Q: You recently talked about Allen, “the forgotten man” from Maryland who called in to a radio show recently and made a plea for help... He said: “Hey, I’m unemployed and my girlfriend can’t get me a job... I have all these troubles that some people have.” And I saw how you responded with a lot of sympathy and empathy. You wanted to talk to him and you wanted to use him as example about howAmerica has left some people behind. It’s a complex and powerful issue, and you talked about it very sincerely. Glenn Beck: I think honestly this area is where conservatives go wrong every single time. I don’t know if you’ve read the book by Jonathan Haidt called The Righteous Mind . But everyone should read it. Before he wrote the book, he was a self-described NYU liberal professor from New York. You can’t get any more progressive than that. He started to write a book about why the Democrats are losing to people like Donald Trump and what language they need to understand. And he really didn’t understand it... So he went out and he did a research project, and he ended up finding a couple of people that changed his life. I found out much later that I was one of them. He studied all of the talk radio shows, but mine in particular, and he heard me talk about things differently. To cut to the chase here, he now has an American flag sticker on his car. He does say that he also has a UN sticker, just to be fair.

American Consequences | 93

Made with FlippingBook Online document