Book review: Anat Shenker-Osorio's 'Don't Buy It'

Don't Buy It: The Trouble with Talking Nonsense about the Economy
By Anat Shenker-Osorio
Hardcover, 256 pages
Public Affairs
September 25, 2012
$24.99

Appealing to where (we think) people are has become the norm among progressives, especially as we've become ever-more wedded to the proclamations of pollsters. This is what gives rise and lends credence to unhelpful slogans like 'Work hard and play by the rules.' Since people are afraid of terrorists, let's call our climate change efforts an antiterrorism program. Since people don't want to shell out for art programs in schools, let's tout how knowing music correlates to good math performance.

Unfortunately, as we've seen time and again, evoking our opponents' worldview in service of our policies only serves to push people further away from our beliefs. And, in turn, makes our policies seem less and less logical.

Strategic communications consultant Anat Shenker-Osorio has a message for progressives, simple but apparently almost impossible to execute, given the movement's history: Get personal. Get real. And for heaven's sake, quit fighting your opponent on your opponent's terms.

Seems like common sense, but as Shenker-Osorio discusses in her new book, Don't Buy It, she sees progressives make these same mistakes over and over and over again. In particular, the progressive messaging on the economy'especially the metaphors we adopt in discussing it'have contributed to a massive communication failure.

In a nutshell, when we insist on talking about the financial meltdown and its effects in terms of an unstoppable force of nature'like I just did with meltdown, in fact, or as many, many other well-intentioned liberals discuss it in terms of a crash, an earthquake, a "flood of bad mortgages," "the perfect storm" of circumstances'all these terms cry out that we must hunker down and pray instead of actively work for change.

Body metaphors are little better'an "unhealthy economy," a "sluggish recovery"'these too imply outside agency swooping in and destroying us, usually from within, like germs or cancer. But these scenarios are flatly wrong.

The economic crisis was neither an act of God nor a natural disaster, not an attack by microbes or internal organ breakdown. It was the result of choices'bad ones'made by specific human beings who benefitted from human-created policies at the expense of a majority of the population. And if our language does not reflect that this crisis is human-made, it follows that it cannot be human unmade either, which plays into the shrugging, no-fault stance of conservatives:

It's a wild and crazy free market. Whatcha gonna do? It's untameable, man. It's gotta do what it's gotta do. It's cyclical, like the seasons. Has ebbs and flows, like the tides. Has peaks and valleys, ups and downs.

No. Just ' no.

(Continue reading below the fold.)