Talking with progressives

Everything here is a version of one idea. You will not move somebody by attacking the framework they think in. You move them by showing that their own framework, applied consistently, already contains the answer. Arguing against progressive values loses a progressive audience in one sentence. Arguing from them is the only thing that has ever worked.

You can decline any conversation on this page, and nothing here is an instruction to take one on. It carries no facts about the conflict either. Those live in the claim entries, and this teaches what you do with them.

Why this audience is worth the effort

They are not the enemy. Most people in this tradition hold their positions out of genuine concern about power and about suffering, the same instinct that ought to make them care about this, and in many cases already has.

There is a practical reason too. This is the audience most likely to change something, because they organise and argue in public, and somebody who reaches your position through their own values holds it firmly.

What conceding buys you here, and what it costs elsewhere

This is a tactic, not an entry price, and it is aimed at this audience in particular. With progressives, granting something true in your first minute is usually what buys you the hearing. In a conservative room the same move can read as disloyalty and cost you the floor. In front of an audience that has never followed any of this, it is invisible and your hedge is not.

So it is a judgement about the room, made afresh each time, and the test is whether the concession sharpens what you say next. If it only adds a footnote, leave it.

Two of these cost you nothing whoever you vote for. Palestinian suffering is real, and saying so out loud concedes not one contested claim. The accusation of antisemitism has sometimes been misused, against people who could not answer it. The entry on silencing criticism sets out what that does and does not settle.

The third is a political view rather than a fact. That Israeli governments have done criticisable things is not seriously disputed, but whether you say so, and which things you name, is yours. Plenty of readers here would and plenty would not, and a handbook does not get to allocate that.

“Two things before I start. Palestinian suffering is real, and I’m not going to spend the evening pretending otherwise. Ask me about any decision that government has taken and you’ll get my straight answer on it.”

And if you do hold criticisms and want to lead with them:

“I’d have voted against that government, and I still want the country to exist. Those are two different sentences.”

Where this backfires, and the warning comes before the move. A concession made under pressure returns as a quotation with the second half removed. Concede only what you would still say with nobody listening, and never a position you do not hold. Borrowed opinions are audible.

Baddiel, and how to use him

David Baddiel’s “Jews Don’t Count” is aimed precisely at this audience, and he says so. He told Channel 4 that he wanted the television version on the most radical broadcaster available, because “my polemic is directed towards those people”.

Understand the argument, because it is narrower than it gets reported. Not a general claim that antisemitism outranks other racisms. An observation about people who check themselves constantly, who would never let a slur about another group pass, and who have a specific unexamined blind spot for this one.

His image is a sacred circle, “drawn around those whom the progressive modern left are prepared to go to battle for”. Jews, he argues, are not inside it. His summary of the result: “Anti-Semitism is a second-class racism.”

Copy two things he is careful about. He refuses to trade one minority against another: “I am not in any way trying to throw any other minority and their struggle under the bus by highlighting this.” And he keeps the subject on the model rather than the people using it: “I am not really interested in understanding Jews. I am interested in the ways that our present way of seeing racism fails Jews.”

That is why it works. An internal critique, made by somebody who accepts the tradition’s premises and points at one place where it fails on its own terms. Delivered from outside it becomes an ordinary accusation and loses what made it land.

“There’s a book I’d rather you read than argue with me about. It’s by someone on your side of this, and it’s about a hundred pages.”

“His point isn’t that Jews have it worst. It’s that people who check themselves about everything don’t check themselves about this.”

Before you reach for it: this collapses if you have not read him. Cite a book you know only from summaries, and the first well briefed person you meet takes it apart, and everything else you said.

Why the model cannot see it

Explain this rather than complaining about it. It is a description of how a model fails, not a charge against anybody using it.

A framework that identifies oppression by looking for a group coded as low status is looking for the wrong shape. Antisemitism does not code its target as lesser. It codes them as powerful, organised and concealed, which the entry on Jewish control sets out.

Two consequences follow, and they are the whole difficulty. Jewish success reads as disproof, because the framework expects the oppressed to be visibly disadvantaged. The conspiracy theory feeds on the same fact from the other direction. One set of numbers serves at once as evidence that there is no problem and as evidence for it.

Baddiel borrows a phrase for what that produces, and credits it to somebody else. The law of “Schrödinger’s Whites”: Jews are white or non-white depending on the politics of whoever is looking.

“I don’t think you’re doing this deliberately. I think the model you’re using is built to spot something with a different shape, and this one goes straight past it.”

The values to argue from

Five of them, and the first is stronger than the rest.

Self-determination for peoples. The strongest ground available, and it belongs to them rather than to you. The United Nations Charter names “equal rights and self-determination of peoples” among the founding purposes of the organisation. Your argument is about consistency, and the entry on anti-Zionism carries the substance of it.

“You support self-determination for peoples. I want to know why this one people is the exception, and what the rule is that produces that.”

The rights of a persecuted minority. Ask, as a general question first, what a small minority is owed when the majority around it turns.

Refugees. Concern for displaced people is a real commitment here, not a pose. There is a population of Jewish refugees from Arab and Muslim countries that rarely appears in the conversation at all. The entry on paying for Europe’s crime is where that argument lives.

“Where do the Jews expelled from Baghdad and Tripoli fit into your account? I’m asking because they’re usually missing from it.”

Anti-racism applied consistently. Not a new principle. Theirs, run over one more case, which is what the entry on excluding Zionists does at length.

“Use the test you’d use anywhere else. If a rule removes most of one minority from a space, you’d call that a rule about that minority.”

Scepticism about conspiracy theories. This audience already has it, and applies it faster than most people do. Hidden financiers, coordinated media, a small group behind the visible events.

“You’re the first to spot it when somebody says a secret group of financiers runs the media. This is that, with one word swapped out.”

The moves that lose the room instantly

Calling somebody a racist as your opening. Whatever comes next, you ended the conversation, and everybody present saw who ended it.

Defending something indefensible in order to defend the whole. One unwinnable thing, held onto, costs you the twenty things you were right about.

Dismissing Palestinian suffering, or handling it as a debating problem. The room can hear the difference between an answer and a manoeuvre.

Treating the entire tradition as antisemitic. It is a far larger claim than you can carry, and it tells everybody listening that they were never the audience.

And any line that means “your concern for other people is fake”. The softer versions count: the raised eyebrow, the remark about how selective they are. Somebody accused of insincerity stops listening and starts defending.

Weak: “Funny how you only ever care about this one country.”

Strong: “You apply that standard carefully everywhere else. I want to understand what makes this the exception.”

The rule underneath: contest the inconsistency, never the sincerity.

When there is no version that works

Sometimes the position in front of you entails something you cannot accept, and no framing repairs it. Notice that early rather than spending the evening hunting for the sentence that would have worked.

The tell is what happens when you ask about consequences. Somebody arguing about policy engages with what follows from their position. Somebody whose position requires that a state and its people cease to exist either says so or changes the subject every time you ask.

When that is where you are, the job changes. You are no longer persuading, you are declining to let a sentence pass in silence, and that takes one sentence.

“We’re not going to agree, and I’d rather not pretend we might. I wanted it said that I don’t accept that. Then we can talk about something else.”

Not every conversation is winnable, and plenty of people have left this work because they believed otherwise and then blamed themselves.

Forty minutes, and three sentences

Fill in the blanks167 words

Two questions from memory. Which of their values are you arguing from, and can you name it in the words they would use? And what are your two concessions, each with the sentence that turns it?

Then, forty minutes. Read one claim entry to the end, including the section arguing against you. Then write your two concessions in your own words, each with the sentence that turns it, and say all four out loud once.

Your plan. If somebody in this tradition raises it with me, then I will grant the suffering in my first minute with the sentence that turns it attached, and ask what rule produces the exception before I make any argument of my own.

Your coping plan. If I hear myself about to say that somebody is a racist, or that their concern for other people is fake, then I will stop the sentence where it is, and ask them instead what they would say to somebody making my argument in good faith.