By Dr. Rod Berger
I'm Dr. Rod Berger. On Help Me Understand, you bring the question to The People's Hotline, and I go find where we've seen it before. Some weeks I take the question to my friend Marshall Herskovitz.
Before the story, a question for you. Next week I'll share how HMU readers answered.
The week of the midterms, Marshall and I sat down to record, and neither of us had much left. Off air, he told me he'd felt like he was living in a state of emergency for two years. I told him it had been ten. Then the results came in, the euphoria came with them, and the next morning we were both wiped out.
An immune response
Marshall doesn't read the result as one party beating the other. He reads it as a body fighting off an infection.
“The body politic of America saw that there was a poison in our system. And it wasn't the Republican Party, it was Donald Trump and Trumpism and what it does to people.”
Marshall Herskovitz, on the midterm result
He went further than I expected. American democracy, he said, proved stronger than a lot of Democrats believed. The job now, he says, is a vision for the next 20 years that most of the country can look at and say, yes, that's where I want to go. Hearings and prosecutions alone won't win the next election.
Where I'm less sure
I live in Tennessee. Our margins shrank, and Memphis finally got some wins. But in my own county, the wealthiest in the state, about six in ten voters in the new Ninth District chose a candidate who admitted to sending unsolicited nude photos to a woman. You read about that here yesterday.
My worry is the retort. You can show up with the research and the data, and the easiest way out for anyone who doesn't want to hear it is to call you elitist. When trust in institutions is gone, people spend the least energy they can to discredit what you say.
Marshall's answer is to stop telling people how to talk and start telling them where the country could go.
“Persuasion is a word that's been almost forgotten in American politics for a very long time. And our system cannot survive without persuasion.”
Marshall Herskovitz
Their power
Then I pushed on the people at the top. They're human. Anyone who has been handed ninety out of a hundred gumballs is going to fight to keep them. Marshall agreed they'll fight tooth and nail, and they own most of the media we consume. Then he reminded me how many votes they have: about one-tenth of one percent.
“I don't believe we're coming to take their money. We're coming to take their power.”
Marshall Herskovitz
Before the election, angry and looking for words, he wrote a speech for a candidate he imagined, not one he knows. He reads it on the episode. It calls for overturning Citizens United and for a government effort, modeled on DARPA, to bring competition back to industries so consolidated they no longer compete. He boils it down to one line: “It's not confiscation, it's competition.”
The part that lands on me
I'm the one who brought up fantasy sports. People can tell you, down to the decimal point, what their running back means to their league, and then skip a midterm. I said it as if it were about other people.
I'm also a suburban dad who rearranges a week around his kids' games. When Marshall said we've built a culture around what I can get, it landed closer to home than I wanted.
When someone you disagree with brings you facts, how quickly do you reach for a reason not to hear them?
What would a vision have to include for you to say, yes, that's where I want to go?
Is there a company in your life you'd leave tomorrow if you had a real choice?
Which bothers you more, what the people at the top have, or what they can buy?
What are you willing to do between now and the next election, besides wait? Tell me in the comments.
A note on limits: Marshall's speech is his, written before the election for a candidate he imagined. It isn't a platform anyone has adopted.
Meet your host
I’ve written for Forbes and Entrepreneur, and I serve as Editor-at-Large at Fair Observer. For nearly two decades, I was a guest lecturer on Storytelling in Business at Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management. You’ll find more of my work at drrodberger.com.
Here, my job is narrower. The callers can take a side. I don't. I go looking for where we've seen this before, and I bring back the strongest case each side can make.
Help Me Understand, the podcast
Help Me Understand is my podcast on The Dangerous Ones Network. Each episode takes the stories from the news that make no sense to an ordinary person and asks the question we should be asking and aren't.
Latest episode: Not Their Money, Their Power. Marshall Herskovitz on the midterms as an immune response, persuasion, and the speech he wrote about taking the country back.
Recent episodes: Who Stayed Home, The Weeks In Between, The Three-Point Plan and Persuasion Over Division with Marshall Herskovitz, Calling the Bluff, and Lives of Quiet Struggle with Marshall Herskovitz.
The book
Most of us live inside stories we never chose. Someone handed them to us, and we kept telling them.
The Narrative Edge: Authentic Storytelling That Meets the Moment (Wiley) is my book about learning to see those stories: how a story gets built, whose interests it serves, and what it asks you to do. Help Me Understand brings the same habit to the news.
Watch or listen: Not Their Money, Their Power
Help Me Understand with Dr. Rod Berger, on The Dangerous Ones Network. Have something you're trying to understand? Call The People's Hotline and leave a message: 503-212-4600.
What bothers me the most is what they can buy because having the power to purchase power, elections, issues, etc is how we got into this mess in the first place! There used to be laws that prevented monopolies like buying all the media platforms, all the airlines, etc. this was to assure a competitive and fair market. One large factor that allows someone to take over power from the public they need to have only their messages seen and heard continuously. They need to control as much of our supposedly free market as possible. If they have the power to purchase the media, they have the power to deceive those that do not research, critically think, and problem solve. This past couple of years has opened my eyes to just how many people blindly accept what is laid in front of them.
Thankfully, many of those people stayed home on Election Day and those that refuse to accept anything but our democratic republic finally had enough. Those are the people that did come out and vote to not just revive our norm but we are insisting on revamping our system so that nothing like this can ever happen again.
What they can buy, but also what they buy instead of doing good with their money. If philanthropy were as good as we used to see from the wealthy, why are not more good structures being seen? It is fair taxes from them that is needed.