Active Learning Feedback Loop, or, Democracy Isn’t a Spectator Sport

A discussion with Robbie Harris, a strategic communications and behavior change subject matter expert who has worked in Iraq, Syria, Africa, and Central America.

For more than a quarter of a century, Robbie Harris, my guest on today’s PREVAIL podcast, has worked with local influencers, activists, civil society organizations, journalists, and senior stakeholders in Iraq, Syria, Africa, and Central America as a strategic communications and behavior change subject matter expert. She has designed and implemented successful programs for US DoD, DoS and USAID, and UK FCDO and MoD. She’s the co-founder of a small international business; has worked for USAID-OTI; speaks Arabic, Spanish, and English, and has a M.A. in Arab Studies from Georgetown University.

I caught up with her in between trips abroad. Here are three takeaways from our discussion:

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The most effective strategic communication emphasizes the positive.

When trying to change minds, Harris tells me, the most successful programs she helped implement were ones that emphasized the positive. The idea, she says, is to “remind people who they are” and “about the things that they love.” She continues:

What I find interesting is usually when people want to counter something, you know, they don’t really mean counter. They want to undermine the influence of someone else. They want to disrupt it. They want to interdict it. Right? And so somehow, as humans, the thing we think is, ‘Oh, we just need to tell them they’re wrong. We just need to tell them how bad this other side is.’ Well, I’m sorry, but if you’ve been living under ISIS occupation, you know how bad they are. You know how traumatizing it is. I don’t need anybody to remind me. And in fact, if I see it, I’m going to turn it off because it’s so traumatizing. Right?

And it disempowers people. It just makes people feel like, ‘Oh my God, they’re so cruel. I can’t do anything.’ But when you provide an alternative, a way for people to feel empowered in this situation, a way for people to take back just a little bit of their own personal agency, whether they’re living under occupation or even outside and near it, so they don’t feel as scared. Scared people can’t organize themselves to do anything. They’re just trying to survive.

And so when you give people something that they want to fight for rather than against—and I say give it to them; we didn’t give them anything, just reminded them: this is who you are, these are the things [you value], these are your people, come together.

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Strategic communications work in other countries, and they can work in the U.S., too.

The thing about ISIS, in the early days, was that it was much, much smaller and less popular than it seemed. “I mean, literally they rolled across the desert with a couple of—mean, it was a little bit more than this, but a couple of trucks, a few RPGs, and scared a bunch of security forces who often left,” Harris says, but “they were perceived to be much bigger because of all of the social media and media around them, including what CNN, Al Jazeera, and BBC put out—credible news sources telling real information, but only telling what side of it. So people said, ‘We’re scared.’”

This is, alas, similar to what we’re seeing now in the United States. The country is deeply divided, mostly because rightwing extremists—you know, fascists—have taken over the Republican Party. Most voters have no idea that this has happened, because, as with the rise of ISIS, the media makes MAGA seem bigger than it really is. The truth is that Trump’s policies, such as they are, are unpopular; most Americans don’t want a ban on all abortions, no restrictions on gun laws, or civil rights drastically curtailed.

How do we meet in the middle? How do we even find the middle? I asked Harris what she would advise, if she was tasked with doing strategic communications here. She says:

I come from a very conservative community, and anytime I try to make a point using facts or Bible verses, which I do sometimes—my Bible’s pretty good—I just, if I give five facts or five verses, I get 10 facts and 10 verses thrown back at me, and people really dig in their heels. So I would say that the logic approach is not going to work, because people are not operating from a sense of logic. They’re operating more from emotions.

I think there needs to be a combination. I think we need to start getting people together from both sides, Republicans and Democrats or independents, Republicans, Democrats. And people need to start—I don’t know how this happens, right?—but people need to start doing things together, having a beer together. A lot of conservatives don’t drink, so fine, that’s not it, but something, doing something together…And we need to turn these into social media pieces, and we need to start talking about it. We need to start talking about what it means to be America, what it means to be American, right? And what are the values that we hold dear?

….I think that we are prone to hyperbole in this country. And I think that we are really stuck in our echo chambers on our social media spaces. And I think anything that can remind us of who we are at our core, what it means to actually be American—and yes, there are differences on that for the right and the left, but there is a core that remains the same—and that is, we value the right to share our opinion. We value the right to live our lives how we want to live them, right? And you could go on, and you can extract from this.

People are talking about democratic norms, but what does that mean? Nobody knows, because for most of us, democracy has been a spectator sport. We expect it’s just going to keep ticking over and keep rolling over because it always has, or we don’t care if it does, because we don’t know what it means if it doesn’t. And so I think, you know, part of it is reminding people: get involved, get involved in the process, participate. Go work at the polls….Go volunteer. See what’s going on. Reminding people that it’s not just me who has a right to live how I wanna live; it’s the other person [too]. Reminding people, all of us, of who we are and the things we like about being American.

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Civil war would be bad. Like, really really really bad. In ways most people cannot fathom—ways that would impact the way we live our lives in big ways and small.

Harris is concerned about polling that indicates that a significant percentage of Americans, especially young Americans, are okay with violence as a means to an end. What if the aftermath of the election leads to violence? What if there is, in time, internecine fighting and civil war? She says:

If there is this violent response, tension to what happens after the elections, you know, kiss March Madness and the Super Bowl goodbye. Those things don’t happen in the middle of a civil war. Your Starbucks is gone and your Walmart is gone and your gas under $5 a gallon is gone. People are glibly throwing these things around, and I hear it from both sides, right? ‘Well, maybe we should.’ And I’m like, ‘You don’t know what that means, and you don’t really mean it.’ We need to introduce ourselves to one another. We need to talk to one another. We need to spend time with one another, even just a little bit. And we need to talk about it more broadly, and we need to focus on the good things that are happening because everybody’s looking at the negative.

I asked her, “What’s something that people don’t think about when they take for granted in our democracy that would fall and make everybody really mad?” Speaking quickly, without pausing or stumbling at all over her words, Harris explains how the fall of democracy would

affect your daily life, your ability to get, walk outside of your house, get in your car, drive down the street and pick up your McDonald’s, your Chick-fil-A, your Starbucks, whatever it is you want in the morning with nobody harassing you, not having to go through armed checkpoints, not having to pay off someone at a checkpoint, not wondering if they’re going to shoot your daughter, your son, and knowing that you will get there and be able to purchase what you want and come home safely. Having football games with the local teams that your kids play with, having baseball games, your kids being able to go to college, go on trips to go look at colleges, your kids even being able to go to school, your daughter being able to walk down the street in the midst of not having a safe society and a stable society: those things aren’t happening.

I’ve lived in places where they don’t….I’ve been stopped at checkpoints and had guns pointed at me. People ask me who I am and where I’m going. And…it’s a 16-year-old kid with his finger on the trigger. Not—I mean, say “boo,” and he might shoot you, because he’s not trained, right? So do you really want militias running your intersections? I don’t think so.

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LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

In the interview with Greg Olear, Robbie Harris discusses her background and how she got into her line of work, which involves strategic communications and behavior change. She shares her experiences working in Iraq and countering ISIS propaganda. The conversation also touches on the legacy of colonialism in the Middle East and its impact on the region today, the situation in Kurdistan, the proxy war in Syria, the refugee camp in Northern Syria, the growing stateless population, and the experience of living in Somalia and Niger. Finally, she shares her advice on messaging to US voters and warns about the potential consequences of a collapse of democracy and of civil war.

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Photo credit: Tim Tregenza.