The clever thing about Giridharadas’s approach is that while dissecting the prejudices of others, he flushes out your own kneejerk reactions, a dynamic from which the author himself isn’t spared. Despite the occasional cuts-job vibe of books by busy media operators, I found it a useful, thoughtful and interesting read. The book grapples with the dangers of political purity and how to persuade people from the centre right and flabby middle to the left without diluting the cause.
If the understanding is that no one will cede an inch to the other side, Giridharadas seeks cheering counter-examples, from the coalition behind the 2017 Women’s March, to the explosion in mainstream support for Black Lives Matter, to the rise of figures such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – her modern campaigning style is studied usefully alongside the less flexible and successful style of Bernie Sanders. In overview, it looks like a book borne of Twitter discourse, and who needs that?Īs it turns out, The Persuaders is, well, persuasive, with a mission to find solutions for all this by identifying strategists, activists and thought leaders who have broken through entrenched political indifference or partisanship to build bridges or win over new fans. Giridharadas describes this state of affairs as “Americans’ growing culture of mutual dismissal”, leading to a mass “writing-off from a distance” and the inability of anyone to change their minds about anything. Anand Giridharadas, well known in the US as a journalist and TV political pundit, has written a thinky book on a subject many of us may feel we’ve heard too much about already – namely, the feedback loops, filter bubbles and interference of Russian bot farms that have led to extreme polarisation in the US and beyond.
I t is a mark of the problem that The Persuaders seeks to describe that I had to force myself to sit down and read it.
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