Politics Without Persuasion: When Winning Replaces Convincing

Persuasion used to be the business of politics. Today it’s consolidation. Campaigns are organized less to change minds than to excite those already on your side. Mobilization, not persuasion, is how we seek victory.

Campaign style infects political discourse. Messages are more incendiary, more snappy, more moralized. Better to prove someone else wrong than to persuade your opponent. In today’s political rhetoric, logos gives way to identity.

The effects are systemic. Where persuasion ends, compromise becomes impossible. If your opponents are immoral, rather than just incorrect, there’s nothing to negotiate with them. Elections end, but the permanent campaign escalates.

This isn’t just a problem of the media. It’s a product of political strategy. Trying to win over the undecided vote is hard, and its returns diminish in a polarized world. Activating base voters is easier, more measurable, and more fundable. Rational calculations lead to irrational results.

The casualty is our democratic infrastructure. A politics that doesn’t try to persuade cedes the existence of a common public. People stop seeing elections as conflicts within reality and start seeing them as battles between realities.

History warns that this stage won’t last. Democracies require the faith that any disagreement is temporary and can be resolved through negotiation. Strip away persuasion, and democracy defaults to zero-sum. That’s when trust in our institutions starts to decay.

Returning to persuasion doesn’t mean returning to staged civility or false moderation. It means creating spaces where arguments can be coherent, grounded in evidence, and aimed at those who won’t automatically agree with you.

Victory is important. But if we can’t remember how to persuade, we won’t remember why winning matters.