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Everyone’S Had Their Own Go At How Labour And The Greens

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Everyone’s had their own go at how Labour and the Greens can take back power, even with most of the economic, social, and political indicators going the governments’ way.

There’s no education in the second kick of a bull. Or indeed the fourth kick, which by about 50-50 is where we are headed in 2017. Losing four terms in a row would suck. it would alter the landscape, in ways that the left would find hard to recover from for many, many years. And winning will not be determined on whether we are “more left” or “more centre”.

For four straight election cycles, Labour has ignored research from the fields of cognitive linguistics and psychology that the most effective way to communicate with other humans is by telling emotional stories. …show more content…

Quantitative political science is an oxymoron. Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton, and John Key beat Helen Clark, because they told their story better.

Obama recognised the problem. On the day after Donald Trump’s stunning, stinging victory over Hillary Clinton, President Obama surveyed the smouldering wreckage of the campaign in an interview with Rolling Stone. Obama recognised the problem when he highlighted the need for Democrats to “rethink our storytelling… [and] make it more entertaining and more persuasive.”

He’s right. We don’t have to worry about whether one kind of politics has more facts in it than the other. We are in the world of where politics always should be: the stuff that dreams are made of.

Storytelling has been the most effective form of communication throughout the entirety of human history. And that is unlikely to change, given that the experts in neurophysiology affirm that the neural pathway for stories is central to the way the human brain functions. The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor, as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written.

“Make America Great Again”. Say that out loud, and try not to think of an elephant. Greatness revolves as its own sun. The political brain is an emotional brain. It wants to see how you feel, and how your feelings relate to our own feelings. You do that by telling a story. These things called stories are a kind of rhetoric designed to make you feel, by taking your mind from one

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