After urging land reform I now know the brute power of our billionaire press

A report I helped publish has led to attacks and flat-out falsehoods in the rightwing media. It’s clear whose interests they serve writes George Monbiot in The Guardian

  

‘As their crucial role in promoting Nigel Farage, Brexit and Boris Johnson suggests, the newspapers are as powerful as ever.’ Photograph: Christopher Pledger


All billionaires want the same thing – a world that works for them. For many, this means a world in which they are scarcely taxed and scarcely regulated; where labour is cheap and the planet can be used as a dustbin; where they can flit between tax havens and secrecy regimes, using the Earth’s surface as a speculative gaming board, extracting profits and dumping costs. The world that works for them works against us.

So how, in nominal democracies, do they get what they want? They fund political parties and lobby groups, set up fake grassroots (Astroturf) campaigns and finance social media ads. But above all, they buy newspapers and television stations. The widespread hope and expectation a few years ago was that, in the internet age, news controlled by billionaires would be replaced by news controlled by the people: social media would break their grip. But social media is instead dominated by stories the billionaire press generates. As their crucial role in promoting Nigel Farage, Brexit and Boris Johnson suggests, the newspapers are as powerful as ever.

They use this power not only to promote the billionaires’ favoured people and ideas, but also to shut down change before it happens. They deploy their attack dogs to take down anyone who challenges the programme. It is one thing to know this. It is another to experience it. A month ago I and six others published a report commissioned by the Labour party called Land for the Many. It proposed a set of policies that would be of immense benefit to the great majority of Britain’s people: ensuring that everyone has a good, affordable home; improving public amenities; shifting tax from ordinary people towards the immensely rich; protecting the living world; and enhancing public control over the decisions that affect our lives. We showed how the billionaires and other oligarchs could be put back in their boxes.

The result has been four extraordinary weeks of attacks in the Mail, Express, Sun, Times and Telegraph. Our contention that oligarchic power is rooted in the ownership and control of land has been amply vindicated by the response of oligarchic power.

Some of these reports peddle flat-out falsehoods. A week ago the Mail on Sunday claimed that our report recommends a capital gains tax on people’s main homes. This “spiteful raid that will horrify millions” ensures “we will soon be joining the likes of China, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam in becoming one of the world’s few Marxist-Leninist states”. This claim was picked up, and often embellished, by all the other rightwing papers. The policy proved, the Telegraph said, that “keeping a hard-left Labour party out of office is not an academic ideological ambition but a deadly serious matter for millions of voters”. Boris Johnson, Philip Hammond and several other senior Tories weighed in, attacking our “mad” proposal.

But we made no such recommendation. We considered the idea, listed its possible advantages and drawbacks, then specifically rejected it. As they say in these papers, you couldn’t make it up. But they have.

There were dozens of other falsehoods: apparently we have proposed a “garden tax”; we intend to add “an extra £374 a year on top of what the typical household pays in council tax” (no such figure is mentioned in our report); and inspectors will be sent to people’s homes to investigate their bedrooms.

Dozens of reports claim that our proposals are “plans” hatched by Jeremy Corbyn: “Jeremy Corbyn’s garden tax bombshell”; “Jeremy Corbyn is planning a huge tax raid”; “Corbyn’s war on homeowners”. Though Corbyn is aware of our report, he has played no role in it. What it contains are not his plans but our independent policy suggestions, none of which has yet been adopted by Labour. The press response gives me an inkling of what it must be like to walk in his shoes, as I see my name (and his) attached to lurid schemes I’ve never heard of, and associated with Robert Mugabe, Nicolás Maduro and the Soviet Union. Not one of the many journalists who wrote these articles has contacted any of the authors of the report. Yet they harvested lengthy quotes denouncing us from senior Conservatives.

The common factor in all these articles is their conflation of the interests of the ultra-rich with the interests of the middle classes. While our proposals take aim at the oligarchs, and would improve the prospects of the great majority, they are presented as an attack on ordinary people. Progressive taxation, the protection of public space and good homes for all should strike terror into your heart.

We’ve lodged a complaint to the press regulator, Ipso, about one of the worst examples, and we might make others. But to pursue them all would be a full-time job (we wrote the report unpaid, in our own time). The simple truth is that we are being outgunned by the brute power of billionaires. And the same can be said for democracy.

It is easy to see why political parties have become so cautious and why, as a result, the UK is stuck with outmoded institutions and policies, and succumbs to ever more extreme and regressive forms of taxation and control. Labour has so far held its nerve – and this makes its current leadership remarkable. It has not allowed itself to be bullied by the billionaire press.

The old threat has not abated – it has intensified. If a newspaper is owned by a billionaire, be suspicious of every word you read in it. Check its sources, question its claims. And withhold your support from any party that allows itself to be bullied or – worse – guided by their agenda. Stand in solidarity with those who resist it. 

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Putin’s wrong on liberalism, but so are liberals themselves

The two liberalisms - one offering genuine human freedom, the other entrapping humans in ruthless market mechanisms - are fundamentally in conflict writes Pankaj Misra in The Print


Russian President Vladimir Putin’s assertion last week that Western liberalism was obsolete provoked some strident rebuttals. A contemptuous silence might have been preferable, saving us the embarrassment of Boris Johnson invoking “our values,” or European Council President Donald Tusk claiming, against overwhelming evidence, that it was authoritarianism that was obsolete.

Even the Financial Times, to which Putin confided his views, was reduced to childishly asserting that “while America is no longer the shining city on the hill it once seemed, the world’s poor and oppressed still head overwhelmingly for the U.S. and western Europe” rather than Russia.

Such rhetoric from both sides felt like a rehash of the cold war, and with the same purpose: to conceal the failures and weaknesses of both systems.

One function of Russia’s communist tyranny in the past was to make its capitalist opponents look vastly better. Centrally planned command economies failed spectacularly, revealing that communists had no economic solution to the modern riddles of injustice and inequality, and were, furthermore, devastatingly blind to their own environmental depredations.

Wealth-creating capitalist economies, on the other hand, can hardly be said to have resolved those problems or made the world more inhabitable for future generations. Their advocates made extravagant promises of freedom, justice and prosperity after the collapse of communism, claiming that capitalism was the only viable model left standing at the End of History. Then their feckless experiments in free markets set the stage for the authoritarian movements and personalities that now dominate the news.

It should not be forgotten that the shock therapy of free markets administered to Russia during the 1990s caused widespread venality, chaos and mass suffering there, eventually boosting Putin to power. That’s why it won’t be enough to invoke, against Putin’s demagoguery, the most flattering definition of liberalism: as a guarantee of individual rights and civil liberties.

To be sure, the liberal tradition that affirms human freedom and dignity against the forces of autocracy, reactionary conservatism and social conformism is profoundly honorable, and ought to be always defended. But there is another liberalism that has been bound up since the 19th century with the fate of capitalist expansion, concerned with advancing the individual interests of the propertied and the shareholder. This is the liberalism, unconcerned with the common good, popularly denounced today as “neo-liberalism.”

In fact, the two liberalisms — one offering genuine human freedom, the other entrapping humans in impersonal and often ruthless market mechanisms — were always fundamentally in conflict. Still, they managed for a long time to coexist uneasily because the West’s expanding capitalist societies seemed capable of gradually extending social rights and economic benefits to all their citizens.

That unique capacity is today endangered by grotesque levels of oligarchic power and domestic inequality, as well as formidable challenges from economic powers such as China that the capitalist West had once dominated and exploited. In other words, modern history is no longer on the side of Western liberalism.

The devastating loss of its special status has exposed this central Western ideology to mockery from demagogues such as Putin and the Hungarian leader Viktor Orban. They’re joined by men of the hard right in the West who also zero in on liberals’ always vulnerable faith in cultural pluralism, denouncing immigrants and multiculturalism as well as sexual minorities.

In a much-circulated recent article, Sohrab Ahmari, the op-ed editor of the New York Post, complimented Donald Trump for shifting the national conversation from liberal notions of individual freedom to “order, continuity, and social cohesion.” But, as the intellectual historian Samuel Moyn put it last week, “the political system based on individual liberty and representative government doesn’t need to be celebrated or repudiated. It needs to be saved from itself” — from an obsession with “economic freedom that has undercut its own promise.”

Certainly, it won’t do to double down on shattered verities: to claim superior values, or to insist, as the Financial Times did, that “the superiority of private enterprise and free markets — at least within individual nations — in creating wealth is no longer seriously challenged.”

That seemingly last-minute qualifier, “at least within individual nations,” tries to conjure away the buffeting of national economies by opaque global forces. And it betrays the uncomfortable truth that, these days, even liberalism’s self-appointed defenders are not wholly convinced of their cause.

Perhaps, instead of mechanically asserting their superior status, they should examine their reflexively fanatical faith in market mechanisms. They should trace how the once-expansive liberal notion of individual freedom narrowed into a rigid principle of individual entrepreneurship and private wealth-creation. Indeed, such self-criticism has always defined the finest kind of liberalism. It is the best way today to renew an important tradition and convincingly defend it from its critics.

Currency warrior: why Trump is weaponising the dollar

Businesses in countries such as Russia are testing the power of the reserve currency but it could benefit from any global instability writes Sam Fleming in The FT


In an industry long dominated by the dollar, it was a move that carried obvious symbolic weight. 

Last summer Russian diamond miner Alrosa tested a new system for selling its rocks in roubles to clients in countries such as China and India, as an alternative to the US currency. 

Since then the company has conducted about 50 transactions under the mechanism, using a range of currencies, says Evgeny Agureev, Alrosa’s director of sales, who says avoiding dollar conversion allows transactions to be conducted more speedily. 

“The number and volume of these transactions is relatively small . . . but we think it is valuable for our clients to have a variety of options for settlement to choose from,” he says in an email, adding that the “world changes and we need to respond”. 

Though under consideration for several years, the initiative by the partly state-owned miner is a sign of a growing appetite to find ways of shaking off the stranglehold the US dollar has long held on global commerce and finance. Those efforts have taken on high urgency given Donald Trump’s increasingly aggressive use of US economic and financial weaponry to get his way in foreign affairs. 

The president has thus far engaged in minimal military conflict, but he has proved an unusually pugnacious currency warrior, as he pairs a tendency to talk down the dollar’s value in his quest for a smaller trade deficit with an unusual willingness to use the currency’s global heft as a tool of foreign policy. 

Critically, sanctions, which can block foreign officials or corporations from accessing vast swaths of dollar-dominated commerce and finance, are being deployed against Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela and a host of other countries, alongside tariffs and other restrictions on key companies such as telecoms manufacturer Huawei. As a result, economies including China and Russia are examining mechanisms to curtail their reliance on the dollar, while European capitals are seeking ways of circumventing America’s new barriers on dealings with Iran. 

To date the initiatives amount to less than a pinprick in the US currency’s hegemonic status, as underscored by the modest scale of Alrosa’s foreign exchange innovation. But Mr Trump’s unilateralist approach has unquestionably unleashed a phase of experimentation elsewhere, prompting some analysts to ask whether, in the longer term, the US dollar’s supreme position in the global financial system could be shaken as other nations revolt against what they see as Mr Trump’s arbitrary use of American power. 

Adam M Smith, a former Treasury and White House official who is now a partner at law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, says the manner in which Mr Trump is wielding America’s economic power is unprecedented, as he uses sanctions, tariffs, trade negotiations and export controls interchangeably. 

“He is using the importance and attractiveness of the US market to the rest of the world as a coercive tool to get others to bend to his will,” says Mr Smith. “Does the very aggressive use of these economic tools make it more urgent for countries to find ways to avoid the US market? Probably. However, the urgency may not mean that most countries will be successful in finding effective workarounds.” 

America has long enjoyed a singular economic arsenal thanks to the ubiquity of the dollar and the centrality of its economy and financial system to global commerce. Although America’s share of global gross domestic product may have declined, its currency still accounts for over 60 per cent of international debt, according to a speech by European Central Bank official Benoît Cœuré in February, and leads the euro both as a global payment currency and in foreign exchange turnover. It dominates pricing of commodities such as oil and metals and accounts for about 40 per cent of cross-border financial transactions. 

The dollar’s share of global foreign exchange reserves has slipped in the 10 years since the financial crisis, but at 62 per cent of the total it still dwarfs all rivals. The euro has lost greater ground over the same time, now standing at just over 20 per cent. The Chinese renminbi is just a few per cent of global reserves, and a mere 2 per cent of international payments, according to the global transfer network, Swift. 

This unique place at the heart of the global economic system gives the US government enormous power. Using the dollar almost invariably means touching a US financial institution, says Eswar Prasad, a professor of economics at Cornell University. This immediately puts you within the reach of US government and regulators. 

The US toolkit is particularly potent thanks to the use of “secondary” sanctions. Normal US sanctions aim to prevent American citizens from dealing with a given country or party, but secondary measures allow the government to penalise third parties that do business with a sanctioned country. 

The consequences for non-US institutions of failing to comply with US rules can be severe. In 2014, for example, BNP Paribas was hit by a penalty of nearly $9bn by the US authorities in connection with sanctions violations, as well as being forced to temporarily suspend part of its US dollar clearing work. 

While Washington’s use of sanctions has been on the rise for decades, Mr Trump has emerged as a particular enthusiast. Data compiled by Gibson Dunn show 1,474 entities were subject to sanctions designations in 2018 — 50 per cent higher than in any previous year for which it has kept records. 

The power of these tools has been felt across markets. The Treasury’s decision to sanction metal groups Rusal and parent company En+ led to a surge in aluminium prices, before it agreed to ease its stance if its major shareholder, Oleg Deripaska, gave up control. Sanctions were lifted in January. 

Last August Turkey was plunged into a currency crisis as the US imposed swingeing tariffs on its steel and aluminium exports, on top of sanctions on senior ministers. 

The US Congress has equally been aggressive in pushing sanctions. In April a cross-party group of senators led by Republican Marco Rubio and Democrat Bob Menendez demanded sanctions against senior Chinese Communist party officials in response to alleged human rights abuses against Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in the northwestern province of Xinjiang. 

This month senators demanded the more rigorous enforcement of US regulations against Chinese companies that seek access to US markets. Hawks such as Mr Rubio want to take matters further and more closely examine China’s ready access to US finance. 

“China poses the greatest long-term threat to US national and economic security. At a minimum, American investors should be aware of where their money is going when it comes to Chinese investments,” said Mr Rubio. 

The Trump administration’s aggressive use of sanctions carries multiple risks. It is not only rivals who are upset: the US has at times also incensed close allies, which for decades have viewed Washington as a reliable steward of orderly global markets. 

In the longer term it could accelerate a trend in which other countries wish to reduce their reliance on the dollar for its main three purposes — as a store of value, a unit of account and a medium of global exchange. In the very long run, some specialists fear the US dollar’s totemic status at the centre of the global economy could be eroded, or even supplanted, just as the British pound was by the dollar during the interwar period. 

Richard Nephew, a former US government sanctions specialist who is now programme director at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, says that for at least the next five to 10 years the world is locked into the dollar as the default currency. 

But he argues there will be an evolution towards a system where the US is not the sole significant trading currency. US policy today “will increase the speed with which that transition takes place”. 

A recent report from the Center for a New American Security think-tank argues that a host of factors could conspire to weaken the impact of America’s economic policy arsenal over the longer term. Critically, it says that if the US attempts to reduce its economic, financial and trading connections with key overseas economies, “over time US coercive economic leverage over those economies will diminish”. 

Russia has been at the forefront of attempts to de-dollarise, spurred on by the punishing impact of US sanctions on its economy. “We are not ditching the dollar, the dollar is ditching us,” Russia’s president Vladimir Putin said late last year. “The instability of dollar payments is creating a desire for many global economies to find alternative reserve currencies and create settlement systems independent of the dollar.” 

Russia’s central bank last spring sold $101bn worth of dollars from its reserves, shifting the holdings into renminbi, euros and yen, according to official data published in January with a six-month delay. Fifteen per cent of Russia’s reserves were in the Chinese currency last summer, the data showed, three times the proportion at the end of the first quarter of 2018. 

For its part, China has experimented with denominating oil futures in its currency as well as working on its own international payments system. 

In June Russia agreed with China at a summit between Xi Jinping and Mr Putin to do more trade in their respective currencies. The rouble and renminbi’s share of Chinese imports into Russia edged up from 17 per cent in 2017 to 24 per cent in 2018, according to economist Dmitry Dolgin of ING. 

Yet for all the political attention, the two countries’ attempts to reduce the dollar’s role remain in their infancy. For example, China and Russia set up a non-dollar direct settlement plan to help with their gas pipeline deals around 2015. However, in practice, the Chinese side uses it as little as possible, in part because of the risk of rouble volatility. 

China has also harboured aspirations to turn its Belt and Road Initiative into a platform for boosting the international use of the renminbi. But it would in practice have to dramatically liberalise its capital controls to gain widespread acceptance as a reserve currency. 

In Europe, frustrations have been growing at the continent’s faltering attempts to boost the euro’s global role alongside the dollar. Top French officials including François Villeroy de Galhau, governor of the Banque de France, have called for greater use of the euro in international transactions in a bid to challenge the dollar’s dominance. European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker last year said it was an “aberration” that the EU paid for more than 80 per cent of its energy imports in dollars despite only 2 per cent of imports coming from the US. 

Yet the pattern since the financial crisis has if anything been a decline in the euro’s international role. Gita Gopinath, the IMF’s chief economist, points to a reduction in euro invoicing and international financial transactions. “The dollar on the other hand has gained relative to the euro in the last 10 years,” she says. 

Meanwhile progress on a high-profile mechanism backed by major European countries that aims to sustain trade with Iran despite newly imposed US sanctions has been painfully slow.   

Sigal Mandelker, the Treasury official in charge of enforcing sanctions, points out that despite European efforts to keep their businesses invested in Iran following Mr Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal, the companies “got out in droves”. 

“There are people out there who argue we have overused the tool,” says Ms Mandelker, “[but] if you look at our objectives and how we are using the tool, you will see that what we have been doing systemically is to change behaviour, to disrupt the flow of bad money, and to go after entities and individuals who pose national security and illicit finance risk.” 

For all the warnings that the US will undermine its own currency by being so aggressive, there is little sign of any diminished appetite for using the greenback. Kevin Hassett, the outgoing chairman of Mr Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, says: “If you thought that the Trump policies were imperilling the status of the dollar, then your case would be stronger if you showed that the dollar had collapsed a lot under Trump policies . . . But the move in the dollar has been kind of the opposite of that.” 

Ms Gopinath is sceptical about the chances of near-term change. “You are hearing more noise right now for other currencies to become truly global currencies. But the data do not show a more forceful dynamic in this direction and it would take a lot more than what we’re seeing now for there to be a switch.” 

Indeed, the irony is that if the president ends up triggering global instability via his policies, investors may end up flocking all the more enthusiastically towards dollar assets. That was after all the phenomenon during the financial crisis, when a mortgage meltdown that was made in the US prompted global investors to scamper for the safety of government bonds, and it has been the same story more recently as Mr Trump’s trade wars drove down US bond yields. 

“Anything Trump creates to foment uncertainty and instability will only end up strengthening the dollar,” says Mr Prasad. Over time, other countries will indeed get tired of this and shift away from the dollar as a unit of account and a medium of exchange, he adds, but “in the foreseeable and longer future the dollar’s role as the dominant store of value is unlikely to be challenged.”

The science of influencing people: six ways to win an argument

Hidebound views on subjects such as the climate crisis and Brexit are the norm – but the appliance of science may sway stubborn opinions writes David Robson in The Guardian 

 

Illustration: Getty Images/Observer Design


“I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters of religion and politics a man’s reasoning powers are not above the monkey’s,” wrote Mark Twain.

Having written a book about our most common reasoning errors, I would argue that Twain was being rather uncharitable – to monkeys. Whether we are discussing Trump, Brexit, or the Tory leadership, we have all come across people who appear to have next to no understanding of world events – but who talk with the utmost confidence and conviction. And the latest psychological research can now help us to understand why.

Consider the “illusion of explanatory depth”. When asked about government policies and their consequences, most people believe that they could explain their workings in great detail. If put to the test, however, their explanations are vague and incoherent. The problem is that we confuse a shallow familiarity with general concepts for real, in-depth knowledge.

Besides being less substantial than we think, our knowledge is also highly selective: we conveniently remember facts that support our beliefs and forget others. When it comes to understanding the EU, for instance, Brexiters will know the overall costs of membership, while remainers will cite its numerous advantages. Although the overall level of knowledge is equal on both sides, there is little overlap in the details.

Simply asking why people support or oppose a policy is pointless. You need to ask how something works to have an effect

Politics can also scramble our critical thinking skills. Psychological studies show that people fail to notice the logical fallacies in an argument if the conclusion supports their viewpoint; if they are shown contrary evidence, however, they will be far more critical of the tiniest hole in the argument. This phenomenon is known as “motivated reasoning”.

A high standard of education doesn’t necessarily protect us from these flaws. Graduates, for instance, often overestimate their understanding of their degree subject: although they remember the general content, they have forgotten the details. “People confuse their current level of understanding with their peak knowledge,” Prof Matthew Fisher of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, says. That false sense of expertise can, in turn, lead them to feel that they have the licence to be more closed-minded in their political views – an attitude known as “earned dogmatism”.

Little wonder that discussions about politics can leave us feeling that we are banging our heads against a brick wall – even when talking to people we might otherwise respect. Fortunately, recent psychological research also offers evidence-based ways towards achieving more fruitful discussions.

Ask ‘how’ rather than ‘why’
Thanks to the illusion of explanatory depth, many political arguments will be based on false premises, spoken with great confidence but with a minimal understanding of the issues at hand. For this reason, a simple but powerful way of deflating someone’s argument is to ask for more detail. “You need to get the ‘other side’ focusing on how something would play itself out, in a step by step fashion”, says Prof Dan Johnson at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. By revealing the shallowness of their existing knowledge, this prompts a more moderate and humble attitude.

FacebookTwitterPinterest Anti-Brexit protester Steve Bray and a pro-Brexit protester face off outside parliament earlier this year. Photograph: Jack Taylor/Getty Images

In 2013, Prof Philip Fernbach at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and colleagues asked participants in cap-and-trade schemes – designed to limit companies’ carbon emissions – to describe in depth how they worked. Subjects initially took strongly polarised views but after the limits of their knowledge were exposed, their attitudes became more moderate and less biased.

It’s important to note that simply asking why people supported or opposed the policy – without requiring them to explain how it works – had no effect, since those reasons could be shallower (“It helps the environment”) with little detail. You need to ask how something works to get the effect.

If you are debating the merits of a no-deal Brexit, you might ask someone to describe exactly how the UK’s international trade would change under WTO terms. If you are challenging a climate emergency denier, you might ask them to describe exactly how their alternative theories can explain the recent rise in temperatures. It’s a strategy that the broadcaster James O’Brien employs on his LBC talk show – to powerful effect.

Fill their knowledge gap with a convincing story
If you are trying to debunk a particular falsehood – like a conspiracy theory or fake news – you should make sure that your explanation offers a convincing, coherent narrative that fills all the gaps left in the other person’s understanding.

Consider the following experiment by Prof Brendan Nyhan of the University of Michigan and Prof Jason Reifler of the University of Exeter. Subjects read stories about a fictional senator allegedly under investigation for bribery who had subsequently resigned from his post. Written evidence – a letter from prosecutors confirming his innocence – did little to change the participants’ suspicions of his guilt. But when offered an alternative explanation for his resignation – to take on another role – participants changed their minds. The same can be seen in murder trials: people are more likely to accept someone’s innocence if another suspect has also been accused, since that fills the biggest gap in the story: whodunnit.

FacebookTwitterPinterest Boris Johnson, Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove, Sajid Javid and Rory Stewart taking part in a BBC TV debate earlier this month. Photograph: Jeff Overs/BBC/PA

The persuasive power of well-constructed narratives means that it’s often useful to discuss the sources of misinformation, so that the person can understand why they were being misled in the first place. Anti-vaxxers, for instance, may believe a medical conspiracy to cover up the supposed dangers of vaccines. You are more likely to change minds if you replace that narrative with an equally cohesive and convincing story – such as Andrew Wakefield’s scientific fraud, and the fact that he was set to profit from his paper linking autism to MMR vaccines. Just stating the scientific evidence will not be as persuasive.

Reframe the issue
Each of our beliefs is deeply rooted in a much broader and more complex political ideology. Climate crisis denial, for instance, is now inextricably linked to beliefs in free trade, capitalism and the dangers of environmental regulation.

Attacking one issue may therefore threaten to unravel someone’s whole worldview – a feeling that triggers emotionally charged motivated reasoning. It is for this reason that highly educated Republicans in the US deny the overwhelming evidence.

You are not going to alter someone’s whole political ideology in one discussion, so a better strategy is to disentangle the issue at hand from their broader beliefs, or to explain how the facts can still be accommodated into their worldview. A free-market capitalist who denies global warming might be far more receptive to the evidence if you explain that the development of renewable energies could lead to technological breakthroughs and generate economic growth.

Appeal to an alternative identity
If the attempt to reframe the issue fails, you might have more success by appealing to another part of the person’s identity entirely.

Someone’s political affiliation will never completely define them, after all. Besides being a conservative or a socialist, a Brexiter or a remainer, we associate ourselves with other traits and values – things like our profession, or our role as a parent. We might see ourselves as a particularly honest person, or someone who is especially creative. “All people have multiple identities,” says Prof Jay Van Bavel at New York University, who studies the neuroscience of the “partisan brain”. “These identities can become active at any given time, depending on the circumstances.”

You are more likely to achieve your aims by arguing gently and kindly. You will also come across better to onlookers

It’s natural that when talking about politics, the salient identity will be our support for a particular party or movement. But when people are asked to first reflect on their other, nonpolitical values, they tend to become more objective in discussion on highly partisan issues, as they stop viewing facts through their ideological lens.

You could try to use this to your advantage during a heated conversation, with subtle flattery that appeals to another identity and its set of values; if you are talking to a science teacher, you might try to emphasise their capacity to appraise evidence even-handedly. The aim is to help them recognise that they can change their mind on certain issues while staying true to other important elements of their personality.

Persuade them to take an outside perspective
Another simple strategy to encourage a more detached and rational mindset is to ask your conversation partner to imagine the argument from the viewpoint of someone from another country. How, for example, would someone in Australia or Iceland view Boris Johnson as our new prime minister?

Prof Ethan Kross at the University of Michigan, and Prof Igor Grossmann at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, have shown that this strategy increases “psychological distance” from the issue at hand and cools emotionally charged reasoning so that you can see things more objectively. During the US presidential elections, for instance, their participants were asked to consider how someone in Iceland would view the candidates. They were subsequently more willing to accept the limits of their knowledge and to listen to alternative viewpoints; after the experiment, they were even more likely to join a bipartisan discussion group.

FacebookTwitterPinterest The front pages of two New York newspapers on Friday 2 June 2017, as Donald Trump pledged to withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement. Photograph: Richard B Levine/Alamy

This is only one way to increase someone’s psychological distance, and there are many others. If you are considering policies with potentially long-term consequences, you could ask them to imagine viewing the situation through the eyes of someone in the future. However you do it, encouraging this shift in perspective should make your friend or relative more receptive to the facts you are presenting, rather than simply reacting with knee-jerk dismissals.

Be kind
Here’s a lesson that certain polemicists in the media might do well to remember – people are generally much more rational in their arguments, and more willing to own up to the limits of their knowledge and understanding, if they are treated with respect and compassion. Aggression, by contrast, leads them to feel that their identity is threatened, which in turn can make them closed-minded.

Assuming that the purpose of your argument is to change minds, rather than to signal your own superiority, you are much more likely to achieve your aims by arguing gently and kindly rather than belligerently, and affirming your respect for the person, even if you are telling them some hard truths. As a bonus, you will also come across better to onlookers. “There’s a lot of work showing that third-party observers always attribute high levels of competence when the person is conducting themselves with more civility,” says Dr Joe Vitriol, a psychologist at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. As Lady Mary Wortley Montagu put it in the 18th century: “Civility costs nothing and buys everything.”