Persuasion is Predetermined — Courage Isn’t
Why the Rivers of Change Flow Through Emboldened Allies, Not Coddled Enemies
Uri Kurlianchik said something worth sitting with: “My main objective online is not to change the minds of my enemies, but to make my friends bolder by showing them that they’re not alone.”
It’s a clean formulation. But it implies something most political writers won’t say outright, so let me say it: persuasion, in any meaningful political sense, is largely predetermined. You are not changing minds. You are not winning converts. The person who reads your careful argument and emerges newly convinced was already moving in your direction—pushed by circumstance, social repositioning, accumulated private doubt. You didn’t mindhack anyone. At best, you handed them a cold drink on a hot day in a foreign place. They were already thirsty. You just showed them an option they already wanted. Those who don’t want to hydrate can’t be made to do so.
This isn’t cynicism. It’s a structural observation about how belief actually works. Minds are not updated by rhetorical contact the way a ledger is updated by a new entry. They’re embedded in identity stakes, social incentives, epistemic commitments, and prior frameworks so load-bearing that argument alone rarely moves them. Rationalization runs downstream of motivation. The enemy you’re addressing isn’t reasoning toward a conclusion—they’re defending one they already hold, or one they were seriously considering. The fence-sitter you’re courting isn’t genuinely suspended between options—they’re waiting for the social cost of choosing to drop low enough.
If persuasion is overdetermined by prior conditions, then the political writer’s actual job is something else entirely. Kurlianchik names it: not conversion, but solidarity. Not changing minds, but making the people see they’re not alone.
Once we realize this, we can focus on a different mechanism, one that runs on a different fuel: courage. I think courage can spread, like water when a dam breaks.
When the Water Flows
Courage, unlike persuasion, is genuinely underdetermined. It can swing. One visible person saying the quiet part aloud can unlock five others who were already convinced but suppressed—not because they needed to be persuaded, but because they needed permission. The permission structure is social. It cascades. This is why modeling matters in ways that argument doesn’t: you’re not providing new information, you’re lowering the cost of acting on information already held.
Which means the writer who thinks they’re persuading is often doing something different and more valuable than they realize—or something different and less valuable, depending on who they’re pointing at. Write at your enemies and you’re wasting the mechanism. Write at the already-aligned, already curious, and you’re doing the actual work: consolidating conviction, signaling that the view has company, making the private into the public. No longer isolated but communal.
This is not a minor reframe. It changes who the piece is for, what it’s doing, and how success should be measured. A piece that “fails to persuade” the opposition but emboldens ten quiet allies to speak has done more political work than a piece that “wins” a debate with someone who will forget the argument by Tuesday.
The Flow Always Forks
There is an objection here, and it deserves a real answer rather than dismissal. The objection, roughly, is that bold or confrontational framing alienates the uncommitted—the neutral observers who haven’t yet decided, who might be won over by measured argument but are turned off by urgency, by the demand to choose, by what gets called “tone.” The tactical advice that follows is familiar: soften the edges, hold the door open, don’t make people feel attacked.
I think this advice starts from two faulty premises, and they compound each other.
The first is that genuine, stable neutrality exists in any politically live conflict. It doesn’t. Prolonged non-alignment isn’t a position held in suspension—it’s a slow drift along the path of least resistance, which is almost always the perpetrator’s path by default. Time doesn’t preserve openness. It erodes it. The person who has watched something important unfold and remains “unaligned” hasn’t maintained an epistemic virtue. They’ve made a tacit bet that the stakes don’t require them to act.
The second faulty premise is that sustained neutrality in a perilous circumstance is evidence of genuine undecidedness rather than prior tacit commitment. Someone who remains unmoved in the face of a clear and consequential conflict hasn’t been insufficiently persuaded. They’ve already, at some level, made their bed. The “tone” they’re objecting to isn’t what moved them away—it’s the pretext they’ve located for a departure that was already underway. A convenient excuse, not a cause.
Judith Herman, writing in Trauma and Recovery about violence and its witnesses, puts the structural logic precisely: “It is morally impossible to remain neutral in this conflict. The bystander is forced to take sides. It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement and remembering.”
Herman’s context is intimate violence and atrocity. But the social logic she describes scales outside that. The perpetrator asks nothing of the bystander—no disruption, no cost, no explicit commitment. The victim, or the cause aligned with the victim, asks you to see something, name something, pay something. Neutrality isn’t balance. It’s asymmetric comfort-seeking. Staying “neutral” is easy because one side leaves us alone. Until it doesn’t, as Martin Niemöller warned us about a certain political crisis.
This reframes the tone objection entirely. The discomfort that bold, urgent discourse produces in the ostensibly uncommitted isn’t evidence of tactical overreach. It’s the discomfort of being asked to exit a costless position. When someone says your tone has lost them, the honest translation is often: you have asked me to pay a price I had not budgeted for. Their aversion gets twisted into your bad manners.
Three Connecting Streams
But solidarity and courage, even properly understood, aren’t enough on their own. The courage to name enemies and fight them is only one layer of a serious political project—and mistaking it for the whole project is its own failure mode.
A serious political thinker needs at least two layers, preferably three, in descending order of importance and actionability.
The first is Conflict Commitments: the recognition that bad actors exist, that some fights are zero-sum, that “everybody wins with no tradeoffs” is fantasy. A lot of people avoid this layer, or avoid being honest about it, because they’re conflict-averse or because they’ve convinced themselves that a politics of universal accommodation is achievable rather than delusional. Many more have this layer but refuse to name it as such, because naming enemies and red lines can be perilous in its own right. Once you acknowledge that you have opponents, and that they're irreconcilable to your cause, you have to make some hard choices. And others will view you as an agitator, an ideologue, or far worse.
The second is Policy Commitments: a real agenda, with “agenda” being a neutral word for having a platform that isn’t just vibes. A lot of people pretend to have this. They waffle when pressed. Or—more commonly—they mistake their Conflict Commitments for Policy Commitments. Knowing who your enemies are is not the same as knowing what you’re fighting for. Pure conflict orientation without program is a permanent war footing with no destination. It feels like seriousness. It is not. You must have actionable positions and prescriptions, ones informed by a worldview. And that worldview needs to be fleshed out.
Which brings us to the third piece, which is an Affirmative Vision: a coherent picture of the polity you’re actually trying to build. Crucially, this must be grounded in realism rather than utopia—”utopia” meaning, literally, nowhere. Theocrats have a real vision, even if it’s bad. Technocrats do too, and it has tradeoffs. Many liberals, egalitarians, populists, and progressives do not, even if they say they do. What they have are aspirations. They have objections to the status quo. They have a mood, and vibes. What they often lack is a destination that survives contact with reality. They don't have a vision of what they're fighting for, let alone how to achieve it. Not without assuming universal buy-in and ignoring that the goods different people want do conflict. They forget, or refuse to accept, that not everyone can win.
Courage lives primarily at the Conflict Commitments layer—it’s the layer that requires naming bad actors, accepting that some fights won’t resolve through good faith engagement, and abandoning the hope that politeness and patience will eventually bring your opponents around. The people most resistant to this layer are, not coincidentally, often the people most invested in the persuasion fantasy. If you believe minds can be changed through argument, you have a reason to avoid naming enemies: it forecloses the conversion you’re still hoping for. But the conversion isn’t coming. And the foreclosure was always there, or soon to come.
Conflict informed by courage. Policy as the proof in the pudding, informed by a larger goal. Vision as that goal, making the policy make sense and justifying the Conflict. Some think they only need two of these. But we need all three. A man must know what he wants, know what he's fighting for, and be willing to actually fight rather than angle-shoot or cravenly maneuver.
Reading the Tea Leaves
There is a deeper problem, and the one most serious political writers won’t touch. Objectivity is a position. Rationality is a position. Good faith is a position. They are not neutral tools floating above the fray, equally available to, and equally valued by, any party to a given dispute. They are commitments—ones not everyone shares, ones not everyone is even obligated, by their own beliefs, to share. These commitments are ones that can be sincerely rejected by people who are neither stupid nor insincere. This sounds, on first hearing, like it opens the door to relativism. It doesn’t. It opens the door to realism.
The standard move when someone appears to be in bad faith is to split into two interpretations: either they’re genuinely irrational, dishonest due to inducements, or they’re misunderstood and reachable. But bad faith behavior is often downstream of a sincere prior commitment that simply doesn’t include your epistemic standards as binding. The person who rejects your appeal to evidence is sometimes operating from a framework in which your conception of evidence isn’t authoritative. You can’t reason someone into valuing reason. You can’t persuade someone into valuing what you value. Because they have values of their own, and they might be mutually exclusive.
This is why the liberal and egalitarian traditions—the ones I have the most genuine value overlap with—often get this so systematically wrong. They’ve built their politics on an assumption of ultimate convergence: that careful reasoning, extended good faith, and the right framing will eventually bring even serious opponents to compatible conclusions. That assumption does two things simultaneously, both damaging: it leaves them tactically unprepared for opponents who don’t share the convergence premise and never will; and it leaves them morally unprepared to fight—because fighting requires accepting that the other side’s position isn’t a misunderstanding to be corrected but a competing vision to be defeated.
Some goods are genuinely incompatible. A sincere theocrat and a sincere liberal aren’t failing to understand each other. They understand each other fine. They want different things, at a foundational enough level that no amount of dialogue resolves the incompatibility. Acknowledging this isn’t contempt. Someone can be intelligent, morally serious by their own lights, and in direct conflict with your vision—not because they’ve reasoned poorly but because they’ve reasoned from different foundational commitments toward a different destination.
The point isn’t that everyone you fight is evil. The point is that some conflicts don’t resolve without loss. And the political actor who refuses to accept that—who keeps the conversion door open because closing it feels uncharitable—isn’t practicing a more moral politics. They’re practicing a less honest one, and in doing so, they’re failing the people on their own side who need to see the actual stakes named.
Shifting Tides
So what does this all mean in practice? What is the operative advice here? And why is this not—as some might be inclined to cynically clapback—just a permission structure for preaching to the choir on one hand and preemptively offending people in the other? I will elaborate, and start with myself as an example. Not to recruit anyone to my specific positions—that would rather prove my point about persuasion—but to show what all three layers actually look like when fleshed out.
Before that, let’s take a nice Israeli lady, who I'll leave nameless, and her call to stop enlisting people in the fight to defend Israel itself from AntiZionism and AntiSemitism. Her thinking was essentially that when people talk about how Zionism is for everyone, and that everyone should be a Zionist, it risks upsetting moderates or neutrals. That people who refuse to support the existence of legitimacy of Israel should be left alone. Not proselytized to, not informed about the history, not made even slightly uncomfortable. Because maybe if they're uncomfortable, they'll turn hostile.
My position, which I shared with her, was that if someone's comfort is more important than the safety of Jews, that's already a big problem. And if these supposed moderates, neutrals, and unaligneds are so easily offended and converted to enemies, were they really all that moderate or neutral to begin with? To quote Steve Rogers, we ended up disagreeing. But we parted respectfully, for whatever that’s worth.
I think her perspective was/is terminally naïve, and I don't mind saying as much even tho she's otherwise an ally. We can't condition our own rhetoric around the sensibilities of people who are already, actively or tacitly, not on our side. And when I say “we,” I don't just mean Zionists of all ethnicities and regions. I mean decent people who value certain things over others and are wiling to fight for them.
My Conflict Commitments are well known, but I'll just lay out a simplified version here. I oppose theocrats on all sides (most notably Islamists and Christo-Fascists). I oppose bigots (including, tho not limited to: classists, homophobes, racists, and sexists). I oppose political violence users and apologists. I oppose liars, no matter their supposed “good intentions.” I oppose corporatocracy and its enablers. The list goes on, but those are some key highlights.
I notably do not see myself as inherently wedded to a specific political party, nor incapable of ever supporting a candidate from a party I might otherwise disagree with. I don't view myself as a tribalist. I am not defending my team against the other team, whatever those might be. I see my conflicts as about ideas and worldviews.
My Policy Commitments include several areas, but my Top 10 are roughly: civil liberties & rights, liberal economics, criminal justice reform (including policing), carceral urbanism (including homelessness), agricultural regulation (especially banning factory farming), education reform & deradicalization, electoral reform & maximizing the franchise, addressing loneliness & the mating crisis, conservationism (deep ecology) & safer energy independence, and German style health reform.
Real policies and key areas of focus. Thought through, no vibing out. Not because I'm a wonk, but because failure to think properly about this stuff and game it out means I'm vulnerable to manipulation or predictable attack. I try not to leave myself exposed. I encourage others to do likewise. Have real policies in your pocket, not vibes.
Lastly, my Affirmative Vision. I imagine a future not too dissimilar from our present, which itself is not too dissimilar from the way I grew up. Guardrails in the sociopolitical firmament. An economy where playing by the rules pays dividends, even if risks can still be rewarded; rather than feeling like a racket setup to predate on suckers and greater fools. A criminal justice system and a police force that holds itself to account alongside the public, with safety for all being a primary ethos rather than a noble fiction or disrespected and discarded ideal of the past. Democratic cohesion and real buy-in from the public. A time and place where we can still debate the more mutable or diffuse questions….because the obvious ones have been resolved already.
I don’t seek a utopia. I don’t think politics or government can solve our problems. I do think we need to answer certain pressing and highly soluble challenges, and we need to do it quickly—without diffidence, without fear, and with the knowledge that not everyone will win. We must do this knowing that conflicts will arise, and that the losers of those conflicts must accept the results. Truth, justice, and permanent armistice around certain issues will take hold. Because not everything can be endlessly debated or dithered about. Some truths stay true. Some wrongs stay wrong. End of.
Parting the Sea for Allies (current and future)
Courage is contagious. I believe that. You can’t make someone agree with you, can’t make them see reason, but you can create a space where they feel able, secure, and/or emboldened to embrace the logic, and the arguments, that they are already inclined to see virtue in. To follow their own conscience, and make the hard choices it will occasionally ask of them. Including telling stupid or malicious people they’re wrong. Including defending those people or places that need it most. Including taking side in a conflict where others would rather look away. Because truth exists and morality is real. Because we need each other, now more than ever in my lifetime.
Our work should be calibrated to remind people of the goodness in themselves. Not to coddle those who killed or perverted that part of themselves ages ago. Not to beg those with their feet on our necks, or on the necks of our allies, to please let up. But to demand that everyone submit themselves, their beliefs, and their actions to a universal standard. Because there’s no agreeing to disagree about assassinations being permissible, or on the sanctity of universal moral norms in general.
Those who disagree? Our work becomes a fight against them. A commitment to defeat them. Competing conflict commitments and competing visions cannot be treated as simple errors or misunderstandings. We must be willing and able to defeat those who, through willful acts or craven passivity, wish us ill. And to remind those who feel alone…that they are not. We are here, we are not isolated, and we’re never going away. No matter how hard things get. No matter who wants us gone.
Conclusion
There is no view from nowhere. The person who presents as a neutral arbiter evaluating claims on their merits is presenting from a position—one that happens to be comfortable, undemanding, and structurally aligned with whoever benefits from inaction. The victim demands justice, the perpetrator demands nothing but looking the other way. I can’t convince anyone to value justice. So I don’t—not as such.
Kurlianchik is right that the goal isn’t to change the minds of enemies. But the implication is sharper than it first appears: if you’re writing for the “neutrals,” you’re not being strategically prudent. You’re writing at people who have, in most cases, already made a tacit choice—and whose “neutrality” exists precisely because no one has yet made the cost of that choice visible.
Making the cost visible is what bold, committed, courageous political writing does. Not persuasion. Not conversion. Not the careful management of tone to avoid alienating someone who was never really with you. But the commitment to rousing those who weren’t certain anyone had their back. To defending principles left languishing in the dirt. To raising the banner of ideas worth fighting for.
The enemy asks nothing of the bystander. Our allies need action, engagement, inspiration and memory. So does any politics worth having. I’ve made my choice.
@Daniel Muñoz
@Edward Campbell
@Mike Brock
@Julie Roginsky
@Behind the Narrative 📣
I am inspired.