And won victory after victory after victory Anand Giridharadas took inspiration from his research for “The Persuaders,” and particularly from his chapter on progressive messaging authority Anat Shenker-Osorio. The left focuses so much on what it stands against that what the left stands for gets lost. It’s a habit we need to kick, she tells students. “We have to be for a thing.” “As we fight against the neo-fascist right, let us not forget what we are for,” Giridharadas tweets in harmony. In conversation this week hosted by the Brooklyn Public Library, Giridharadas explored “the possibility and the difficulty of persuasion in a time of polarization, disinformation, conspiracy theories, political violence, and more.” But we should stop putting our political adversaries at the center of the progressive narrative, Giridharadas told the audience: We are trying something hard and awesome. And at the risk of kind of mixing progressivism with patriotism, it is an awesome pursuit in history. Most of our ancestors lived in small, little monocultures in all kinds of different places in the world where they never met anybody who was different. We are building an entire country on the idea that human beings are enriched through encounters with difference. And, even though there is this incredibly scary movement, it is not the protagonist of this drama. We are the protagonist of this drama. We have won victory after victory after victory to get here. Look at this room. Most places in the world do not look like this…