In my experience (usually arguing business decisions and ethics), the best hope is to shoot for instilling doubt and therefore softening opposition. (And softened opposition is more likely to cede to a majority.) That’s where I’ve had my best luck.

To a different point above, however, I’d generally disagree. We’re not all ideologues, dogmatic and unwilling to cede any front to the convenience of our easy answers. There’s a difference between having core beliefs and having a handy imaginary model of ideals that refuse to acknowledge that the world and issues are complicated.

Most rational people can admit the shades of grey, pause to consider new information, and confess that they might not know all the answers. Ideologues are plainly a different stripe. Why else has “the reality-based community” become a catch-phrase in recent history? (And turned out to have been right more often?)

In the end, however, and as I think Daniel said, only those who believe themselves to be relatively uninformed are persuadable. Almost without exception, those of us who hold strong positions will continue to hold those positions even in the face of damaging counter-factuals.

And there are religious positions, where the facts are not equally ascertainable to the parties. Someone who believes the Bible to be the Word of God will have a difficult time using that as a fact in a discussion with someone who does not believe the same way, or believe in a god at all, someone who insists that facts be equally ascertainable to all parties to the discussion. There is literally no resolution to those kinds of disagreements.

Perhaps the best you can do under those circumstances is to point out the things that people would do if they truly believed in what they were saying. If abortion is murder, for example, then the woman who hires an abortionist is guilty of murder and should be punished as a murderer. If a blastocyst is a human being, then the in vitro fertilization clinic that disposes of frozen blastocysts is guilty of murder and should be punished as such. Further, uteri should be found for all those blastocysts as it is not their fault they were not chosen for implantation. Does that not seem logical, if we believe that a blastocyst is a human being?

In the end, we humans are extraordinarily good at justifying our positions, as well as all those “necessary” departures from the consequences of our position. We are all ideologues sooner or later.

Or something.

There are two kinds of persuasion in my view: rational, and emotional.

The rational type is based on the standard scientific approach–empiricism is the standard by which validity is judged.

Emotional persuasion is more complicated. I think the ability to persuade emotionally is fundamentally a leadership skill, it requires the establishment of empathy and deployment of moral authority to purchase validity. No amount of stunning argumentation against the Iraq war is going to “win” a debate against a wounded veteran arguing the contrary position, in the minds (or more importantly, guts) of most people. The utilization of the commonly held sacred is a favored tactic in emotional persuasion, and usually has far more power than logic.

The only way to effectively sell an alternative to imperial hegemony, or torture, or socialism,–to which consent is almost always based in emotion, is for representatives of the sacred–those with genuine moral authority–to take a stand for the alternative and repurpose the common, shared values in support of the alternative while reframing the status quo in opposition. I strongly believe that the rhetoric is far less important than the source.

The trick isn’t to go after their conclusions, it’s to go after their premises. And most effective of all when you can throw a premise into question that they haven’t even thought much about, but rather assumed as a simple given. Look for those assumed premises and turn them upside down – gradually (in a conversation or debate) or with a sharp poke in the eye (in a speech), if necessary. Obviously, humorous memorability gets more mileage out of either case.

Furthermore, if arguing in good faith, one can also invite the opponent – “under which circumstances would my point-of-view have any merit?,” and almost inevitably get some useful leverage out of recycling his answer into a new purpose. (I’ve dissolved some formidable oppositions by that route.)

Most of all though, in “live debate,” honor the opponent’s dignity, don’t press for a full public capitulation, and rather leave him realizing that your position has more to speak for it than he’d supposed, and his own perhaps less. It’s the art of gradual persuasion, and perhaps those people are never brought into the proper camp, but they at least become less hostile to yours.

Unless he’s an ideologue, of course. They’re hopeless.

His support for the war represents a serious moral and analytical failure that can only cast serious doubts upon his character and intellect.

If that seems ad hominem is is because the problem is with the man, Mr. Salam himself. He, along with his mentor David Brooks and so many others, cheerfully set the stage for a mass murder. He will always stink of corpses as far as I’m concerned.

After Vietnam, can one even posit that this “national myth” still existed? That futile conflict had a better ideological justification, being a lost “battle” in the Cold War, but it was also one that we entered based on “faulty intelligence” (lies) about the Gulf of Tonkin incident. And once mired in it, we spent years denying that our South Vietnamese allies lacked the will to fight on their own, even with the extraordinary amount of military hardware we gave them. Ultimately, all we did was gravely harm ourselves and the Vietnamese people by being there.

Even though it seems obvious to us that the war was decisive in wrecking the reputation of conservatism and the GOP, I suppose there is a certain logic, or at least a certain inevitability in the enduring conviction that there was nothing wrong with the war in Iraq that more soldiers and better planning couldn’t have solved.

I agree that “the war was decisive in wrecking the reputation of conservatism and the GOP,” just as the Vietnam War did for the Democrats. However, I don’t even buy the “certain logic” that there was “nothing wrong with the war in Iraq that more soldiers and better planning couldn’t have solved.” To the contrary, from the very beginning it bore all the hallmarks of a trumped-up conflict, and a distinct war of choice. Rice’s “mushroom cloud over Manhattan” and Cheney’s “there is ‘no doubt’ that Saddam possesses WMD” war drum beating were the closest we came to a “preemptive” necessity, and it was a complete and utter lie. The only thing of which there is “no doubt” was that Cheney et al were cooking the intelligence books to get this result, and pushing the U.S. into a conflict whose “imperialistic,” “hegemonic” [inset whatever word you want to describe a great power carving out a sphere of influence] agenda had more in common with the Spanish-American war than anything else (except that it was neither “splendid” nor “little.”)

I suppose I am an “old man” now raging against the folly and evil of other old men sending our youth into combat for less than the most compelling and urgent reasons of national security. I certainly felt there was every reason to go into Afghanistan after 9/11, but none whatsoever to start the Second Iraq War. The fact that they did it with such abysmal post “conquest” planning merely underscores the basic immorality of the decision.

To me, the “national myth” the Second Iraq War exploded was not that we don’t “fight futile, much less unjust, wars” but rather that we had learned from our Vietnam experience not to be manipulated by lies into another one. It’s amazing what fear and national trauma can produce.

Rush Limbaugh had no problem saying that the Balkan adventure of a Democratic president was futile and unjust.

In this light, actually getting people to change American foreign policy such that we don’t get involved in these kinds of wars in the future isn’t really a matter of making persuasive arguments on issues of policy and even facts, it’s about leading people to abandon a failed self-image and adopting a new one, abandoning a failed national image and adopting a new one. This is a very tricky business, and I’m glad you bring the issue up, because it’s really something that ought to be discussed more. I’m not quite sure how that can be done, but I can certainly say that it needs to be done. We as Americans and as a collective really do need a new self-image to guide us in our foreign policy, because that is the determining factor in what policies we actually carry out, regardless of all these rational arguments.