Wednesday, 28 April 2021

Why we can't have nice things

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Why we can't have nice things

Democrats tend to suck at messaging, as compared to Republicans. It's going to cost us at the polls. And already has. Here's what we can do.

John Aravosis

Apr 28

If you read anything this week, check out this brilliant new Vox interview with Democratic strategist James Carville.

First things first. Ignore the title — it’s clickbait, and inaccurate.

Carville’s central thesis isn’t an attack on liberal policies — he’s not claiming that Democrats have gone too far left. What he’s saying is that Democratic messaging has gone too far left. And, that poor messaging is going to kill us at the ballot box, and already has.

If you listen to my podcast, Carville’s comments will be all too familiar. Cliff Schecter and I routinely talk about the failures of Democratic messaging, and the importance overall of political marketing. Many folks on the left think that liberal ideas are so good, they’ll sell themselves. Who doesn’t want to save the earth, after all? So they don’t think much about how we market those ideas. And in fact, they might even consider marketing and messaging to be somewhat dirty and sleazy. It’s not. It’s critical to winning in politics.

Latinx, etc.

Carville’s first target is the new term “Latinx,” intended to replace the word Latino, which is considered by some to be sexist since it ends in an “o,” and in Spanish, that makes the word masculine.

The thing is, almost no one in the Latino community actually uses, or embraces, the term Latinx (the poll I saw was around 2% of Latinos embrace the term). It’s a fiction created by a small group of activists. Yet, for some reason, it’s been adopted by much of the media and the talking heads on TV. Even the New York Times now uses the term.

Carville lumps “Latinx” with terms like “communities of color.” His point is that no one talks this way, or uses these terms, outside of the “woke” left, and they risk alienating the rest of the electorate:

You ever get the sense that people in faculty lounges in fancy colleges use a different language than ordinary people? They come up with a word like “Latinx” that no one else uses. Or they use a phrase like “communities of color.” I don’t know anyone who speaks like that. I don’t know anyone who lives in a “community of color.” I know lots of white and Black and brown people and they all live in ... neighborhoods.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with these phrases. But this is not how people talk. This is not how voters talk. And doing it anyway is a signal that you’re talking one language and the people you want to vote for you are speaking another language. This stuff is harmless in one sense, but in another sense it’s not.

Carville adds:

We have to talk about race. We should talk about racial injustice. What I’m saying is, we need to do it without using jargon-y language that’s unrecognizable to most people — including most Black people, by the way — because it signals that you’re trying to talk around them. This “too cool for school” shit doesn’t work, and we have to stop it.

I’d add the ever-changing name of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans community to the mix — which recently had a Q and a + added on to LGBT, though no one knows who made that decision. (I’m particularly perplexed by the abbreviation LGBTQ+, since both Q (for Queer) and + are added on as umbrella terms encompassing “everyone else.” So, the abbreviation LGBTQ+ actually means “Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, everyone else, and everyone else.”

Or take the abbreviation AAPI, which I only recently learned means “Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.” It’s widely used by Asian American advocates, but is little-known outside of certain segments of the left — I’ve been a civil rights advocate for nearly thirty years, and I had no idea what AAPI meant when I first saw it about a month ago. In this case, the messaging doesn’t turn people off. Rather, it undercuts the movement’s goals because most people have no idea who you’re talking about, so the message never sinks in.

And finally, there’s the abbreviation BIPOC, the newly-created way to refer to people of color. It stands for, “Black, Indigenous, and people of color.” (Though Black and indigenous people are already people of color.) Even people who know what POC means, which isn’t that many outside of the left, still don’t know what BIPOC is. One African-American writer on Twitter recently admitted he thought the term meant “bisexual people of color.” Now imagine whether your mom and dad know what it means.

Woke messaging

Carville next takes on “wokeness,” and says it’s a problem and everyone knows it. But note what Carville actually says — he’s talking about the messaging of woke politics, not the policies themselves: Like saying “defund the police,” when you really mean “reform the police.”

(Though, a few people on the left truly do want to get rid of the police, so that would be an example of Carville being concerned about the policy itself. But most mainstream Democrats, even progressives, don’t believe we should entirely eliminate the police, yet a lot of us still used the slogan “defund the police.”)

I’d add to this discussion the effort by some on the left to rehabilitate — or habilitate — the term “socialism,” a word that is anathema to a wide swath of Americans, and has been routinely used against Democrats for decades. Carville weighs in on the overall subject:

Interviewer
Part of the issue is that Republicans are going to paint the Dems as cop-hating, fetus-destroying Stalinists no matter what they say or do. So, yeah, I agree that Democrats should be smart and not say dumb, alienating things, but I’m also not sure how much control they have over how they’re perceived by half the country, especially when that half lives in an alternate media reality.
James Carville
Right, but we can’t say, “Republicans are going to call us socialists no matter what, so let’s just run as out-and-out socialists.” That’s not the smartest thing to do.

This is a point I’ve been making for a while. It’s one thing for Republicans to accuse us of being socialists. It’s quite another for us to respond: “Why, yes I am!” The latter causes far more damage, as it confirms the GOP’s messaging.

Also, our goal should be to enact good policies, not find the perfect name for them. If you’re more wedded to the name “socialism” than the underlying policy, then you, and we, have a problem.

Hanging Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz and Denny Hastert around the GOP’s neck

Where Carville’s piece really excels is his take on Republican members of Congress Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, and (former GOP House Speaker) Denny Hastert — one cuckoo, and three men tarnished by youth sex scandals.

Carville starts with Marjorie Taylor Greene, and discusses her in comparison to Democratic House member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Carville rightfully notes that AOC is quite lefty politically, but that’s really the worst you can say about her. Taylor Greene, on the other hand, is a QAnon cult adherent who’s ga-ga. Why then have the Republicans been so successful in painting Democrats as the party of AOC, while we’ve done little to paint all Republicans as the party of Q’s love-child?

Take someone like Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She’s obviously very bright. She knows how to draw a headline. In my opinion, some of her political aspirations are impractical and probably not going to happen. But that’s probably the worst thing that you can say about her.
Now take someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, the new Republican congresswoman from Georgia. She’s absolutely loonier than a tune. We all know it. And yet, for some reason, the Democrats pay a bigger political price for AOC than Republicans pay for Greene. That’s the problem in a nutshell. And it’s ridiculous because AOC and Greene are not comparable in any way.

The reason is messaging.

Carville continues by invoking three Republican member tarnished by youth sex scandals: GOP Reps. Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, and Denny Hastert.

Gaetz is currently under FBI investigation for possible youth sex trafficking.
Jordan has been accused by a number of college wrestlers, who in the 1990s were under his tutelage as a coach at Ohio State, of ignoring the ongoing sexual assault being committed by the team doctor. (Jordan denies knowing about the sexual assault at the time.)
And former Speaker Denny Hastert confessed to sexually abusing high school boys whom he had coached.

Carville asks, rightfully, why Democrats don’t hang these three men around the Republicans’ collective neck:

Tell me this: How is it we have all this talk about Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and we don’t talk about Dennis Hastert, the longest-serving Republican speaker of the House in Congress? If Hastert was a Democrat who we knew had a history of molesting kids and was actually sent to prison in 2016, he’d still be on Fox News every fucking night. The Republicans would never shut the hell up about it.
So when Jim Jordan was pulling all these stunts with Anthony Fauci [Fauci was speaking at a congressional hearing about ending coronavirus precautions], why didn’t someone jump in and say, “Let me tell you something, Jim, if Fauci knew what you knew, if he knew that a doctor was molesting young people, he would’ve gone to the medical board yesterday. So you can go ahead and shut the fuck up.” [Ed. note: Jordan denies knowing about the allegations of abuse when he was an assistant coach at Ohio State University.] I love that Congresswoman Maxine Waters told Jordan to “shut your mouth,” but that’s what I really wish a Democrat would say, and I wish they’d keep saying it over and over again.

There are a number of reasons you do this. First, to brand Republicans as the party of child sex, something that tends not to resonate with voters. Second, in the case of Gaetz and Jordan, if our messaging is successful, we take two of the GOP’s top messengers off the table. If Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan reignite a discussion about child sex trafficking and college rape every time they appear at a committee hearing, political event, or on a TV show, Republican leaders will be forced to pull a Maxine Waters, and tell both to shut up, lest they damage the party and its messaging heading into the next election.

The Insurrection

Along those same lines, Carville asks why we’re not making Republicans own the January 6th Insurrection:

[Democrats] have to make the Republicans own that insurrection every day. They have to pound it. They have to call bookers on cable news shows. They have to get people to write op-eds. There will be all kinds of investigations and stories dripping out for god knows how long, and the Democrats should spend every day tying all of it to the Republican Party. They can’t sit back and wait for it to happen.
Hell, just imagine if it was a bunch of nonwhite people who stormed the Capitol. Imagine how Republicans would exploit that and make every news cycle about how the Dems are responsible for it. Every political debate would be about that. The Republicans would bludgeon the Democrats with it forever.
So whatever you think Republicans would do to us in that scenario, that’s exactly what the hell we need to do them.

A-freaking-men. Where is the ongoing messaging about the Republicans’ violent attempt to overthrow our government, not three-and-a-half months ago? As Carville notes, had a group of 1,000 African-Americans violently stormed the Capitol, and used American flags to beat up cops — and we had the entire thing on film! — we’d still be hearing about this atrocity nightly on Fox News.

Now, this raises a problem that my podcast partner, Cliff Schecter, often mentions: We don’t have our own Fox News. CNN isn’t as liberal as Fox is conservative — not even close. And while MSNBC clearly leans left, they tend not to lie as routinely as Fox, and there appears to be little message coordination between most of the hosts on MSNBC and the professional left. Whereas, Fox News was practically living out of the Trump White House, and is still clearly the mouthpiece for Republicans, from Trump on down.

Fox News will beat the same message to death every single night, for years on end. You simply don’t see that on MSNBC.

And finally, the Republicans have amazing message coordination amongst themselves. This past weekend, on the Sunday shows, Republican after Republican accused Joe Biden of being a “socialist.” It was clearly a prepared talking point, and they all used it dutifully. How often do you see Democrats doing this? Not often enough.

A decided lack of emotion in Democratic messaging

Another point Carville hits on is how Democrats think their ideas are so smart and so good that they’ll sell themselves. To wit, climate change:

Let me give you my favorite example of metropolitan, overeducated arrogance. Take the climate problem. Do you realize that climate is the only major social or political movement that I can think of that refuses to use emotion? Where’s the identifiable song? Where’s the bumper sticker? Where’s the slogan? Where’s the flag? Where’s the logo?
We don’t have it because with faculty politics what you do is appeal to reason. You don’t need the sloganeering and sound bites. That’s for simple people. All you need are those timetables and temperature charts, and from that, everyone will just get it.
That’s not how the world works; that’s not how people work. And Republicans are way more disciplined about taking a thing and branding it. Elites will roll their eyes at that, but I’d ask, “How’s that working out for you?” Most people agree with us on health care and minimum wage and Roe v. Wade and even on the climate.
So why can’t we leverage that?

Years ago, polar bears started drowning because the chunks of floating ice they took refuge on were melting and disappearing. I begged my friends in the environmental movement to use the drowning polar bear as a perfect heart-tugging illustration of the climate problem. What a mascot! They didn’t. Instead we heard a lot about 4 degree celsius, or something, and how many parts per million carbon we were about to have in the air. Their argument was boring and over my head, and probably that of many voters as well.

The lesson of Donald Trump

Carville makes one last point. Democrats should have done a hell of a lot better in the 2020 election, considering we were running against Donald Trump, the biggest disaster this country has seen in recent memory. Why didn’t we? Messaging.

We won the White House against a world-historical buffoon. And we came within 42,000 votes of losing. We lost congressional seats. We didn’t pick up state legislatures. So let’s not have an argument about whether or not we’re off-key in our messaging. We are. And we’re off because there’s too much jargon and there’s too much esoterica and it turns people off.

Other Interesting Stuff

Republicans are now urging young people not to get vaccinated:

Ben Yelin @byelin

This is just stunningly irresponsible. What is wrong with these people? YOUNG PEOPLE CAN STILL GET COVID. I’M 34 AND GOT HOSPITALIZED AND IT REALLY SUCKED! Getting a vaccine makes you woozy for a day and otherwise comes with no discernible risk.

Jim DeMint @JimDeMint

He’s right and should be applauded. We need more people telling the obvious truth. #FactsNotFear https://t.co/qbry9bjMYH

DC police officer Michael Fanone, who was brutally attacked by Trump supporters while defending the US Capitol building on January 6, gives a moving new interview in the wake of Republican efforts to rewrite the history of the attack:

CNN Tonight @CNNTonight

Officer Michael Fanone tells @donlemon it’s been very difficult to see elected officials whitewash what happened on Jan. 6. He was stun-gunned several times and beaten with a flagpole during the Capitol attack. Watch part 1 of his first in-depth interview:

I wrote a piece recently about my experiment in investing in crypotocurrency. If the topic interests you, have a read.

I also did an in-depth podcast with health care guru Charles Gaba about Obamacare and the future of health care in America. It was a really good show.

Did you know that people are using hook works to address everything from allergies to irritable bowel? Katie links to a really interesting NYT piece on the topic.

Am I the only one who’s not sure he cares anymore if Republicans get vaccinated?

John Aravosis 🇺🇸🇬🇷🏳️‍🌈 @aravosis

I just don’t care anymore. Let them not get vaccinated, we will, we’ll take boosters every year, they won’t, and a lot of them will get sick, have lasting damage to their bodies, and die. At this point, I give up. They’ve become a cult. It’s not our job to save them.

🌊 R Saddler @Politics_PR

The partisan divide in coronavirus vaccinations is widening https://t.co/dIjsD1AzJb https://t.co/YYGLFWEMja

An excellent update on an earlier story about a man who was harassing a gay or trans high school kid at prom for wearing a dress. His board of directors just fired him!

John Aravosis 🇺🇸🇬🇷🏳️‍🌈 @aravosis

Holy cow. This board of directors just fired their CEO for harassing a gay (or perhaps trans) kid at their prom. The Guy kept following the kid and deriding him. It was filmed. The man is fired. Well done, Visuwell.

Visuwell @VisuWell

Official Statement https://t.co/cMYoAEbI9d

Puppies and butterflies!