Dear Friends -
Did you hear Trump said something terrible? I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked! But before I dissect my addiction to scandal and offer you a very specific prescription, I must respond to a couple of reader comments from my last email:
Reliable reader Joel Gagne give me a hard time for being a “Biden Bed Wetter” in my last email. I’m doubling-down: Biden needs to go for the jugular. I’m still stunned that the Democratic Convention never mentioned the impeachment -- going to so far as to disinvite Adam Schiff and Tom Steyer. This plays into Trump’s martyr narrative: nine months ago, the Democrats forced the whole country to focus on Trump’s Ukrainian and Russian ties for weeks on end, and now those accusations don’t even merit a mention over the course of a four day convention? Another narrative win for Trump.
Bed wetting misses the point of my last missive. We have to defend our vision for the country. The entire point of Trump’s attacks (and not just Trump, Hannity, Rush, and the ghosts of Roger Ailes) is to simultaneously delegitimize the entire Democratic worldview while also further insulating his base from any other narratives that might take hold. And while I’m recommending that you, dear reader, avoid the media’s Daily Outrage Machine (see below), lots of people don’t avoid it. We must aggressively offer an alternative narrative. Think about it like Trump: you need to counter-program the Trump Show… Every. Single. Day. And therein lies the challenge: how can you possibly compete with the spectacle Trump offers around the clock? Better get creative. “Trump calls war dead losers”... what’s the non-Trump counter-narrative? Trust me, it’s not “Biden announces new policy team.” How do you compete? Trump’s ethos is “there is no such thing as bad PR”, and he is using it to maximum effect again. We must get him out of the daily news cycle by providing alternative serial narratives to build a different vision for the country.
Americans know everything they need to know about Donald Trump. Nothing he says -- no breathless new revelations -- will change anyone’s mind. This has been true for at least four years. The steady stream of stories about his craven selfishness and pathological narcissism are entertainment for you, dear reader, to distract you from the real work at hand. They’re like polls in that way. To quote Matt Taibbi, “Under Trump it became taboo to have a slow news day.”
Turn off the MSNBC. Put down the Twitter. Ignore the polls. Break your addiction to Trump Outrage. Banish your pessimism and hopelessness. Don’t let the nihilism of contemporary culture bring down that soaring American Spirit. Go on a media diet from entertainment excess. Let’s get down to the real work of this democracy:
Full participation: you’re not going to convince any Trump voters to vote for Biden. The only solution is get everyone to vote. There are a lot of people who didn’t vote last time -- hell, a lot of people don’t ever vote. In 2016, 55.5% of the voting age population actually voted. That’s right; almost half the country didn’t participate in 2016. (The last time more than 60% of Americans voted in a presidential election was 1968.) We know from the research that voting can be habit-forming… so let’s form some new habits.
Trump knows that about half of America doesn’t vote; as I mentioned in my last email, there is a short list of states where if he gets a few more non-voters to vote for him, he can be hard to beat. This is why answering Trump’s narratives and rising above them is so important. If he stimulates non-voters (which he does with his racism and outrageousness), so must Biden. Sure, young people are overwhelmingly anti-Trump, but they vote at a lower rate than older people. And for the record, in this context, I definitely qualify as “older”. (A simple test: do you understand this headline: 24kGoldn Brings MySpace Emo To TikTok Rap. I do not; ergo I am old.)
To make voting this time solely about Trump is a mistake; it’s part of how we got here in the first place. Voting can’t be about just this election. We need to be a country where everyone expects to vote; that’s what we do, we’re Americans. It’s important to make voting about where you live (I vote because I love Massachusetts! or I vote because I love America!) as opposed to partisan identity (I vote because I'm a Democrat!). The focus on community participation leads to more long-term participation and creates a much healthier civic and political culture.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it: get more people to vote for the first time -- not out of fear, but with joy.
There are plenty of parts of the country where voting is hard for various reasons (top of the list: racism) but it’s not just red states where voting is hard. I mean, for heaven’s sake, why do we vote on Tuesday? But we just gotta figure out how to do it: get more first time voters.
Beyond November: Let’s assume everybody votes. Now what? Americans on both sides are already expressing an unwillingness to accept the election outcomes. In recent polling it’s quite stark: 28% of Joe Biden’s supporters say they aren’t prepared to accept a Trump victory as fairly won; 19% of President Trump’s supporters say they aren’t prepared to accept a Biden victory as legitimate. How do you fix that?
On August 27, 2019, President Trump held a 41.3% approval rating and a 51.2% disapproval rating. Since then he’s been impeached, more than a thousand people a day die from a preventable pandemic, unemployment skyrocketed, and the country is tearing itself apart over racist police violence (to name a few of the highlights of the last year). And exactly one year later, on August 27, 2020, Trump’s approval ratings haven’t budged. Nothing. To quote Susan Glasser, “None of this, apparently, has any electoral consequence.” Imagine you’re President Joe Biden: what do you do? Any ideas?
More to come, I promise. This labor day weekend, find one non-voter and register them to vote. If you need a stretch goal, find three.
Lotsa love, nicco
PS. Can you still call it a conspiracy if it goes mainstream? “One in three Republicans (33%) believe that the QAnon theory is mostly true. Another 23% of Republicans say that some parts of the QAnon conspiracy are true. Only 13% of Republicans think that it is not true at all.” [source] (If you missed it, I explained QAnon here.) The editors at BuzzFeed just announced that QAnon is too widespread to be a conspiracy theory: now they’re going to refer to it as “a collective delusion”. Remember Rule 1, folks: it will get crazier.