The Neverending Story

Convention season starts Monday!

Dear Friends - 

Now we’ve got a VP pick. Conventions -- or what passes for conventions in COVID-land -- come next. Mark your calendars now: the first debate is Sept. 29. I’m mildly terrified about it, but that’s for a later email.

You’re sending me a lot of feedback that this newsletter is too depressing. Somehow this surprises me. It’s all a matter of how you come to it: yes, things are nuts. We’ve all been too complacent for too long -- and now we’ve got a lot of work to do. It’s daunting but it’s thrilling: imagine what we might accomplish, what kind of country we might build! Although if Trump is re-elected, I’m going all-in on New England Secession. 

If you want some good news, this is the best thing I’ve read about local journalism in over a decade. It honestly made me happy. A new, different infrastructure for journalism is being built (slowly but surely), an approach wholly unimaginable by the old system. 

If you want to add some optimism to your news consumption, the Washington Post has an email newsletter that is just that - “The Optimist”. Of course, in fine newspaper style, they make it nearly impossible to find or sign up for, but if you scroll down this page you’ll find it. Myself, I prefer the poems to keep me focused on what’s possible. 

As for recent events:

• Do VP picks matter? As I’ve said before, no. But Kamala certainly makes me feel better.  Meanwhile Fox News insists that Biden didn’t pick Kamala. 

• I warned you: expect more hate. Mark Meadows is now the White House Chief of Staff; that means his House seat is empty. His likely successor -- the GOP nominee in a deep red district -- looks and sounds like a genuine Nazi, posting photos on social media full of giddy captions celebrating his visit to Hitler’s mountain retreat. Meanwhile, Trump nominated an ambassador to Germany opposed by Jewish advocacy groups.

• The South Carolina Senate race is looking more and more competitive. You can see my Senate horserace forecast here -- two weeks in and it’s aged pretty well.

• The GOP continues to get crazier: having won her GOP primary, another Qanon conspiracy theorist is likely to end up in the US Congress. Will there be a Conspiracy Caucus? 

I can’t get out of my head Attorney General Bill Barr’s testimony to Congress a couple weeks ago. Jim Jordan -- the ranking GOP member -- had an opening statement that included a ten minute video montage of (mostly Black) protesters, framed to appear as violent and criminal as possible. Every single GOP Member of Congress asked Bill Barr a question about crime, riots, lawlessness and “law and order”. There was a remarkable consistency in the GOP questioning. They had a clear, compelling story to be told, repeated and amplified. 

Meanwhile, the Democrats were all over the map: what about the Mueller investigation? What about the armed, unmarked federal agents on the streets of Portland? What about the firing of the NY District Attorney? What about profiting from the pandemic? While the Republicans had a simple, clear, repetitive message -- Trump is protecting us from crime -- the Democrats were diffuse, all over the map. Every question asked by a Democrat was about an important, serious issue -- but bouncing between narratives, the Democrats sounded lost.

Over the last forty years or so, the Right has built an ascendant media infrastructure -- campus newspapers, talk radio, digital outlets like Breitbart, and Fox News. User-powered social media provides more fodder and plenty of amplification, although the biggest amplifier is Fox News. Tucker Carlson’s show had a million more viewers than the NBA last week. Fox News dominates prime time ratings -- not just beating CNN and MSNBC, but also beating ABC, CBS, and NBC (even beating Law & Order!).

And what does Fox do? Carry on the narrative drumbeat of the core conservative messages: Government is the enemy (the Deep State!). The white middle class is under attack (Black people might move into your precious suburbs!).  The Democrats are godless heathens who will destroy of our way of life (to quote Barr, Democrat’s obsessive focus on victory is a “substitute for a religion”!). 

These messages are embedded in compelling stories with villains and superheroes. Current events are then dropped into these big stories to validate the core messages, reinforcing the message again and again and again, with compelling avenues for audience participation in the stories being told.   

The bending of the facts to feed meta-narratives combined with a hermetically sealed media environment (and a hefty dose of madness fed by social media) has led to the “epistemic closure” of the GOP. Unfortunately, the epistemically-challenged GOP is in charge -- of the Supreme Court, of the Senate, of the White House, and of 30 state legislatures. Not only are they in charge, but it looks to me like they’ll stay pretty strong for a while. After all, the end of any one political career does not mark any kind of end, on the contrary, for the right wing media ecosystem. It’s pretty profitable. 

Jerry Taylor (a long-time leader on the right) just wrote a deeply compelling essay on what the Democrats get wrong about power. Most interesting to me was this passage:

Finally, liberals too often confuse the critical matter of political meta-narratives with marketing and communications. Conservatives overcome the public’s tilt to the left by campaigning on a compelling, easy-to-understand mythos about American identity and its foundation in liberty, which (the right argues) is sacrificed by excessive government power. It’s a powerful creed that resonates deeply with American character, and it is reinforced by a network of conservative organizations grounded in institutions that govern people’s lives (churches, workplaces, recreational clubs, etc.).

Democrats have great difficulty producing a simple, compelling creed to rival this mythos, and lack the institutional organs necessary to pound a liberal creed home to the public. Consequently, they invest huge sums of money in marketing research and communications strategies premised on granular surveys of public opinion to inform their meta-narratives in any given election. This is problematic because voters, despite their liberal tilt, have few firm and informed opinions about public policy, and no coherent ideology to speak of.

Not only does the right have the infrastructure (including Fox), but they’ve got the storytelling. As Gabriel London points out, treating the news as a serialized narrative allows audiences to play a part in an evolving drama, where they can shape how the story ends. This has been most explicitly tracked in the rise of the Tea Party movement (which began on cable television, nurtured by Fox News), but definitely includes the rise of Donald Trump as an answer to the long-running right wing narrative about failed government (a self fulfilling prophecy if ever there was one).

I could go on and on about the media and its miserable role in our politics. (Don’t even get me started on Rupert Murdoch, who has mostly escaped scrutiny in this entire epoch of history, despite having had a greater role in shaping it than perhaps any other human being.) But I’m more interested in where we go from here. The Democratic Party is a party without the simple stories and narratives we need. We don’t have the magnetic, serialized narratives that draw people in and energize them towards action. Lately I’ve been toying around with the idea of an “American Narrative Project” to lay this groundwork. If you’re interested, email me and let’s talk.

 Lots of love, nicco

PS. Not to freak you out or anything, but since my last email the Post Office has started deactivating mail sorting machines for no apparent reason; meanwhile Virginia managed to send out a bunch of mail-in ballots with the wrong return address. Did I mention we’re a failed state?