One last follow up from my last post. I want to address the subject of whether Democrats can ever learn to be competitive in rural areas. Indivisible Rural Caucus found that the most successful candidate in rural areas were ones who were well-known in the community, had strong ties to the community, were able to build local organizations and address local issues. I said that if this meant that Democrats can set aside demands for ideological purity* and (re)learn to do retail politics I thought it would be a very healthy development.
To some extent, it comes down to a question of whether you can beat message discipline with message indiscipline.
And the question of whether you can beat message discipline with message indiscipline itself leads to the larger issue and central paradox of the asymmetries in today's politics -- the paradox of centralization.
Liberals for all too long have placed too many eggs in the presidential basket and assumed that once we elect a Democrat as president he (or she) will have a free hand to make policy. This, in turn, see politics and policy in top-down terms. The President makes policy and dictates it to the country and the country falls in line. Conservatives complain, with some justification, that this top-down dictation of policy is authoritarian.
What has actually happened every time a Democrat is elected President is that Republicans put up massive resistance from all levels. From votes in Congress to Senate filibusters to debt ceiling crises to defiant state governments to "constitutional" county sheriffs, resistance has been extremely broad-based, and therefore extremely hard to overcome in our system of highly decentralized political power.
But while Republicans have shown great ability to mobilize grassroots politics at all levels, they are extremely centralized in a different way -- their message. This, in turn, comes from the right-wing media, which has great message discipline. I am not going to hunt for the link, but I was most impressed by someone who watched and compared Fox and MSNBC. The difference was not merely one of ideology, nor did he see all that great a difference in quality. The real difference was that Fox commentators all conveyed the same message in different ways, while MSNBC commentators were all conveying separate and unrelated messages.
And it is not just Fox. In general, when the right wing decides on a party line, before long the entire right wing media are all saying the same thing. Soon right wing politicians -- at all levels -- all join in. The same message hits over an over. Certainly it is repeated by the party faithful. But it leaks out of the right wing echo chamber into Sunday talk shows and other mainstream outlets, all on the same note. Soon everyone who follows the right wing news has the story and everyone else hears it at least as one side. On one side -- a unified phalanx. On the other -- confusion.
So what do we do about this? I have heard two main proposals. One is to start adopting our own message discipline. Have all MSNBC commentators start singing on the same note and Democratic politicians repeat the same message on Sunday talk shows and continue to echo through liberal think tanks and other outlets. That will doubtless be effective in rallying the party faithful, but it will not reach people in the Fox News ghetto.
Another alternative is to deliberately cultivate message indiscipline. Approach each election as separate and individual and learn to hit on the issues that lie outside Fox News' purview. Fox News can convince local voters of the importance of school boards banning critical race theory from the local schools and sheriffs refusing to enforce national gun laws. But if the biggest local issue is actually how to rebuild after a forest fire, neither critical race theory nor guns are much use. Show that you are really good at rebuilding after the forest fire, and maybe voters can tolerate some heterodoxy on other issues.
Can this be made to work? I think the jury is still out on that. It appears to have been effective in the 2018 midterms. Instead of all singing on the same note, Democratic candidates all crafted their messages to appropriate local concerns. The right wing noise machine was frustrated, unable to counter so many disparate messages at the same time. Of course, that also makes it extremely difficult for national organizations to manage, while local organizations lack resources. So maybe this is wishful thinking on my part.
At the same time, after making a poor showing in the 2022 midterms, some Republicans started to wonder whether "be as crazy as possible" is as effective a message as they thought. Some of them started to think maybe it was best to tailor their message to the needs of their local constituency. In other words, some Republicans started to consider the merits of message indiscipline.
And allow me to say that if Republicans, too, can be persuaded to adopt message indiscipline, if local elections can stop being nationalized, and, in short, if ideology starts to fragment to match our highly fragmented power structure, maybe at last we can move past the rigid polarization that is destroying our country.
_____________________________________
*I am not altogether confident with the Indivisible Rural Caucus. Leaders insist on giving their pronouns. In giving advice how to argue for abortion in rural area, they offer messaging strategies like encouraging members not to be afraid to say abortion instead of taking refuge in euphemisms like "choice," "reproductive health," and the like, and to be sure we talk about pregnant "people" or "folks" instead of women. This sounds a lot more like an attempt at woke message discipline than a serious attempt to appeal to people in rural communities.
No comments:
Post a Comment