“Signs don’t vote” is campaign-ese for dismissing armchair partisans’ need for planting a candidate yard sign on their lawns. In recent cycles, national campaigns that once gave away the clunky advertising now charge money for them early and distribute the few free ones so late in the campaign that it makes partisans nervous that their favs’ campaigns are floundering.
The quantity of Trump signs sprouting outside city limits in 2016 so alarmed one early Bernie Sanders supporter here that he paid to create and distribute a couple of thousand small Hillary Clinton signs.
“Do you think Trump can win?” Democrats asked nervously as November approached.
Don’t worry, we said. Signs don’t vote.
We should have listened to H.L. Mencken‘s riposte about underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
In similar fashion, Andriy Yermak from Ukraine Ukrainian President Zelensky’s office warns against underestimating the brutality of the Russian army the way people underestimated Ukrainian bravery. Russian atrocities mount as the port city of Mariupol is “reduced to ashes.”
Russian attacks, Yermak writes in the Washington Post, have
… left hundreds of thousands of residents without food, clean water, electricity and communications. More than 1,200 civilians have been murdered. Russia violated an agreement on a humanitarian corridor almost before it began. This is how it wages wars. It did it in Grozny in 1999 and in Syria in 2015. Now, it is doing it in Ukraine. This is a scorched-earth campaign to wipe Ukraine — its people, its culture, its history — off the map.
What the two tales have in common is our tendency to misread opponents until it is too late. Clinton did. (I did.) Or else not to learn our lessons. See: Grozny and Aleppo.
Dan Pfeiffer in his newsletter this morning cautions that the American far right’s fondness for Vladimir Putin “is closer to mainstream GOP thinking than many would have you believe.” He proposes four reasons the right cannot quit Putin:
1. Addicted to Strength: The concept of strength is the axis on which Republican politics has long rotated. Every Republican political campaign is about portraying the GOPer as strong and the Democrat as weak. This is why so much hay was made of Michael Dukakis’s tank photo op. Republicans worked hard to undermine John Kerry’s military service, and pushed false narratives about the health and cognitive abilities of Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. The type of strength and how it is used is irrelevant. When strength at all costs is emphasized at the expense of empathy, compassion, and morals, Putin can become the ideal leader for a morally bankrupt political party.
2. An Apocalyptic Mentality: The public tends to gravitate towards strongman-like figures out of fear. And fear is a central feature of Republican messaging. Watch any GOP campaign ads or consume Right Wing media and experience a constant stream of apocalyptic imagery. America is under ceaseless assult from immigrants, terrorists, criminals, and an array of non-White bogey men and women. Partly, this is a political strategy designed to keep the shrinking, mostly White GOP in a rabid state. According to a January NPR/Ipsos poll, 47 percent of Republicans strongly agree that “America is in crisis and at risk of failing” compared to 29 percent of Democrats
The driving force in the politics of fear is that before too long White people will represent a minority of Americans and the dominant political position that many believe is their birthright is at risk. Putin’s restorative nationalism is appealing to this segment of the population. His death grip on power and aims to restore the Soviet Union is essentially a platform to Make Russia Great Again. Supporting Trump doesn’t necessarily equate to becoming a political apologist, but the sentiments driving the very Far Right to embrace Trump above all else are the same sentiments causing the folks to side with Putin right now.3. White Power: There is something grossly ironic about the America First movement idolizing a former KGB agent trying to reestablish America’s greatest adversary. But “America First,” really means “White America First.” As Emily Tamkin wrote in the New York Times: “Many of the admirers of the world’s strongmen on the American right appear to believe that the countries each of these men lead are beacons of whiteness, Christianity and conservative values… The white nationalist Richard Spencer has referred to Russia as ‘the sole white power in the world.’” Matthew Heimbach, a founder of the Traditionalist Worker Party, told The Times in 2016, “I see President Putin as the leader of the free world.” As the nomination of Trump indicates, the White nationalist fringes of the Republican Party are the tail that wags the dog. If you are skeptical about the central role of race, ask yourself why the Far Right loves Putin and Orban but disdains Xi Jinping of China? Pay close attention to what they are saying today in order to be prepared for tomorrow.
4. The Perverse Incentives of the Internet Attention Economy: Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and Tucker Carlson have a lot in common. One of these commonalities is an inherent understanding of how to get and maintain attention in a media ecosystem powered by outrage. There is financial and political incentive to say outrageous things that generate backlash. You get attention for what you said and then you get to scream “cancel culture” when people get mad. The anger and outrage fuels the algorithms pushing your content to even more people, lining your pocket and increasing your political power. So, if you are looking for someone to blame, feel free to add Mark Zuckerberg and other tech folks to your list.
Maya Angelou is perhaps over-quoted on believing when people show you who they are. Mencken’s quote is often forgotten. Trumpism and Jan. 6 and vote-rigging legislation and Putin-philia have shown us again and again who many of our neighbors are and we fail to believe them. That’s on us. Like Russia, they keep waving it in our faces.
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