How a fringe, far-right faction convinces us it is bigger than it is
“Democrats need to make more noise,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D) of Hawaii told Greg Sargent last week. “We have to scream from the rooftops, because this is a battle for the free world now.”
The occasion was Schatz giving Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley the Senate equivalent of a dressing-down in a floor speech last week for, writes Sargent, his “bottomless levels of bad faith” and “ludicrous grandstanding.” Democrats have yet to adjust to the fact that Republicans are no longer in office to govern. They are there to attract eyeballs and clicks.
“I have built my staff around comms rather than legislation,” Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) wrote to his new Republican colleagues in Jan 2021. It could hardly be plainer.
Depraved
Right-wing talk radio is built on attracting ears. They’ve taken Orwell’s two minutes and drawn out the daily hate to fill hours, days and weeks. Why? Because it sells Snapple and juices the Republican base. Newt Gingrich formalized demonizing opponents in the 1990s with his infamous GOPAC memo, Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.
Democrats still bring letter openers to gun fights. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell last week virtually promised not to allow confirmation hearings for any Biden Supreme Court nominees if Republicans take back the Senate next year. What did Democrats say about that? Buehler?
Sargent responds:
Yet we don’t hear enough from Democrats putting down hard emotional markers indicating that at moments like these, something is deeply amiss, and something unusually absurd and depraved is happening.
[…]
McConnell perhaps instinctively knows little noise from Democrats will break through to their voters, or alert the middle that something this unusual happened at all. Meanwhile, the vast right-wing media apparatus will keep up the drumbeat of wildly inflated hysteria about the threat of radical Democratic rule, which means threats like these will only energize Republicans more:
That tweet is from Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, who has long argued for a new focus on sheer amplification to avoid getting drowned out by the noise of the right.
Create “social proof”
Get loud or go home. Perhaps Schatz read this Dave Roberts thread from March 5. You should right now:
Lunchtime thread:
I’ve been thinking about the “Freedom Convoy” & social proof. As news-literate folks are likely aware, the convoy — which disrupted Canada for weeks & is heading toward the US — is, to a first approximation, bullshit. washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/…
By bullshit I mean: it doesn’t represent truckers, or “the working class.” It represents a familiar, small far-right faction. It is a demonstration of how the right — the RW base, RW billionaires, & RW media — works together to make this faction *appear* large.
You know how they say, when you encounter a mountain lion in the wild, you’re supposed to try to appear large? Stand up tall, raise your hands over your head, jump around, shout? Same basic principle here: use big trucks, aggressive tactics, & friendly media to appear large.
The main goal is not any particular policy outcome. The main goal, articulated or not, is to provide what sociologists call “social proof.” Social proof is a way of signaling that particular beliefs or preferences are widely held, that they have social presence & significance.
Legendarily, if you look at opinion polls, even in the ’50s, they show that most Americans were open to racial integration. But people didn’t really know that *other* people were open to it, because existing voices/institutions/practices were explicitly racist.
One important function of civil rights protests, etc. was to provide social proof – to signal to quiet integrationists that they weren’t alone, that integration was a legitimate & widely held preference. The point was to render it safe for people to “come out” as integrationists.
Social proof is also behind the contemporary push for “representation” in media. When you see gay people (or Muslims/single women/trans youth — pick your marginalized group) in culture, it signals that those groups are legitimate, part of the fabric, welcome out in the open.
It is campaign common wisdom that “signs don’t vote.” Campaign signs are costly, bulky, and not effective marketing. But perhaps that depends on what you are selling.
Doug Jones’ 2017 Senate campaign in Alabama insisted anyone who wanted a sign had to provide their name, address, phone number and email. They gave strict orders that signs go in their front yards and nowhere else. Their strategy was to give Republican neighbors who hadn’t voted for a Democrat in decades … the permission to. Social proof.
I wrote ahead of the 2020 election, “A wealthy Bernie supporter here was so unnerved by the presence of Trump signs (in the absence of Clinton’s) that he himself printed and fabricated thousands of 1/4-size ‘Clinton 2016’ signs. Democrats snatched them up in days.” County roads were awash in Trump signs.
I’m not arguing for more campaign spending on yard signs. I’m arguing that people respond to social proof. Even over-savvy lefties. Maybe we should pay more attention to providing it. And not just for convincing voters.
Relatively malleable
Roberts continues (emphasis mine):
The right is incredibly good at using social proof — quite simply, *getting attention* — to exaggerate the size of the RW base & the prevalence of its views. (See: the Tea Party.) Reactionary views/people have representation in news media wildly out of scale w/ their numbers.
The right does this with protests like the convoy, but also by using its giant coordinated media machine to force RW tropes & arguments into the mainstream, though volume & repetition. Look how it spun the CRT controversy out of nothing into a ubiquitous national issue.
What I think the right understands on an instinctive level is that most ordinary people don’t have settled views or priorities, certainly not on political issues. They have ambivalent, contradictory views that can be easily pushed one direction or the other through exposure.
So rather than thinking all these parents had pre-existing views on CRT or systemic racism, it’s more accurate to think they had bits & pieces, intuitions & scraps of info, that could be *shaped & directed* into something coherent through social proof.
But — and this is super, super important — all those parents also had *other* bits & pieces & intuitions & scraps of info that could have been shaped & directed into *different* coherent views. Most non-political-obsessive people are relatively malleable.
What happened is, the right reached them with a coordinated set of “facts” & anecdotes; it signaled to them with school board meeting protests & parent lawsuits; it provided them with copious social proof. And the left just didn’t. Instead it just sputtered defensively.
The left’s utter incompetence at providing this kind of social proof is among my many ongoing sources of angst. But I’ve been thinking about it recently in a particularly acute way, because of what’s going on in Russia.
One way of interpreting this episode is as a rather obvious, on-the-nose lesson about the dangers of fossil fuel dependence. It’s a pretty natural way of seeing it! The world is hamstrung in responding to Russia’s aggression because
Russia has it by the balls. Russia has the world by the balls because of its copious natural gas production. To the extent the world uses less gas, it frees itself of Russia’s grip & can do far more to push back against its aggression. This isn’t a complicated message. It’s quite intuitive!
But the *logic* of the argument is not going to make the argument. This is a classic, textbook case where we need some social proof. We need to signal to Americans that this intuitive response is correct, that other people are thinking it, that it’s legitimate & urgent.
So — and here, at long last, we arrive at my point — where’s that social proof? Where’s the equivalent of the trucker convoy? Where are people doing the work to make this view *appear large*, through being loud, imposing, & aggressive, demanding attention?
I see environmental groups … issuing press releases. I see left scholars writing polite op-eds in mainstream publications.
I see a reporter confronting Psaki w/ quotes from the American Petroleum Inst., forcing her on the defensive. Where’s the journalist w/ counter-quotes?
Herd mentality
We know this: “Politicians tend to vastly overestimate just how conservative their constituents really are.” Roberts argues it is because the right is better at generating noise and attention. The right puffs itself up to look bigger and more threatening than it is. And thereby convinces politicians to give it what it wants and to balk when it is the left asking.
An ordinary American, with the ordinary brew of vague & contradictory intuitions & factoids, is looking for social proof. What’s the right way to think about & respond to this? What do “we” think? Where’s the herd heading?
And as always, always, always, most social proof is coming from the right. Fossil fuel interests are loud & aggressive. RW media is loud & aggressive. The left & supporters of clean energy are on the defensive, sputtering yet again, in what should be their moment.
This is already obnoxiously long & I need to go walk the dogs. I’ll just conclude by saying: picture the equivalent of the trucker convoy … but for accelerating decarbonization. For passing the f’ing BBB. For preserving democracy & holding seditionists accountable.
It’s difficult to imagine, isn’t it? For some reason the left just doesn’t do that stuff any more. All the theatricality, the demands for attention, the rebellious wild energy, is on the right. Dems now just come off as the boring, lecturing establishment.
Anyway. The left, especially the grassroots left, needs to think a lot more about social proof. One great place to start would be signaling that Russia’s invasion demonstrates the intense need to accelerate decarbonization & pass the BBB’s climate provisions. </fin>
A massively successful Women’s March makes our presence felt for a couple of days. What should we be doing to keep that going month after month? We don’t have to be assholes to draw attention. But we do have to be as smart and creative as we think we are.
(h/t DJ)
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free, countywide get-out-the-vote planning guide for county committees at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.