On Democrats fighting the last war
Trying to teach Yellow Dogs new tricks sometimes seems pointless. With few exceptions, Democrats always seem to be fighting the last war because that’s the one they learned on. Brian Beutler sees it too.
Beutler perceives that social media has fundamentally shifted our political ground:
When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 on the strength of a media feeding frenzy over emails, it dawned on me that either my intuitions about partisan politics had been wrong, or something fundamental had changed. With the benefit of hindsight, I soon came to see the 2014 midterm campaign as a precursor. Republicans back then turned a closely fought election into a blowout in the final stretch by fanning a different media feeding frenzy—this one over a far-off outbreak of Ebola.
[…]
All of this happened because Republicans situated themselves to win an information war in 2014, then situated themselves to win another information war in 2016. I had simply been underestimating the effectiveness of their antics.
What allowed Democrats to win in 2018 and 2020 were not material conditions but “contagious ideas.” We could use some about now.
“A huge recession in 2008 drove the incumbent party from power,” Beutler writes, and the slow recovery precipitated the 2010 backlash. All fitting predictive models. Then social media took off.
The media once measured the economy by a standard set of metrics, whatever “gloom and doom” Republicans spread. But the right had fewer tools for spreading them. Today the Net is a toxic smorgasbord while collective media literacy has remained weak. (Undermining liberal arts and civics education has helped that, I’d add.)
“Within that glut, the lines between professional journalism and all other media have blurred, and liberal political elites were unprepared for it,” Beutler continues. All of the radical shifts in how people receive and process information off screens has occured in the last 15 years, he argues (emphasis mine):
While we weren’t paying attention, Republicans created a politics for the attention economy. Democrats are doing politics like it’s 1999. More generously, they’ve built politics around the insight that “the internet isn’t real life” and stuck with it for many years, even as the assumption itself has become less and less true.
Ask those beaten and injured in the “Be There. Will Be Wild!” insurrection if the internet isn’t real life.
This paragraph evokes memories:
Even before Republicans became terminally online, Democrats were no great visionaries about the power of the internet. When I began my career in online journalism almost 19 years ago, Democrats on Capitol Hill were quicker than Republicans to make small adjustments for it. But they were very small and very reluctant. It was common practice for Democrats to leave their standard communications operations intact, but create tiny, isolated digital-media outreach teams to contend with their online critics and allies. Real news and information was for the capital-J Journalists; “bloggers” (emphasis always on the “blah”) had to contend with the 22-year old staffer who had an RSS feed and no useful information to share. Over many years and under a lot of pressure, these teams typically became integrated. But the disdain lingered—many of the same people run the Democratic Party today. And under their watch, Republicans became savvier about the online world and overtook the left.
Before then, back when conservatives scheduled their Right Online conferences for the same dates and cities as Netroots Nation (2008-2011?), they held digital trainings that seemed to amount to teaching senior citizens how to “log on.” Ah, the good old days. We bloggers were DFHs then. Still are.
And this is ultimately why I’m not so sanguine about Republicans voting to formalize their baseless Biden impeachment inquiry. It’s why I suspect media is largely responsible for breaking the relationship between economic fundamentals and public sentiment, and why I don’t take it for granted that happier tidings will wash over the public in the coming months (though, of course, I hope they do).
Most liberals see factual realities—of Biden’s unimpeachable conduct, or the economy’s resiliency—and assume they must break through to the masses at some point. I see artifacts of yet-more information wars that could cost Democrats a fateful election once again.
I have to interject yet again that this information war is an asymmetrical one. When people ask why the Democrats don’t have a messaging infrastructure as vast and as disciplined as the GOP’s, I remind them that the GOP doesn’t have one either. It just appears that way because Republicans are so well-supplied with information armaments by a network of billionaire-funded think tanks and billionaire-owned media outlets. Democrats are Ukrainians fending off Russia without support from NATO and the U.S.
Another problem is that Democrats are not as plucky and improvisational as the “outmatched” Ukrainian Army. Decades after the advent of near-universal early voting, their election organizing still echoes the days when precinct captains were tasked with turning out neighborhood voters in a single-day, fourteen-hour marathon. Like 1999, if not 1969. They’ve been slow to up their game at the county level.
It’s Happy Hollandaise Time! You help keep lit this beacon of sanity.