Category Archives: Random Blogging

Political Attention Deficit Disorder

The problem isn’t the message. It’s getting people to hear the message.

While pundits and strategists wring their hands and insist that the Democrats have “a messaging problem,” that diagnosis misstates the real problem. Chris Hayes recently–and accurately–wrote an essay for the New York Times (which, to ironically emphasize his point, MAGA folks are highly unlikely to read), in which he quite accurately described our information environment, where the problem isn’t the message, it’s getting people to hear the message.

Take the national election in 2024. Hayes (again, in my view, quite accurately) asserts that the Harris-Walz campaign’s message was fine. The campaign not only spent ample money on advertising, it concentrated that effort in the swing states–and as a result, swing state voters were less likely to defect to Trump than in non-swing states. “And the message of those ads was in line with a lot of what many critics have suggested — focused on core economic issues and framed in populist terms, with Kamala Harris portrayed as an ally of the working class.”

In other words, even though she lost, her core problem was not her message, however imperfect it might have been. It was an inability to get enough people to hear it, in spite of record-breaking advertising spending. If Mr. Trump had not run a single paid advertisement in the race, he almost surely would have dominated the single most important resource of our age: attention. Democrats need to win the attention contest in 2026 and beyond if they want to win back the country.

And winning attention is a lot harder than it used to be.

For one thing, as Hayes notes, ever since Teddy Roosevelt coined the term “bully pulpit,” the political party that doesn’t control the White House has struggled to match the agenda-setting power of the presidency. And as he also points out, today’s asymmetry is more daunting and profound than ever, because Trump has a “feral, almost pathological genius for getting people to talk about him, and to a degree that his supporters find thrilling and his opponents find suffocating, he dominates the nation’s and the world’s attention.”

As I have often argued on this blog and elsewhere, the fragmentation of our information environment frustrates efforts to communicate with a broad and diverse public. Not only have we lost the community newspapers that were widely trusted, and that accurately if scantily reported national news along with the results of the last City Council vote, not only do we have national mass media news that is little more than propaganda (think Fox and Sinclair); people use the Internet to confirm their biases rather than to access sources of vetted journalism.

Add to that–as one of the commenters to this blog regularly reminds us– the national penchant for entertainment. Given a choice between a football game and a news program–or a choice between a concert and a lecture–millions of Americans will happily choose the game or the concert. Hayes’ advice to Democrats is to “go everywhere”–to appear in forums that are untraditional. Podcasts, television shows, places where candidates talk “off-script” and  with “lots of different kinds of interlocutors.”

And in our social media age, he emphasizes the need to post. Constantly.

It’s not just how you campaign and which outlets you talk to, though. Successful campaigns must prioritize producing content. One thing successful content creators will tell you about excelling in the world of digital attention is that there’s no penalty for quantity. No one checks your percentages — only your total numbers. You need to always be posting if you want a better chance of things going viral or at least ending up in the algorithmic slipstream that shoots it out to millions of eyeballs. So Democratic campaigns and candidates should be thinking about how their campaigns are going to produce a lot of attention-grabbing short-form videos to meet the most disengaged and youngest voters where they are.

He points to candidates who have effectively used social media–Mamdani in New York, AOC, a North Carolina candidate. Hayes also counsels candidates not to be risk-averse, not to worry about negative attention. (The proof of that recommendation has to be Donald Trump, who–despite his demonstrable lack of mental acuity–was evidently born knowing that any and all publicity is good publicity.)

As Hayes argues, the public has become distracted and distractible, and gaffes, controversial and even offensive statements  no longer matter the way they did. When people are distracted, they rarely recall anything but the name.

And we’re all distracted all the time now.

Comments

No News Is Definitely NOT Good News

A friend recently sent me a link to Northwestern University’s “State of Local News.” It was incredibly depressing. It also provides an answer to the question so many of us repeatedly pose: how can people believe X or Y? The answer, it turns out, is simple: they have no access to contrary information–or, for that matter, any contemporary news coverage that can credibly be labeled journalism.

Here is the first paragraph of the report’s Executive Summary: the emphases are mine.

Our first State of Local News report, published in 2016, examined the local news landscape across America over the previous 10 years, taking data from 2005 as its starting point. Now, in the project’s 10th year, we are able to look back through the past two decades and see dramatic transformations in the ecosystem of local news. Almost 40% of all local U.S. newspapers have vanished, leaving 50 million Americans with limited or no access to a reliable source of local news. This trend continues to impact the media industry and audiences nationwide. Newspapers are disappearing at the same rate as in 2024; more than 130 papers shut down in the past year alone. Newspaper employment is sliding steadily downward. And although there has been some growth in stand-alone and network digital sites, these startups remain heavily centralized in urban areas, and they have not been appearing fast enough to offset the losses elsewhere. As a result, news deserts – areas with extremely limited access to local news – continue to grow. In 2005, just over 150 counties lacked a source of local news; today, there are more than 210. Meanwhile, the journalism industry faces new and intensified challenges including: shrinking circulation and steep losses of revenue from changes to search and the adoption of AI technologies, while political attacks against public broadcasters threaten to leave large swaths of rural America without local news.

There are many reasons for the urban/rural divide, and access to reliable information is one of them.

According to the report, there has been a steady increase in the number of counties that are “news deserts” – defined as areas that lack consistent local reporting. The project found that 213 U.S. counties lack any local news source, an increase from the 206 such counties it found last year. And you have to wonder just how much “news” is delivered In the 1,524 counties having only a weekly newspaper. As the project reports, that leaves some 50 million Americans who have limited or no access to local journalism.

It isn’t just the rural areas of the country, although the problem is most severe in rural America. The disappearance of local news sources has been especially pronounced in the suburbs of large cities where, the report tells us, “hundreds of papers have merged together. The papers that remain look profoundly different than just a few decades ago, with significantly consolidated ownership and reduced print frequencies.”

One result of rural Americans’ diminished access to information has been an increased dependence on public broadcasting. So in July, Congress rescinded more than $1 billion that a previous Congress had allocated to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

As a direct result, all federal funding to local NPR and PBS member stations vanished. This leaves hundreds of public media stations at risk of having to reduce or suspend operations – at a time when their services are increasingly vital to Americans with limited alternatives for local news, especially in rural areas. In this report, we track 342 public media stations across the country. Collectively, the signals from these stations reach into more than 90% of all U.S. counties, including 82% of news deserts, making them a crucial piece of information infrastructure within the local news ecosystem.

The effort to kill public broadcasting is quite clearly part of MAGA’s effort to control the information environment–to deprive those living in news deserts of access to information inconsistent with GOP propaganda.

There’s much more at the link, but the quoted material goes to the heart of the information problem central to America’s polarization: the consolidation of ownership– of both print news and broadcast–means that the overwhelming majority of news delivery is now in the hands of the billionaires who are part of our governing kakistocracy. Meanwhile, the lack of traditional, reliable local news sources means that millions of Americans no longer have access to credible, vetted journalism.

What’s left is the Wild West of the Internet–filled with sites that provide “news” curated to confirm the bias of the person doing “research.”

No wonder we Americans occupy alternate realities.

Comments

Remember The Golden Mean?

Remember the golden mean?

Aristotle believed that virtue occupies a middle ground between deficiency and excess. He called that middle ground “the golden mean,” and it was a key concept in his philosophy. Courage, for example, can be described as a mean between cowardice (a deficiency of courage) and recklessness (an excess).  Confidence lies between self-doubt and arrogance. Etc.

Inherent in the notion of a golden mean is the recognition that even good things can be taken too far.  The absence of a good quality is a problem we usually recognize, but (despite the adage) we less often understand that you can have too much of a good thing.

I recently came across an article from the Yale Daily News that reminded me of the importance of that golden mean. (I have no idea how I came to read the Yale Daily News….). The argument raised was hardly new; numerous scholars and historians–not to mention political pundits–have faulted America’s culture for an excess of individualism. Indeed, there is an entire philosophy, called communitarianism, built upon the premise that a good society is one in which citizens are “embedded” in the values and norms of their communities, and that the American emphasis on individual rights actually deprives us of the comforts and connections that make for a fulfilled life.

My own reading of communitarian philosophy is that it lies at the “deficiency” end of the spectrum–that the sort of society many of its proponents extol would smother creativity and penalize difference. Protecting individual rights against majority passions was, after all, one of the Founders’ most important and praiseworthy goals.

That said, the author of the linked article and many others who would not choose the degree of “embeddedness” that the communitarians appear to advocate argue that we have gone too far in the direction of excess.

As a matter of political philosophy, we, like many other countries, protect individual rights to protect the people from government overreach and maintain the mixed regime that our exceptionalism presupposes. But our politics and practices go further. They are built on the individual not just as a bearer of rights, but as the sole fundamental unit of society; in this vein, policy ideas are constantly evaluated on the basis of individuality. How does policy X affect an individual’s freedom to express their religion? How does policy Y burden an individual taxpayer?

This individualist mindset, built into the core structure of U.S. governance, is now inseparable from the American identity. I propose that our wholehearted devotion to the individualist perspective goes too far.

As the author points out, governments in much of the rest of the world have come to realize that serving the common good requires a combination of individualism and commitment to community welfare.

In America, we seem to lack the ability to prioritize the common good over individual rights, even when doing so would clearly benefit both individuals and the community. The author provides examples: the U.S. is the only Western democracy (assuming we still are a democracy) that declines to provide its citizens with universal health care. We refuse to prevent the leading cause of death for children and teens, thanks to our devotion to an individual right to bear arms. As he writes,

In America, community safety is understood — like everything else — through this same individualistic filter; the community is nothing more than a loose set of individuals. Therefore, community safety is as simple as putting weapons in the hands of each American so they can protect themselves. The American community as an end in itself is an empty concept.

This is probably not an optimum time to have this discussion–in the U.S. right now, the individual rights that do lie at the heart of the golden mean–free speech, separation of church and state, the right to due process and other protections of the rule of law– are under unremitting attack, an attack mounted primarily by a Christian Nationalist cult, and aided and abetted by a rogue Supreme Court. But it’s worth wondering whether people who were a bit more “embedded” in a system that looked out for their collective welfare–that guaranteed them access to health care, outlawed assault weapons, and provided a more robust social safety net–would be less likely to express their resentments by joining racist cults.

Devotion to the common good is entirely compatible with protection of individual rights. We just need to find the golden mean…

Comments

The Monsters In The Closet

There’s a difference between real monsters and imaginary ones. A recent essay in Lincoln Square made that point–and the further, not-so-obvious point that expending our energies fighting fictitious ones may be less unproductive than we think.

The essay began with the author explaining that he’d gotten a little girl to sleep by pretending to overpower the monsters that–in her imagination–populated her closet. As he wrote, politics works similarly. The monsters may not be real, but they’ll control the process until someone confronts them.

Every election cycle has its own bedtime story. This last one, the 2024 showdown between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, was no different. It was a close race, and Trump won it on the margins — those tight, swingy counties where a few thousand votes make democracy feel like a coin toss.

And once again, MAGA’s favorite bedtime story was about the monster in the closet. This time, it wasn’t immigrants or caravans or Critical Race Theory — it was transgender Americans.

Anti-transgender political ads flooded the airwaves, built on the same fear-based architecture Republicans have been refining since Nixon. Trump’s campaign made them a centerpiece, hammering the claim that trans athletes were destroying women’s sports and sneaking into bathrooms to terrorize little girls.

The Democrats didn’t waste much time and effort on pushing back, because the party’s polling suggested that relatively few Americans were swayed by these attacks. But as the author noted, Trump didn’t need very many. He didn’t even need 51%. He needed just enough voters to enable him to flip three counties.

As the author wrote, “That’s the Southern Strategy 2.0: Rebrand hate as “common sense,” then sell it as protection.”

In our digital age, lies can become immortal. As some wag has put it, a lie will go halfway around the world while truth is still putting on its pants. In the Wild West that is our current information environment, truth is increasingly irrelevant; repetition is what matters. In the 2024 election, those millions of dollars in targeted anti-trans messaging weren’t intended to move a majority — “just enough voters in just the right ZIP codes.”

The essay puts this strategy in historical context, finding its roots in Nixon’s Southern Strategy. That strategy has now evolved. As the author put it, the dog whistles have become baked into our reflexes. He quoted the strategy’s “prime mover,” Lee Atwater:

 “You start out in 1954 by saying n****, n*****, n*****,”* he said. “By 1968, you can’t say n**** — that hurts you. It backfires. So you start saying stuff like ‘forced busing,’ ‘states’ rights,’ and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract now that you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and the byproduct of them is that Blacks get hurt worse than whites.”*

That wasn’t a slip. It was a strategy. The racism didn’t disappear; it just learned better grammar.

If America’s current political polarization proves anything, it reminds us of the human tribal reflex to divide the world into us and them. Political strategists know that in today’s environment, the use of certain words will trigger predictable responses, and those responses aren’t reasoned — they’re conditioned. “Once fear bonds a group together, logic doesn’t even get a seat at the table.”

The essay argues that Democrats haven’t figured out how to respond to that reality, haven’t recognized that they need to confront political fears, no matter how ridiculous or imaginary those fears may seem, before they metastasize. The monster in the closet doesn’t disappear when you ignore him.

I find that argument persuasive.

What the essay doesn’t tell us, however, is just how the Democrats–and others who see the strategic use of “Othering” for what it is–are supposed to defeat it. In our current information environment, those most likely to be convinced that the monsters are real typically get their “news” from sources that confirm the existence of the monsters in the closet and the threat they pose. In order to evaluate the validity of a proposition, citizens need to hear contending perspectives–and we inhabit a world where millions of people have purposely insulated themselves against evidence that is contrary to their preferred beliefs.

There will always be some percentage of voters who feel the need for someone or something to blame for life’s disappointments, and those voters are perfect targets for the political strategists trying to convince them of the existential threat posed by the monsters in the closet.

I don’t know how we counter that, but we really need to figure it out.

Comments

The Political Divide

Libertarian friends of mine used to insist that the political spectrum is not a straight line from Left to Right, as it is often described, but a circle–and at the top of that circle, where Left and Right meet, the argument isn’t about liberty, it’s about whose agenda a powerful government should impose on the rest of us.

I’ve always agreed with that description, which is supported by another friend’s observation: there are a lot of people who simply cannot tolerate ambiguity. These are people desperate for bright lines and moral certainty, for whom inhabiting or even recognizing the existence of “gray areas” is intolerable. (That need for certainty helps to explain the appeal of fundamentalist religions.)

A recent article from Lincoln Square (a publication I increasingly consult) focused in on those observations. It was titled “The Extremes Aren’t Opposites. They’re Twins,” and it provided additional insight into the world-views of the ideologues at the top of that libertarian circle.

As the author, Trygve Olson, pointed out, assertions that the far Left and far Right are different are simply false–and if we want to save democracy, we  need to understand their shared psychology. Olson cited a study from Eastern Europe — van Prooijen & Krouwel, 2019 — that identified the four core psychological traits fueling extremism, and confirmed that they are present in both extremes of the political spectrum.

People with these mindsets are “true believers”–and they are receptive to autocracies that promise to use government to impose their beliefs on others.

The four traits are: psychological distress (the craving for certainty); cognitive simplicity (a black and white worldview);  overconfidence (belief in the superiority of their understanding); and intolerance (rejection of pluralism). The combination leaves no room for nuance, no ability to occupy–or even see–gray areas. As the essay puts it, “Every issue becomes a purity test. Every disagreement becomes a betrayal. Every opponent becomes the enemy. That’s why conspiracy theories spread so easily. They offer simple stories for a complicated world. They reduce every problem to good guys and bad guys.”

Extremists believe they are the righteous, and that people who disagree with them are morally broken. “They confuse clarity with correctness. They reject disagreement not because it’s wrong, but because it’s threatening.” That reaction–as the author correctly notes–is a characteristic of a cult, not of democratic polities. Its a characteristic that leads extremists to reject the very notion of a marketplace of ideas. What they want is an echo chamber. (While the article didn’t reference it, an echo chamber is what the Right has constructed via the extensive network of right-wing media outlets all of which obediently echo MAGA’s approved “talking points.”)

We are seeing the consequences of that extremist worldview all around us.

Once politics becomes personal identity, disagreement becomes existential. And when that happens, dissent isn’t just unwelcome — it’s dangerous.

That’s how you get threats to school board members. That’s how you justify political violence. That’s how democracies die — not with a bang, but with a crowd cheering its collapse.

It’s important that the rest of us recognize where the threat comes from. As the author says, that recognition isn’t just an academic exercise.

If we’re serious about fighting authoritarianism — not just Trumpism, but the broader global wave of illiberalism — we need to stop pretending the threat only comes from one side. It comes from anyone who plays the zero-sum game.

Democracy is win-win. Autocracy is zero-sum. And the people who reject democratic norms — whether they call themselves left or right — are playing the same game.

That means our job, as defenders of democracy, is to build a coalition of the reasonable. That includes liberals, conservatives, independents — anyone who believes in truth, pluralism, and peaceful transitions of power.

Because in the end, it’s not about left vs. right.

It’s about democracy vs. extremism.

When people fear ambiguity, they fear “the Other”–and anyone who disagrees with their particular world-view is “Other.” Think about that as we protest autocracy and demand a return to American constitutional liberties on this second “No Kings Day.”

Comments