Nothing is more fundamental to the worldview of the Very Online, over-educated, hyper-verbal, A-student left than the notion that WORDS ("messaging") are the skeleton key to politics, the answer to every political challenge. Nothing can dissuade them from this belief.
All right I'm gonna stop tweeting today but I gotta clarify the above, since "messaging" tends to conflate two distinct things. On one hand there's message development -- finding clever/viral/sticky/effective combinations of words & phrases. On the other hand ...
... there's message distribution, i.e., the mechanics of getting the message to, & into the heads of, the public.
It is the first that lefties tend to fixate on. It's what they spend their time online doing & often mistake for actual politics. They're all experts at it.
It is the first that lefties tend to fixate on. It's what they spend their time online doing & often mistake for actual politics. They're all experts at it.
But it is the second that actual does the work of changing political outcomes. It is the second that matters above all. And the second is driven, not by cleverness, but by *money & power*. It takes money & power to establish a sprawling message machine like the right's.
If you have the money & power to reach voters, you can repeat just about ANY message enough to make it stick. The repetition is doing the work, not the cleverness. It's a brute force game & the right has a machine that brute forces their message to every single committed R voter.
Dems spend hours (& $$$millions) carefully studying survey data & focus groups, looking for messages that "work" ... & then inconsistently & sporadically loft those messages into the MSM, hoping they will eventually reach voters. No reach, no discipline, no repetition.
"Dems should say X instead of Y" -- which comprises ~90% of left-leaning political commentary -- almost never gets at the core of the issue. The core of the issue is that Dems haven't spent the money/power necessary to build a messaging network ...
... capable of carrying their messages directly to the people they need to reach and repeating those messages ad nauseum until they are embedded in the collective subconscious. Yes, on some level that is a "messaging" problem, but not one that can be solved with cleverness.
So sure, rando tweeters, be amateur messaging experts. (It's fun!) But philanthropists & funders, please, stop flushing millions down the toilet of yet another round of focus groups, yet another Lakoff-wannabe wielding dubious social science. Build the machine! </fin>
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