Thread by @deontologistics

'Talent' is a place holder term: a promissory note for some more concrete conception of ability, yet to be articulated. The same might be said of 'electability'. When the Labour right repeats these terms without even trying to cash them out, they're running on intellectual fumes.

https://twitter.com/HealthUntoDeath/status/1361944611099451400

It's particularly telling that the one original term they had for Starmer's talent was 'forensic', which by now has been widely and rightly mocked. This is because it shows how incoherent their conception of political communication is.

Corbyn was repeatedly painted as and criticised for not being a man of the people, for being unable to communicate with anyone outside of the metropolitan bubble of urban millennial progressives. There wasn't nothing to these criticisms, but they were mostly performative.

This is to say that they were signalling 'anyone outside of this demographic *shouldn't* listen to this man' and this helped boost the same messages that were relentlessly and successfully spread by the right-wing press in those areas that switched between 2017 and 2019.

Corbyn is actually an incredibly good communicator in person, precisely because he has an effortless authenticity that's hard to attack in the usual way (i.e., calling out hypocrisy). Yet this clashed with other aspects of his leadership role as a *mediated* public communicator.

His early success was largely due to the fact that *who he is* made him unintelligible to those who were opposed to him in principle, and this gave him a certain armour that worked well until 2017. Once they found the chinks in that armour, he couldn't pivot to be someone else.

But who the fuck thinks being 'forensic' is an important communicative skill in a public leadership role? I say this as someone who has cultivated a talent for intellectual autopsy. This isn't the talent needed to communicate with those groups that were dissuaded from Corbyn.

Doing well in the debating society environment of PMQs is a useful skill, but it really isn't the exemplary skill when selecting a party leader qua locus of public communication. If you think so, it's because this is how *you* like to be communicated to, pure and simple.

Starmer is what you get when journalists confuse speaking for the people with speaking for the political class, as the crucial *mediating* link in the communicative ecology of the political system. The debating society set get a vicarious thrill from watching Keir on PMQs.

Journalists will speak even when they have nothing useful to say, and they're very good at rationalising wasting 3,000 words saying 'this makes me feel seen' by passing it off as 'look at this great communicator'. Once more, there is supposedly 'talent' here, but wtf even is it?

There are no doubt lots of talents that must be cultivated in order to survive on writing gigs in the London media scene, but do they amount to the ability to understand, articulate, and present complex political ideas to people outside of it? Turns out the answer is no.

The right has a functional press: an army of hacks who are paid because they deliver the goods, who specialise in generating propaganda capable of pulling and holding together a political coalition sufficient to win elections. The left demonstrably does not.

The slow transformation of The Guardian into a competitor to the NYT sits at the centre of a centrist storm of people passing off West Wing fanfiction as commentary on world events. There are good voices mixed up in all this, but they're often drowned out by the liberal din.

There are some important and long running attempts to bootstrap not just the media we deserve, but the media we desperately need (e.g., @novaramedia and @thetribunechd). If we want to avoid the living death of bluetick brainworms, we need to support these and cultivate more. 🖖