Thread by @PnictogenHorses

two best-selling books, both decades old, warned us what #marketing would do to #politics. (I'm sure that many others books did the same—maybe better—but these are the two we know.)

the first was Vance Packard's "The Hidden Persuaders" from 1957.

archive.org/details/hidden…

(1/x)

Packard's text is a popular treatise on "psychological advertising"—inducing people to buy products for *irrational* reasons, by appealing to their buried fears and traumas.

Packard writes about many aspects of this new #marketing method of exploiting human weaknesses.

(2/x)

the insidious thing about the "psychological" method of #marketing is that the advertising method, i.e. manipulation of human fears, is completely dissociated from the product itself. one may use fears and traumas to sell *literally anything*, even @bariweiss or @elonmusk.

(3/x)

Mr. Packard justly feared that this universal technique for manipulating people would make mincemeat of American politics.

if candidates could be sold like any product, merely by using psychological #marketing manipulation...didn't that make their *policies* irrelevant?

(4/x)

the other book I mentioned, Joe McGinnis's "The Selling of the President 1968", was a specific inquiry into the marketing methods employed by the campaign of Mr. Richard Nixon (@dick_nixon). it is fair to say that Nixon owed his political career to such canny use of media.

(5/x)

archive.org/details/sellin…

Mr. Nixon needed *slick packaging* in order for the American people to accept him as a candidate for national office. he had a lot of "negatives", as they say—he was not perceived as a charismatic or magnetic speaker without the help of TV magic.

(6/x)

decades later Mr. @AndrewYang continues to attempt a rather similar feat—presenting himself in carefully rehearsed and scripted contexts that are shot and stylized to look spontaneous: the artistry of television drama, but applied to a political campaign and to a *person*.

(7/x)

Mr. @elonmusk has benefited from similar public-relations magic. his relentless self-marketing and "product placement" in popular media—sometimes appearing himself, in juxtaposition with Hollywood celebrities and heroes—has made #ElonMusk (undeservedly) a household name.

(8/x)

but no one person in politics benefited more from this commercialization of politics, the transformation of political candidates from aspiring legislators into slickly marketed celebrities, than @RonaldReagan, the vacantly grinning @GOP superstar President of the 1980s.

(9/x)

Reagan was already a celebrity of this sort, albeit a faded and ludicrous one, but that was enough for the @GOP to capitalize on—in the topsy-turvy world of politics, even faded and ludicrous celebrities like Donald Trump or @RonaldReagan are salable as political royalty.

(10/x)

what did @RonaldReagan actually believe? the details hardly mattered. he was scripted and rehearsed and *moulded* into what the @GOP wanted him to be. they sold him to the public as though he were a real-life cowboy even though he merely an actor of little distinction.

(11/x)

the future that Vance Packard feared in 1957 came true in 1980 with @RonaldReagan: at last, we had been sold a completely *empty* President, someone who was a mere vessel to be filled with extremist #conservative diatribe supplied by unelected nabobs like @Peggynoonannyc.

(12/x)

the marketing was *so effective* that @Peggynoonannyc could get away with praising her own work—she was the hand up Mr. @RonaldReagan's backside, feeding him the words to say, but in her fulsome editorializing about "The Great Communicator" only Reagan got any billing.

(13/x)

that was necessary for the illusion to work; it was necessary to keep people's minds off the fact that @RonaldReagan was, in fact, _scripted_ by someone, and not actually in very much control of his words.

I suppose that came to seem *comforting*, the more senile he got.

(14/x)

#marketing clearly is the villain here—to be sure, @elonmusk and @RonaldReagan and the @GOP are all villains, but none of them would be anywhere without "psychological advertising". they are all beneficiaries of the same mind-manipulation techniques Packard wrote about.

(15/x)

there's a *reason* why greedy chumps like @APompliano and @saylor, and b!goted chumps like @Timcast and @MattWalshBlog, think that Mr. @elonmusk is a genius and the greatest human being who ever lived: they've been *taught* to think in such puerile, nursery-school terms.

(16/x)

we have all, in our ways, been taught and drilled into obedience to crude and simplistic worldviews—about political power and leadership, about invention and innovation, about science and technology, *all* of it.

#marketing and #advertising traffics in such crudities.

(17/x)

the #marketing person, the person who dedicates their life to #advertisement and #publicrelations, wishes the general public's minds and imaginings to *stay* crude and simplistic—it makes sales pitches so much easier and more effective if everyone's kept stupefied.

(18/x)

we have let these people have their way with us for *far* too long.

we shouldn't get too angry at Mr. @elonmusk per se. he simply happened to be the right person to fit the right #marketing slot—if it hadn't been him, it'd be @RichardBranson or @JeffBezos or @BillGates.

(19/x)

any one of these people could have been *packaged* for us as a corporate "genius", the sole hope of humanity. that was Vance Packard's fear—that *anyone*, any leader or executive, could be sold to the people not on their merits, but through pure _manipulation_.

(20/x)

#marketing shaped us all into people who craved a phony science-wiz superhero like Mr. @elonmusk.

I daresay it's high time we all start *unshaping* ourselves. we have been _conned_. we have been sold a bill of goods—for Mr. #ElonMusk is no genius.

~Mona Drafter of Pnictogen

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