Welcome to the sixth edition of the Daily Meme, a guide to what's going on online and which memes, or 'viral blog sound bites', are powerful. The interpretation here is of course subjective, but it's based on which memes gather the most responses in comment boards on popular blogs. To subscribe, email matthewnstoller@yahoo.com. Though I guess I'm a Clark supporter, I try to remain nonpartisan (well in the Democratic primary process) about memes, because memes are my pride and joy. Yes. I did write that last sentence. I am now sad. The last Daily Meme was here.
The two meme themes emergent over the past three weeks are the angry Democrat versus the disappointed voter, and the disappearing Clark versus the winner Dean. Bush has pretty much stayed ineffective, hoping the economy will get better, saying Iraq is getting better, and gradually losing his grip over the media establishment.
Written Off Bush
For the past few weeks, the tough decisions meme has basically disappeared. The tough decisions meme, for those who don't obsessively read and reread the way-too-irregularly published Daily Meme, basically says that yes, the President makes bad decisions, but at least they are tough decisions. You know, decisions that Clinton couldn't or wouldn't make, like having the bravery and vision to fall off a Segueway. The give me more time it's working meme, focused on the fact the tax cuts aren't working and the war in Iraq is unworking, spunoff into the things are getting better in Iraq, really and the bizarre things are getting better and anyone who says they aren't is responsible for the fact that they aren't and the even more bizarre it's the CIA's fault for telling and not telling us about WMDs. These are all desperation memes, and the front page of the New York Times is finally reflecting the administration's incompetence. But it doesn't matter because no one's made it matter. Yet.
The Plame factoid, which hasn't disappeared so much as been subsumed into a larger media culture of resigned acceptance of mass criminality, has somehow been trumped by the $87 billion he said/she said dumbness in funding for Iraq. Now, the Democratic nominees don't trust the President because he tends to screw things up a lot, so you would think that they could make a case that having a huge appropriations bill rammed down their throat giving lots of sweet cash to Halliburton would be a good opportunity to take the President to task. Also, most Americans don't support the bill, and there's a massive spy scandal involving high ranking administration officials. So opposition would be popular, right?
Aha, don't worry Mr. President, The Democrats will NEVER EVER do anything right EVER meme has galloped to the meme-rescue. So has the phenomenon of Brooks Republicans that live on the editorial page of the New York Times and the New Republic, who wish that the Democrats would oppose the President for principled reasons instead of just partisan ones. It's so sad, really, as the President isn't doing a very good job, but hey, you know how you criticize him for not doing a good job, well you should really listen to Lieberman who only whispers that he might have mistepped here and there but only in polite and private company. Otherwise it's partisan, you know. Not good partisan, but bad Democratic partisan (hiss). The Liberal hatred is out of control meme has really reduced the sack of the current candidates, with the possible exception of Dean. After all, if there's something craven about taking us to war based on fraud and impugning the patriotism about your political opponents for electoral gain, there's something even more craven about attempting to take political advantage of the guy who's taking us to war based on fraud and impugning the patriotism of his political opponents based on fraud. It's kind of like the kid who expects a cookie for telling on his classmates beating up the retarded kid. It's too horrible for any rewards, and calls for an adult in the room.
On the other hand, the Republicans are thoroughly corrupt meme is just sitting there, big, ugly and resonant. It's impossible for there not to be some reaction to the everything's great in Iraq because the explosions are so pretty meme dishonesty; in fact, it's becoming a sort of spectator sport called Can they surpise us and out-vicious themselves again? The answer always seems to be yes. Yes, again. That second one touches on an important factoid I will briefly touch on, the increasing anger and stronger memes surrounding the Floriditization of our voting systems.
Ok, so Bush has been written off as doing a bad job. But he may yet win in 2004, because the opposition can still lose more. Tom Friedman, paragon of 'the I used to know something before I started to pretend to know everything' punditry industry, writes this incredible paragraph, incredible because of its meme-intensity:
"I've often pointed out the good we have done in Iraq and unabashedly hoped for more. No regrets. But some recent trends leave me worried. Unfortunately, there are few Democrats to press my worries on the administration. Most Democrats either opposed the war (a perfectly legitimate position) or supported it and are now trying to disown it. That means the only serious opposition can come from Republicans, so they'd better get focused -- because there is nothing about the Bush team's performance in Iraq up to now that justifies a free pass."
There are three enormous memes here:
- Things are getting better in Iraq, really
- Republicans are thoroughly corrupt
- Democrats are simply irrelevant
Ok, so number (2) isn't totally the meme he's using, though the Bush
administration is thoroughly ineffective is a sort of spinoff for those too blind to recognize that the
Bush administration is the Republican Party at this point for the most part. It's amazing the capacity for self-deception, but hey, that's why memes work, so I guess I should shut it. Smart conservatives are reduced to quibbling over dumb judicial rulings and railing against
entitlements.
Railing against entitlements is like the liberal promoting
alternative energy sources. Both fall victim to
give it up already meme, a sort of media bias against old good ideas that are unfashionable because they haven't been enacted but obviously should be, though they don't make good stories. Using them is a crutch to avoid discussing the failings of the Bush administration, which is really indefensible at this point. It's also suggestive that the
blame Clinton meme is pretty much dead, because that's the other crutch.
Who Gets Credit for the Rancid Rebound
Now, the investor class is excited about the economy. 'Fasten your seatbelts' says value investor Arne Alsin of Realmoney. But since Bush has consistently overpromised and undelivered, I find it hard to imagine he'll get any credit for the recovery. For while the stock market is going up, it will be hard to take credit for two reasons. One, this recovery suck, and you can't eat economic statistics. Two, Bush never took any blame for the downturn, and consistently promised that the economy was sound. Now that it's sort of ok, he'll look merely clueless instead of willfully malicious. But not great either, because he didn't meet expecations.
As an aside, doesn't Bush always seem to play golf just after doing something particularly galling? Doesn't he take a lot of vacations? These are great factoids, though for what I'm not sure. The American people didn't hire this guy to work hard, so it's not like this is some breach of contract. It's almost as if they just hired him not to be a Democrat, and he's fulfilling that role nicely.
The Angry Democrat versus the Disappointed Voter
Over on Kos, you can smell the despair when something good happens in the economy or in Iraq, and you can taste the glee when bad things happen. Over on Democratic Underground, folks were wishing for Paul Wolfowitz's death. This is not an uncommon sentiment among liberals, who are so angry at the consistent deceptions of this administration that they see red pretty much all the time. The Democrats are angry meme is pushed therefore by Brooks Republicans to make them seem like part of a bickering crew of selfish jerks in Washington, rather than as an alternative to the Republicans. For while voters are disappointed, it's not a partisan disappointment, at least not yet. Voters are angry at politicians, at the process, at their country, at their neighbor, at their boss, at themselves; but not at the guys telling them that the anger is justified. That is, the Republican Party. For in order to be angry at the Republicans' anti-government anti-solution anti-rationalist anti-patience anti-non-immediate gratification platform, someone has to present you with a credible rational solution-oriented reason to be patient and hold off on immediate gratification.
Voters must believe in themselves and their society once again, in their ability to build instead of destroy. Only then will alternative energy seem reasonable instead of 'pie-in-the-sky'. (In fact, watch for a responsible discussion of alternative energy as a key tell in a political realignment).
And in order for that to happen, there can be no more Gray Davis characters. Because while Davis might be for reasonable policies, memetically those policies are lost because Gray Davis can't deliver the optimistic 'we're all in this together' message to go along with them. He's just a selfish guy who doesn't believe in being good to people, and that's obvious. Lieberman, Edwards, Kerry, Kucinich all sort of fall into this reactionary trap. Indeed, the Contract with America moment comes not just because someone gets the message right, but because that person can also deliver it. Dean has solved part of the delivery puzzle, though not all of it. No one else is even close.
Voters by and large aren't angry at one party, they are angry at stuff. And if you're trying to be the party of government, you can't hang your hat on a pessimistic cloud of rage, no matter how vicious the opposition is. Indeed, Nazi analogies are by and large ridiculous, and I don't think the GOP is a party of Nazis. But fascism touches on something fundamental to memes, that is that it's important to realize that humans will put up with a lot of nonsense to protect their sense of self-worth. That's why the Nazis were able to exist, really.
The Disappearing Clark versus the winner Dean
It would be pretty hard to conceive of a campaign that has gone worse than Clark's. Somehow, he retroactively voted for the war, then unvoted for it, told the grassroots they were unimportant then held them up as the key to his candidacy, released his military records revealing that he in fact has superpowers and the ability to see the future to absolutely zero fanfare, revealed himself as unable to rebut smears that are silly with any grace (the praise of Bush for doing a good job in winning the war in Afghanistan being the prime factoid), and got laryngitis. Clark is over seems to be the operative meme on the Kos, with the 40-6 NH poll being the main factoid. Clark is small is basically the factoid here, as the press and blogs basically decided that Clark is smart, has good ideas, and there are several other Senators with those qualities and ground organizations in place that feed the media with better catering. Like with Kerry, Steve Soto, Kerry's biggest blog booster, never said 'I don't support this guy anymore'. He just doesn't talk about Kerry much. Funny. Matthew Yglesias, Brad Delong, Kevin Drum, even Andrew Northrup don't really talk about Clark except in a sort of 'wait-and-see-he's-not-doing-very-well' mode.
I've worked really hard for the Clark movement, and I'm sad to see this meme triumph. But it has. So far, it's the Clark campaign that's considered awful, not Clark himself. His reputation is now at stake, as evidenced by the lack of 'Dean-Clark' ticket advocates in the leftie blogosphere. That was a big meme back in the day.
<SOAPBOX>: Now, on to Dean, but first, a reaction to Matthew Yglesias's comment that the Daily Meme recommended Democrats get angrier. Perhaps that is part of the message, but the reason I liked Clark and not Dean was because that was never the whole message (Dean has been broadening his anger this whole time). In fact, the Democrats need to get less reactionary, and that means getting rid of the people who can't deliver the progressive message, like Lieberman. I'm always tracking memes, and Chris Lehane and Mark Fabiani's entrance into the Clark campaign was seen by many on Kos as a deathknell for the Clark campaign. I don't know if that's true (friends of mine like Lehane and Fabiani, so how should I know?), but the utter hatred of those two online suggests that reactionary politics within the Democratic Party is the reason that the Democrats lose so consistently. Reactionary progressives can't deliver a message they don't understand and don't believe in.
In fact, I believe that 'reactionary' is the up-and-coming political insult word, because it cuts across party lines but rests mostly on those who act to further the awful mess we're in. It's also the mirror to the conservative demonization of the word 'liberal', because if liberal is evil, then conservative must be good. Well if reactionary is bad, then progressive must be good. Hmm.
That said, the Naderites are ridiculous, incoherent, and selfish, yes, but they were reacting against the snickering of a Democratic Party that really doesn't care about its supporters. Oh yes, the Democrats will put up policies that get them specific voting blocs and money, but that's just pandering. Honestly, what kind of message does it send that Terry McCauliffe, the Global Crossing millionaire, is the head of the Democratic National Committee which at the same time preaches against corporate malfeasance? McCauliffe may be a fine guy, but he's hated nearly as much as the Republicans among the Democrats online. Dean's Democratic wing of the Democratic party involves such internecine warfare, the same type of societal warfare as Dean's 'I don't want to listen to fundamentalist preachers any more' or the Congress cockroach lines. Yes, Dean goes too far, but his message resonates precisely because he apparently shares the contempt his supporters have for reactionaries within and without the party.</SOAPBOX>
And so, the Daily Meme can't see anyone other than Dean winning, for he is ahead in the polls, the messaging game, and smacks the memes out of the park. Indeed, Dean's the movement is the message is precisely the delivery part of the message, because it's a transformative idea that people can see and taste. You can call beautiful language 'just rhetoric' if you're cynical enough (and people are), but you can't fake a die-hard group of grandmothers and annoying college students, because it's really really hard to fake social context. That's the message, though Dean is leaving out large segments of the population, which is unfortunate for our chances in 2004. Still, he's the only one expanding political space, and that's the winning theme of the realignment in American politics, at least for Democrats. (I'll be pestering y'all with some explanatory essays to help you frame the Daily Meme). You can see how fast the Al Gore campaigners got chewed up and wrecked by the media cycle; 2000 doesn't play anymore. Gore didn't really flipflop, but was toasted anyway. Dean can flip-flop away, but that doesn't matter, because the 'issues' are really just symbols of a poorly framed badly asked question the answer to which should in most cases just be a rejection of the question.
Wrap Up
Well, this political season seems to be one huge ticking time bomb waiting to go off. On the one side, Lieberman, Bush, mainstream media, and the 'insider' establishment hew to power; on the other, Deaniacs, Draft Clarkies, protesters, angry liberals, the few McCain Republicans and bloggers and new media contest the hypocrisy of the political order, hypocrisy which is increasingly written in blood. Dean, Clark, and many of the Democrats straddle the line between the two groups, pinned down by a media order that demands trivial specifics on economic policy while blindly accepting glib assurances from an administration that is consistently dishonest. Meanwhile, the new media cycle is starting to develop a real revenue model, donations, which as sure as anything is proof that blogs are mainstream, and that people will pay for the relevance they aren't getting from the 'inside' press outlets.
So the fight between progressives and reactionaries is the big meme for the decade, not any policy differences; those are just the results. Now the Democrats just need to find an elegant way of saying 'I reject the question'. The Republicans already have. It's called lying.
The Plame factoid, which hasn't disappeared so much as been subsumed into a larger media culture of resigned acceptance of mass criminality, has somehow been trumped by the $87 billion he said/she said dumbness in funding for Iraq. Now, the Democratic nominees don't trust the President because he tends to screw things up a lot, so you would think that they could make a case that having a huge appropriations bill rammed down their throat giving lots of sweet cash to Halliburton would be a good opportunity to take the President to task. Also, most Americans don't support the bill, and there's a massive spy scandal involving high ranking administration officials. So opposition would be popular, right?
Aha, don't worry Mr. President, The Democrats will NEVER EVER do anything right EVER meme has galloped to the meme-rescue. So has the phenomenon of Brooks Republicans that live on the editorial page of the New York Times and the New Republic, who wish that the Democrats would oppose the President for principled reasons instead of just partisan ones. It's so sad, really, as the President isn't doing a very good job, but hey, you know how you criticize him for not doing a good job, well you should really listen to Lieberman who only whispers that he might have mistepped here and there but only in polite and private company. Otherwise it's partisan, you know. Not good partisan, but bad Democratic partisan (hiss). The Liberal hatred is out of control meme has really reduced the sack of the current candidates, with the possible exception of Dean. After all, if there's something craven about taking us to war based on fraud and impugning the patriotism about your political opponents for electoral gain, there's something even more craven about attempting to take political advantage of the guy who's taking us to war based on fraud and impugning the patriotism of his political opponents based on fraud. It's kind of like the kid who expects a cookie for telling on his classmates beating up the retarded kid. It's too horrible for any rewards, and calls for an adult in the room.
On the other hand, the Republicans are thoroughly corrupt meme is just sitting there, big, ugly and resonant. It's impossible for there not to be some reaction to the everything's great in Iraq because the explosions are so pretty meme dishonesty; in fact, it's becoming a sort of spectator sport called Can they surpise us and out-vicious themselves again? The answer always seems to be yes. Yes, again. That second one touches on an important factoid I will briefly touch on, the increasing anger and stronger memes surrounding the Floriditization of our voting systems.
Ok, so Bush has been written off as doing a bad job. But he may yet win in 2004, because the opposition can still lose more. Tom Friedman, paragon of 'the I used to know something before I started to pretend to know everything' punditry industry, writes this incredible paragraph, incredible because of its meme-intensity:
"I've often pointed out the good we have done in Iraq and unabashedly hoped for more. No regrets. But some recent trends leave me worried. Unfortunately, there are few Democrats to press my worries on the administration. Most Democrats either opposed the war (a perfectly legitimate position) or supported it and are now trying to disown it. That means the only serious opposition can come from Republicans, so they'd better get focused -- because there is nothing about the Bush team's performance in Iraq up to now that justifies a free pass."
There are three enormous memes here:
- Things are getting better in Iraq, really
- Republicans are thoroughly corrupt
- Democrats are simply irrelevant
Ok, so number (2) isn't totally the meme he's using, though the Bush
administration is thoroughly ineffective is a sort of spinoff for those too blind to recognize that the
Bush administration is the Republican Party at this point for the most part. It's amazing the capacity for self-deception, but hey, that's why memes work, so I guess I should shut it. Smart conservatives are reduced to quibbling over dumb judicial rulings and railing against
entitlements.
Railing against entitlements is like the liberal promoting
alternative energy sources. Both fall victim to
give it up already meme, a sort of media bias against old good ideas that are unfashionable because they haven't been enacted but obviously should be, though they don't make good stories. Using them is a crutch to avoid discussing the failings of the Bush administration, which is really indefensible at this point. It's also suggestive that the
blame Clinton meme is pretty much dead, because that's the other crutch.
Who Gets Credit for the Rancid Rebound
Now, the investor class is excited about the economy. 'Fasten your seatbelts' says value investor Arne Alsin of Realmoney. But since Bush has consistently overpromised and undelivered, I find it hard to imagine he'll get any credit for the recovery. For while the stock market is going up, it will be hard to take credit for two reasons. One, this recovery suck, and you can't eat economic statistics. Two, Bush never took any blame for the downturn, and consistently promised that the economy was sound. Now that it's sort of ok, he'll look merely clueless instead of willfully malicious. But not great either, because he didn't meet expecations.
As an aside, doesn't Bush always seem to play golf just after doing something particularly galling? Doesn't he take a lot of vacations? These are great factoids, though for what I'm not sure. The American people didn't hire this guy to work hard, so it's not like this is some breach of contract. It's almost as if they just hired him not to be a Democrat, and he's fulfilling that role nicely.
The Angry Democrat versus the Disappointed Voter
Over on Kos, you can smell the despair when something good happens in the economy or in Iraq, and you can taste the glee when bad things happen. Over on Democratic Underground, folks were wishing for Paul Wolfowitz's death. This is not an uncommon sentiment among liberals, who are so angry at the consistent deceptions of this administration that they see red pretty much all the time. The Democrats are angry meme is pushed therefore by Brooks Republicans to make them seem like part of a bickering crew of selfish jerks in Washington, rather than as an alternative to the Republicans. For while voters are disappointed, it's not a partisan disappointment, at least not yet. Voters are angry at politicians, at the process, at their country, at their neighbor, at their boss, at themselves; but not at the guys telling them that the anger is justified. That is, the Republican Party. For in order to be angry at the Republicans' anti-government anti-solution anti-rationalist anti-patience anti-non-immediate gratification platform, someone has to present you with a credible rational solution-oriented reason to be patient and hold off on immediate gratification.
Voters must believe in themselves and their society once again, in their ability to build instead of destroy. Only then will alternative energy seem reasonable instead of 'pie-in-the-sky'. (In fact, watch for a responsible discussion of alternative energy as a key tell in a political realignment).
And in order for that to happen, there can be no more Gray Davis characters. Because while Davis might be for reasonable policies, memetically those policies are lost because Gray Davis can't deliver the optimistic 'we're all in this together' message to go along with them. He's just a selfish guy who doesn't believe in being good to people, and that's obvious. Lieberman, Edwards, Kerry, Kucinich all sort of fall into this reactionary trap. Indeed, the Contract with America moment comes not just because someone gets the message right, but because that person can also deliver it. Dean has solved part of the delivery puzzle, though not all of it. No one else is even close.
Voters by and large aren't angry at one party, they are angry at stuff. And if you're trying to be the party of government, you can't hang your hat on a pessimistic cloud of rage, no matter how vicious the opposition is. Indeed, Nazi analogies are by and large ridiculous, and I don't think the GOP is a party of Nazis. But fascism touches on something fundamental to memes, that is that it's important to realize that humans will put up with a lot of nonsense to protect their sense of self-worth. That's why the Nazis were able to exist, really.
The Disappearing Clark versus the winner Dean
It would be pretty hard to conceive of a campaign that has gone worse than Clark's. Somehow, he retroactively voted for the war, then unvoted for it, told the grassroots they were unimportant then held them up as the key to his candidacy, released his military records revealing that he in fact has superpowers and the ability to see the future to absolutely zero fanfare, revealed himself as unable to rebut smears that are silly with any grace (the praise of Bush for doing a good job in winning the war in Afghanistan being the prime factoid), and got laryngitis. Clark is over seems to be the operative meme on the Kos, with the 40-6 NH poll being the main factoid. Clark is small is basically the factoid here, as the press and blogs basically decided that Clark is smart, has good ideas, and there are several other Senators with those qualities and ground organizations in place that feed the media with better catering. Like with Kerry, Steve Soto, Kerry's biggest blog booster, never said 'I don't support this guy anymore'. He just doesn't talk about Kerry much. Funny. Matthew Yglesias, Brad Delong, Kevin Drum, even Andrew Northrup don't really talk about Clark except in a sort of 'wait-and-see-he's-not-doing-very-well' mode.
I've worked really hard for the Clark movement, and I'm sad to see this meme triumph. But it has. So far, it's the Clark campaign that's considered awful, not Clark himself. His reputation is now at stake, as evidenced by the lack of 'Dean-Clark' ticket advocates in the leftie blogosphere. That was a big meme back in the day.
<SOAPBOX>: Now, on to Dean, but first, a reaction to Matthew Yglesias's comment that the Daily Meme recommended Democrats get angrier. Perhaps that is part of the message, but the reason I liked Clark and not Dean was because that was never the whole message (Dean has been broadening his anger this whole time). In fact, the Democrats need to get less reactionary, and that means getting rid of the people who can't deliver the progressive message, like Lieberman. I'm always tracking memes, and Chris Lehane and Mark Fabiani's entrance into the Clark campaign was seen by many on Kos as a deathknell for the Clark campaign. I don't know if that's true (friends of mine like Lehane and Fabiani, so how should I know?), but the utter hatred of those two online suggests that reactionary politics within the Democratic Party is the reason that the Democrats lose so consistently. Reactionary progressives can't deliver a message they don't understand and don't believe in.
In fact, I believe that 'reactionary' is the up-and-coming political insult word, because it cuts across party lines but rests mostly on those who act to further the awful mess we're in. It's also the mirror to the conservative demonization of the word 'liberal', because if liberal is evil, then conservative must be good. Well if reactionary is bad, then progressive must be good. Hmm.
That said, the Naderites are ridiculous, incoherent, and selfish, yes, but they were reacting against the snickering of a Democratic Party that really doesn't care about its supporters. Oh yes, the Democrats will put up policies that get them specific voting blocs and money, but that's just pandering. Honestly, what kind of message does it send that Terry McCauliffe, the Global Crossing millionaire, is the head of the Democratic National Committee which at the same time preaches against corporate malfeasance? McCauliffe may be a fine guy, but he's hated nearly as much as the Republicans among the Democrats online. Dean's Democratic wing of the Democratic party involves such internecine warfare, the same type of societal warfare as Dean's 'I don't want to listen to fundamentalist preachers any more' or the Congress cockroach lines. Yes, Dean goes too far, but his message resonates precisely because he apparently shares the contempt his supporters have for reactionaries within and without the party.</SOAPBOX>
And so, the Daily Meme can't see anyone other than Dean winning, for he is ahead in the polls, the messaging game, and smacks the memes out of the park. Indeed, Dean's the movement is the message is precisely the delivery part of the message, because it's a transformative idea that people can see and taste. You can call beautiful language 'just rhetoric' if you're cynical enough (and people are), but you can't fake a die-hard group of grandmothers and annoying college students, because it's really really hard to fake social context. That's the message, though Dean is leaving out large segments of the population, which is unfortunate for our chances in 2004. Still, he's the only one expanding political space, and that's the winning theme of the realignment in American politics, at least for Democrats. (I'll be pestering y'all with some explanatory essays to help you frame the Daily Meme). You can see how fast the Al Gore campaigners got chewed up and wrecked by the media cycle; 2000 doesn't play anymore. Gore didn't really flipflop, but was toasted anyway. Dean can flip-flop away, but that doesn't matter, because the 'issues' are really just symbols of a poorly framed badly asked question the answer to which should in most cases just be a rejection of the question.
Wrap Up
Well, this political season seems to be one huge ticking time bomb waiting to go off. On the one side, Lieberman, Bush, mainstream media, and the 'insider' establishment hew to power; on the other, Deaniacs, Draft Clarkies, protesters, angry liberals, the few McCain Republicans and bloggers and new media contest the hypocrisy of the political order, hypocrisy which is increasingly written in blood. Dean, Clark, and many of the Democrats straddle the line between the two groups, pinned down by a media order that demands trivial specifics on economic policy while blindly accepting glib assurances from an administration that is consistently dishonest. Meanwhile, the new media cycle is starting to develop a real revenue model, donations, which as sure as anything is proof that blogs are mainstream, and that people will pay for the relevance they aren't getting from the 'inside' press outlets.
So the fight between progressives and reactionaries is the big meme for the decade, not any policy differences; those are just the results. Now the Democrats just need to find an elegant way of saying 'I reject the question'. The Republicans already have. It's called lying. Written Off Bush
For the past few weeks, the tough decisions meme has basically disappeared. The tough decisions meme, for those who don't obsessively read and reread the way-too-irregularly published Daily Meme, basically says that yes, the President makes bad decisions, but at least they are tough decisions. You know, decisions that Clinton couldn't or wouldn't make, like having the bravery and vision to fall off a Segueway. The give me more time it's working meme, focused on the fact the tax cuts aren't working and the war in Iraq is unworking, spunoff into the things are getting better in Iraq, really and the bizarre things are getting better and anyone who says they aren't is responsible for the fact that they aren't and the even more bizarre it's the CIA's fault for telling and not telling us about WMDs. These are all desperation memes, and the front page of the New York Times is finally reflecting the administration's incompetence. But it doesn't matter because no one's made it matter. Yet.
The Plame factoid, which hasn't disappeared so much as been subsumed into a larger media culture of resigned acceptance of mass criminality, has somehow been trumped by the $87 billion he said/she said dumbness in funding for Iraq. Now, the Democratic nominees don't trust the President because he tends to screw things up a lot, so you would think that they could make a case that having a huge appropriations bill rammed down their throat giving lots of sweet cash to Halliburton would be a good opportunity to take the President to task. Also, most Americans don't support the bill, and there's a massive spy scandal involving high ranking administration officials. So opposition would be popular, right?
Aha, don't worry Mr. President, The Democrats will NEVER EVER do anything right EVER meme has galloped to the meme-rescue. So has the phenomenon of Brooks Republicans that live on the editorial page of the New York Times and the New Republic, who wish that the Democrats would oppose the President for principled reasons instead of just partisan ones. It's so sad, really, as the President isn't doing a very good job, but hey, you know how you criticize him for not doing a good job, well you should really listen to Lieberman who only whispers that he might have mistepped here and there but only in polite and private company. Otherwise it's partisan, you know. Not good partisan, but bad Democratic partisan (hiss). The Liberal hatred is out of control meme has really reduced the sack of the current candidates, with the possible exception of Dean. After all, if there's something craven about taking us to war based on fraud and impugning the patriotism about your political opponents for electoral gain, there's something even more craven about attempting to take political advantage of the guy who's taking us to war based on fraud and impugning the patriotism of his political opponents based on fraud. It's kind of like the kid who expects a cookie for telling on his classmates beating up the retarded kid. It's too horrible for any rewards, and calls for an adult in the room.
On the other hand, the Republicans are thoroughly corrupt meme is just sitting there, big, ugly and resonant. It's impossible for there not to be some reaction to the everything's great in Iraq because the explosions are so pretty meme dishonesty; in fact, it's becoming a sort of spectator sport called Can they surpise us and out-vicious themselves again? The answer always seems to be yes. Yes, again. That second one touches on an important factoid I will briefly touch on, the increasing anger and stronger memes surrounding the Floriditization of our voting systems.
Ok, so Bush has been written off as doing a bad job. But he may yet win in 2004, because the opposition can still lose more. Tom Friedman, paragon of 'the I used to know something before I started to pretend to know everything' punditry industry, writes this incredible paragraph, incredible because of its meme-intensity:
"I've often pointed out the good we have done in Iraq and unabashedly hoped for more. No regrets. But some recent trends leave me worried. Unfortunately, there are few Democrats to press my worries on the administration. Most Democrats either opposed the war (a perfectly legitimate position) or supported it and are now trying to disown it. That means the only serious opposition can come from Republicans, so they'd better get focused -- because there is nothing about the Bush team's performance in Iraq up to now that justifies a free pass."
There are three enormous memes here:
- Things are getting better in Iraq, really
- Republicans are thoroughly corrupt
- Democrats are simply irrelevant
Ok, so number (2) isn't totally the meme he's using, though the Bush
administration is thoroughly ineffective is a sort of spinoff for those too blind to recognize that the
Bush administration is the Republican Party at this point for the most part. It's amazing the capacity for self-deception, but hey, that's why memes work, so I guess I should shut it. Smart conservatives are reduced to quibbling over dumb judicial rulings and railing against
entitlements.
Railing against entitlements is like the liberal promoting
alternative energy sources. Both fall victim to
give it up already meme, a sort of media bias against old good ideas that are unfashionable because they haven't been enacted but obviously should be, though they don't make good stories. Using them is a crutch to avoid discussing the failings of the Bush administration, which is really indefensible at this point. It's also suggestive that the
blame Clinton meme is pretty much dead, because that's the other crutch.
Who Gets Credit for the Rancid Rebound
Now, the investor class is excited about the economy. 'Fasten your seatbelts' says value investor Arne Alsin of Realmoney. But since Bush has consistently overpromised and undelivered, I find it hard to imagine he'll get any credit for the recovery. For while the stock market is going up, it will be hard to take credit for two reasons. One, this recovery suck, and you can't eat economic statistics. Two, Bush never took any blame for the downturn, and consistently promised that the economy was sound. Now that it's sort of ok, he'll look merely clueless instead of willfully malicious. But not great either, because he didn't meet expecations.
As an aside, doesn't Bush always seem to play golf just after doing something particularly galling? Doesn't he take a lot of vacations? These are great factoids, though for what I'm not sure. The American people didn't hire this guy to work hard, so it's not like this is some breach of contract. It's almost as if they just hired him not to be a Democrat, and he's fulfilling that role nicely.
The Angry Democrat versus the Disappointed Voter
Over on Kos, you can smell the despair when something good happens in the economy or in Iraq, and you can taste the glee when bad things happen. Over on Democratic Underground, folks were wishing for Paul Wolfowitz's death. This is not an uncommon sentiment among liberals, who are so angry at the consistent deceptions of this administration that they see red pretty much all the time. The Democrats are angry meme is pushed therefore by Brooks Republicans to make them seem like part of a bickering crew of selfish jerks in Washington, rather than as an alternative to the Republicans. For while voters are disappointed, it's not a partisan disappointment, at least not yet. Voters are angry at politicians, at the process, at their country, at their neighbor, at their boss, at themselves; but not at the guys telling them that the anger is justified. That is, the Republican Party. For in order to be angry at the Republicans' anti-government anti-solution anti-rationalist anti-patience anti-non-immediate gratification platform, someone has to present you with a credible rational solution-oriented reason to be patient and hold off on immediate gratification.
Voters must believe in themselves and their society once again, in their ability to build instead of destroy. Only then will alternative energy seem reasonable instead of 'pie-in-the-sky'. (In fact, watch for a responsible discussion of alternative energy as a key tell in a political realignment).
And in order for that to happen, there can be no more Gray Davis characters. Because while Davis might be for reasonable policies, memetically those policies are lost because Gray Davis can't deliver the optimistic 'we're all in this together' message to go along with them. He's just a selfish guy who doesn't believe in being good to people, and that's obvious. Lieberman, Edwards, Kerry, Kucinich all sort of fall into this reactionary trap. Indeed, the Contract with America moment comes not just because someone gets the message right, but because that person can also deliver it. Dean has solved part of the delivery puzzle, though not all of it. No one else is even close.
Voters by and large aren't angry at one party, they are angry at stuff. And if you're trying to be the party of government, you can't hang your hat on a pessimistic cloud of rage, no matter how vicious the opposition is. Indeed, Nazi analogies are by and large ridiculous, and I don't think the GOP is a party of Nazis. But fascism touches on something fundamental to memes, that is that it's important to realize that humans will put up with a lot of nonsense to protect their sense of self-worth. That's why the Nazis were able to exist, really.
The Disappearing Clark versus the winner Dean
It would be pretty hard to conceive of a campaign that has gone worse than Clark's. Somehow, he retroactively voted for the war, then unvoted for it, told the grassroots they were unimportant then held them up as the key to his candidacy, released his military records revealing that he in fact has superpowers and the ability to see the future to absolutely zero fanfare, revealed himself as unable to rebut smears that are silly with any grace (the praise of Bush for doing a good job in winning the war in Afghanistan being the prime factoid), and got laryngitis. Clark is over seems to be the operative meme on the Kos, with the 40-6 NH poll being the main factoid. Clark is small is basically the factoid here, as the press and blogs basically decided that Clark is smart, has good ideas, and there are several other Senators with those qualities and ground organizations in place that feed the media with better catering. Like with Kerry, Steve Soto, Kerry's biggest blog booster, never said 'I don't support this guy anymore'. He just doesn't talk about Kerry much. Funny. Matthew Yglesias, Brad Delong, Kevin Drum, even Andrew Northrup don't really talk about Clark except in a sort of 'wait-and-see-he's-not-doing-very-well' mode.
I've worked really hard for the Clark movement, and I'm sad to see this meme triumph. But it has. So far, it's the Clark campaign that's considered awful, not Clark himself. His reputation is now at stake, as evidenced by the lack of 'Dean-Clark' ticket advocates in the leftie blogosphere. That was a big meme back in the day.
<SOAPBOX>: Now, on to Dean, but first, a reaction to Matthew Yglesias's comment that the Daily Meme recommended Democrats get angrier. Perhaps that is part of the message, but the reason I liked Clark and not Dean was because that was never the whole message (Dean has been broadening his anger this whole time). In fact, the Democrats need to get less reactionary, and that means getting rid of the people who can't deliver the progressive message, like Lieberman. I'm always tracking memes, and Chris Lehane and Mark Fabiani's entrance into the Clark campaign was seen by many on Kos as a deathknell for the Clark campaign. I don't know if that's true (friends of mine like Lehane and Fabiani, so how should I know?), but the utter hatred of those two online suggests that reactionary politics within the Democratic Party is the reason that the Democrats lose so consistently. Reactionary progressives can't deliver a message they don't understand and don't believe in.
In fact, I believe that 'reactionary' is the up-and-coming political insult word, because it cuts across party lines but rests mostly on those who act to further the awful mess we're in. It's also the mirror to the conservative demonization of the word 'liberal', because if liberal is evil, then conservative must be good. Well if reactionary is bad, then progressive must be good. Hmm.
That said, the Naderites are ridiculous, incoherent, and selfish, yes, but they were reacting against the snickering of a Democratic Party that really doesn't care about its supporters. Oh yes, the Democrats will put up policies that get them specific voting blocs and money, but that's just pandering. Honestly, what kind of message does it send that Terry McCauliffe, the Global Crossing millionaire, is the head of the Democratic National Committee which at the same time preaches against corporate malfeasance? McCauliffe may be a fine guy, but he's hated nearly as much as the Republicans among the Democrats online. Dean's Democratic wing of the Democratic party involves such internecine warfare, the same type of societal warfare as Dean's 'I don't want to listen to fundamentalist preachers any more' or the Congress cockroach lines. Yes, Dean goes too far, but his message resonates precisely because he apparently shares the contempt his supporters have for reactionaries within and without the party.</SOAPBOX>
And so, the Daily Meme can't see anyone other than Dean winning, for he is ahead in the polls, the messaging game, and smacks the memes out of the park. Indeed, Dean's the movement is the message is precisely the delivery part of the message, because it's a transformative idea that people can see and taste. You can call beautiful language 'just rhetoric' if you're cynical enough (and people are), but you can't fake a die-hard group of grandmothers and annoying college students, because it's really really hard to fake social context. That's the message, though Dean is leaving out large segments of the population, which is unfortunate for our chances in 2004. Still, he's the only one expanding political space, and that's the winning theme of the realignment in American politics, at least for Democrats. (I'll be pestering y'all with some explanatory essays to help you frame the Daily Meme). You can see how fast the Al Gore campaigners got chewed up and wrecked by the media cycle; 2000 doesn't play anymore. Gore didn't really flipflop, but was toasted anyway. Dean can flip-flop away, but that doesn't matter, because the 'issues' are really just symbols of a poorly framed badly asked question the answer to which should in most cases just be a rejection of the question.
Wrap Up
Well, this political season seems to be one huge ticking time bomb waiting to go off. On the one side, Lieberman, Bush, mainstream media, and the 'insider' establishment hew to power; on the other, Deaniacs, Draft Clarkies, protesters, angry liberals, the few McCain Republicans and bloggers and new media contest the hypocrisy of the political order, hypocrisy which is increasingly written in blood. Dean, Clark, and many of the Democrats straddle the line between the two groups, pinned down by a media order that demands trivial specifics on economic policy while blindly accepting glib assurances from an administration that is consistently dishonest. Meanwhile, the new media cycle is starting to develop a real revenue model, donations, which as sure as anything is proof that blogs are mainstream, and that people will pay for the relevance they aren't getting from the 'inside' press outlets.
So the fight between progressives and reactionaries is the big meme for the decade, not any policy differences; those are just the results. Now the Democrats just need to find an elegant way of saying 'I reject the question'. The Republicans already have. It's called lying.
The Plame factoid, which hasn't disappeared so much as been subsumed into a larger media culture of resigned acceptance of mass criminality, has somehow been trumped by the $87 billion he said/she said dumbness in funding for Iraq. Now, the Democratic nominees don't trust the President because he tends to screw things up a lot, so you would think that they could make a case that having a huge appropriations bill rammed down their throat giving lots of sweet cash to Halliburton would be a good opportunity to take the President to task. Also, most Americans don't support the bill, and there's a massive spy scandal involving high ranking administration officials. So opposition would be popular, right?
Aha, don't worry Mr. President, The Democrats will NEVER EVER do anything right EVER meme has galloped to the meme-rescue. So has the phenomenon of Brooks Republicans that live on the editorial page of the New York Times and the New Republic, who wish that the Democrats would oppose the President for principled reasons instead of just partisan ones. It's so sad, really, as the President isn't doing a very good job, but hey, you know how you criticize him for not doing a good job, well you should really listen to Lieberman who only whispers that he might have mistepped here and there but only in polite and private company. Otherwise it's partisan, you know. Not good partisan, but bad Democratic partisan (hiss). The Liberal hatred is out of control meme has really reduced the sack of the current candidates, with the possible exception of Dean. After all, if there's something craven about taking us to war based on fraud and impugning the patriotism about your political opponents for electoral gain, there's something even more craven about attempting to take political advantage of the guy who's taking us to war based on fraud and impugning the patriotism of his political opponents based on fraud. It's kind of like the kid who expects a cookie for telling on his classmates beating up the retarded kid. It's too horrible for any rewards, and calls for an adult in the room.
On the other hand, the Republicans are thoroughly corrupt meme is just sitting there, big, ugly and resonant. It's impossible for there not to be some reaction to the everything's great in Iraq because the explosions are so pretty meme dishonesty; in fact, it's becoming a sort of spectator sport called Can they surpise us and out-vicious themselves again? The answer always seems to be yes. Yes, again. That second one touches on an important factoid I will briefly touch on, the increasing anger and stronger memes surrounding the Floriditization of our voting systems.
Ok, so Bush has been written off as doing a bad job. But he may yet win in 2004, because the opposition can still lose more. Tom Friedman, paragon of 'the I used to know something before I started to pretend to know everything' punditry industry, writes this incredible paragraph, incredible because of its meme-intensity:
"I've often pointed out the good we have done in Iraq and unabashedly hoped for more. No regrets. But some recent trends leave me worried. Unfortunately, there are few Democrats to press my worries on the administration. Most Democrats either opposed the war (a perfectly legitimate position) or supported it and are now trying to disown it. That means the only serious opposition can come from Republicans, so they'd better get focused -- because there is nothing about the Bush team's performance in Iraq up to now that justifies a free pass."
There are three enormous memes here:
- Things are getting better in Iraq, really
- Republicans are thoroughly corrupt
- Democrats are simply irrelevant
Ok, so number (2) isn't totally the meme he's using, though the Bush
administration is thoroughly ineffective is a sort of spinoff for those too blind to recognize that the
Bush administration is the Republican Party at this point for the most part. It's amazing the capacity for self-deception, but hey, that's why memes work, so I guess I should shut it. Smart conservatives are reduced to quibbling over dumb judicial rulings and railing against
entitlements.
Railing against entitlements is like the liberal promoting
alternative energy sources. Both fall victim to
give it up already meme, a sort of media bias against old good ideas that are unfashionable because they haven't been enacted but obviously should be, though they don't make good stories. Using them is a crutch to avoid discussing the failings of the Bush administration, which is really indefensible at this point. It's also suggestive that the
blame Clinton meme is pretty much dead, because that's the other crutch.
Who Gets Credit for the Rancid Rebound
Now, the investor class is excited about the economy. 'Fasten your seatbelts' says value investor Arne Alsin of Realmoney. But since Bush has consistently overpromised and undelivered, I find it hard to imagine he'll get any credit for the recovery. For while the stock market is going up, it will be hard to take credit for two reasons. One, this recovery suck, and you can't eat economic statistics. Two, Bush never took any blame for the downturn, and consistently promised that the economy was sound. Now that it's sort of ok, he'll look merely clueless instead of willfully malicious. But not great either, because he didn't meet expecations.
As an aside, doesn't Bush always seem to play golf just after doing something particularly galling? Doesn't he take a lot of vacations? These are great factoids, though for what I'm not sure. The American people didn't hire this guy to work hard, so it's not like this is some breach of contract. It's almost as if they just hired him not to be a Democrat, and he's fulfilling that role nicely.
The Angry Democrat versus the Disappointed Voter
Over on Kos, you can smell the despair when something good happens in the economy or in Iraq, and you can taste the glee when bad things happen. Over on Democratic Underground, folks were wishing for Paul Wolfowitz's death. This is not an uncommon sentiment among liberals, who are so angry at the consistent deceptions of this administration that they see red pretty much all the time. The Democrats are angry meme is pushed therefore by Brooks Republicans to make them seem like part of a bickering crew of selfish jerks in Washington, rather than as an alternative to the Republicans. For while voters are disappointed, it's not a partisan disappointment, at least not yet. Voters are angry at politicians, at the process, at their country, at their neighbor, at their boss, at themselves; but not at the guys telling them that the anger is justified. That is, the Republican Party. For in order to be angry at the Republicans' anti-government anti-solution anti-rationalist anti-patience anti-non-immediate gratification platform, someone has to present you with a credible rational solution-oriented reason to be patient and hold off on immediate gratification.
Voters must believe in themselves and their society once again, in their ability to build instead of destroy. Only then will alternative energy seem reasonable instead of 'pie-in-the-sky'. (In fact, watch for a responsible discussion of alternative energy as a key tell in a political realignment).
And in order for that to happen, there can be no more Gray Davis characters. Because while Davis might be for reasonable policies, memetically those policies are lost because Gray Davis can't deliver the optimistic 'we're all in this together' message to go along with them. He's just a selfish guy who doesn't believe in being good to people, and that's obvious. Lieberman, Edwards, Kerry, Kucinich all sort of fall into this reactionary trap. Indeed, the Contract with America moment comes not just because someone gets the message right, but because that person can also deliver it. Dean has solved part of the delivery puzzle, though not all of it. No one else is even close.
Voters by and large aren't angry at one party, they are angry at stuff. And if you're trying to be the party of government, you can't hang your hat on a pessimistic cloud of rage, no matter how vicious the opposition is. Indeed, Nazi analogies are by and large ridiculous, and I don't think the GOP is a party of Nazis. But fascism touches on something fundamental to memes, that is that it's important to realize that humans will put up with a lot of nonsense to protect their sense of self-worth. That's why the Nazis were able to exist, really.
The Disappearing Clark versus the winner Dean
It would be pretty hard to conceive of a campaign that has gone worse than Clark's. Somehow, he retroactively voted for the war, then unvoted for it, told the grassroots they were unimportant then held them up as the key to his candidacy, released his military records revealing that he in fact has superpowers and the ability to see the future to absolutely zero fanfare, revealed himself as unable to rebut smears that are silly with any grace (the praise of Bush for doing a good job in winning the war in Afghanistan being the prime factoid), and got laryngitis. Clark is over seems to be the operative meme on the Kos, with the 40-6 NH poll being the main factoid. Clark is small is basically the factoid here, as the press and blogs basically decided that Clark is smart, has good ideas, and there are several other Senators with those qualities and ground organizations in place that feed the media with better catering. Like with Kerry, Steve Soto, Kerry's biggest blog booster, never said 'I don't support this guy anymore'. He just doesn't talk about Kerry much. Funny. Matthew Yglesias, Brad Delong, Kevin Drum, even Andrew Northrup don't really talk about Clark except in a sort of 'wait-and-see-he's-not-doing-very-well' mode.
I've worked really hard for the Clark movement, and I'm sad to see this meme triumph. But it has. So far, it's the Clark campaign that's considered awful, not Clark himself. His reputation is now at stake, as evidenced by the lack of 'Dean-Clark' ticket advocates in the leftie blogosphere. That was a big meme back in the day.
<SOAPBOX>: Now, on to Dean, but first, a reaction to Matthew Yglesias's comment that the Daily Meme recommended Democrats get angrier. Perhaps that is part of the message, but the reason I liked Clark and not Dean was because that was never the whole message (Dean has been broadening his anger this whole time). In fact, the Democrats need to get less reactionary, and that means getting rid of the people who can't deliver the progressive message, like Lieberman. I'm always tracking memes, and Chris Lehane and Mark Fabiani's entrance into the Clark campaign was seen by many on Kos as a deathknell for the Clark campaign. I don't know if that's true (friends of mine like Lehane and Fabiani, so how should I know?), but the utter hatred of those two online suggests that reactionary politics within the Democratic Party is the reason that the Democrats lose so consistently. Reactionary progressives can't deliver a message they don't understand and don't believe in.
In fact, I believe that 'reactionary' is the up-and-coming political insult word, because it cuts across party lines but rests mostly on those who act to further the awful mess we're in. It's also the mirror to the conservative demonization of the word 'liberal', because if liberal is evil, then conservative must be good. Well if reactionary is bad, then progressive must be good. Hmm.
That said, the Naderites are ridiculous, incoherent, and selfish, yes, but they were reacting against the snickering of a Democratic Party that real