In my profession, creating brands (and maintaining them) is a daily practice. And for a long time, I've been interested in how the Wingnut movement has employed brand strategy in politics in order to take control of our country.
This is the first chapter in a trilogy of diaries on progressive brand strategy. I hope that my insights are of some value, and if so, that somebody who can do something about the Democratic Party's branding crisis happens upon them.
After the flip, Episode I: The Phantom Wingnut.
The Phantom Wingnut isn't any one person. It is a discourse. And referring to it as a "Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy," although clever and stylish, does nothing but strengthen it. Please let's stop referring to this at-one-time phantom menace as a VRWC and simply call it what it is: the Right-Wing Brand Strategy (RBS). For sake of brevity, let's examine the RBS via one of it's early agents: Rush Limbaugh.
Rush Limbaugh took advantage of an opportunity, you have to give him that. An opportunity, in my view, created by liberal complacency. The notion, still persistent in much of Liberalism, that "all we need is to hold the right beliefs and people will vote for us."
Wrong, wrong and wrong again. That only works in a utopia, which America sadly is not. Largely as a result of the New Deal, America became a progressive society, overtime liberals became complacent with that, got lazy with their brand stratgey until it fell apart and crumbled like Ozymandius into the sands and the RBS very quietly did its dirty work.
Above all things, that dirty work was forging the myth of the "Ultra-Liberal" in the hearts and minds of populist, blue-collar families.
I remember this clearly, growing up in a conservative household. Every night on the television, there was Rush Limbaugh, blathering before an all-WASP audience, about the evils of the Ultra-Liberal. They wanted to burn flags. They wanted to kill babies. They wanted to make government intrude into your personal business. They wanted to enable irresponsible people simply because those people were poor, and above all else they wanted to rob you of your identity by forging a socialist society.
If I had a dime for every time I heard the word Ultra-Liberal used to describe any and all progressives while growing up, I would be a rich man. The RBS propogated this myth of the Ultra-Liberal - taking advantage of the deafening progressive silence in its wake - until it succeeded in destroying the progressive brand. It took advantge of brilliant men like Clinton who couldn't keep his dick in his pants. It took advantage of soundbyte liberals like his wife who spoke of "vast conspiracies." It won the the brand wars because most liberals chose not to fight, and the ones who did fought hard but not smart.
Today, we are saturated by an intense background radiation of a metastecized RBS that keeps the progressive brand right where it needs it: not dead, but in critical condition on life support. Kos is right to describe it as having tentacles running throughout the nation, just like a cancer. It's a never-ending barrage of ill-will, bad taste and lack of class or qualified thought that exists for one purpose and one purpose only: to rebrand, over and over again, the myth of the dangerous Ultra-Liberal in the hearts and minds of ordinary Americans.
The Phantom Wingnut is no longer a phantom, and it now has a solid stranglehold on discourse in America. It is enabled by Democrats trying to come off as Republicans. It is given new life every time Ann Coulter publishes a tome on hate that goes unchallenged on the book shelves and news stands across the country. It has gotten away with being, almost to a tee, the dangerous ideological evil that it continues to project onto the whole of Liberalism. It is a formidable foe. It is a muscular brand strategy, and it is an iron muzzle on Reason.
But there are subtle chinks in its armor, I think. The RBS, in my view, failed to lock all the doors behind it while coming inside to take over the American mansion. These doors appear closed but are there for the savvy progressive to open, if only he or she will try. This will be the topic of my next diary - Brand Wars: Episode II.