Do you want to successfully take the Republican identity machine down a peg? Do you want to shave off slices of the GOP electorate? Then you need to understand that audience, and communicate accordingly.
The left has to stop treating the right as if they think, process, and make decisions like liberals. They are not, and they do not.
In this second post of this series, I want to explore a model I have been musing over to help understand how to think like a conservative, and devise communication strategies that can create brand division, or that might be meaningful for splintering voting groups.
The model has three components, listed below, which I want to look at one-by-one with examples.
1. The Narrative
2. The Noise
3. The Pack (Brand Identity)
THE NARRATIVE
The Narrative is the mental construct where conservatives live. This construct has nothing to do with reality in key ways that we all have to understand in order to start kicking ass.
First, as we have seen with the very successful fake news engines making tons of money off the GOP on social media, The Narrative is not fact-based, nor is it particularly interested in facts. The Narrative only cares about information that reinforces The Narrative, regardless of its veracity. Truth doesn’t matter.
The second characteristic of The Narrative is that it’s more malleable than Democrats think, shifting very dramatically in response to The Noise and The Pack. For instance, Evangelicals were totally happy to shift their moral Narrative to elect a pussy grabbing wife cheater to the highest office in the land. Republicans, the party of virulent anti-Russian sentiment, were happy to view the entire Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia as a good thing. An astonishing shift. People will move the narrative in response to Noise, or to stay with the The Pack. (More on The Pack below.) So we need to think about using The Narrative to move people’s perceptions, it is malleable. Use it.
The third characteristic of The Narrative is that it lives in an almost constant state of conflict. An example would be the way that poorer conservatives vote against their own economic self interests when they vote GOP. Liberals always try to resolve conflicts like this, conservatives ignore them. In fact, they go out of their way to avoid acknowledging the conflict all together. Dems love to point out the conflict, as if conservatives are going to stop and take an unflinching look at this essential conflict, and then decide to resolve it and becomes liberal. Pointing out the existence of the conflict is not a useful strategy for reaching Republicans.
THE NOISE
Republicans are too dependent upon "Where there is smoke, there is fire!" as a shortcut for evaluating and categorizing truth, or even deciding what is important to consider in decision making, such as figuring out who to vote for. Essentially, what this means is that Republicans respond almost exclusively to Noise, not to nuance.
To be clear, The Noise (“Where there is smoke, there is fire”) shortcut is a human shortcut that we all use. While The Noise is a shortcut that is a huge timesaver, and is probably super effective in small closed systems where you know everyone and information is passed through informal networks of people you trust, like in a town of 500 or 1,000 people, it is NOT effective in large, complex systems.
The challenge with The Noise is that Republicans overuse this method for decision making. As a group, they generally don’t have an interest in diving into facts, especially if those facts run counter to The Narrative. Liberals love facts, and 10 point plans, and breaking down issues. Republicans don’t necessarily care, unless there is a lot of The Noise to tell them to pay attention. They are primarily looking at how many people are making the same noise, and the overall volume of that noise, and only when those two are in concert, and HIGH, do they tend to pay attention. If you are going to talk like a liberal — fact-based, nuanced, multi-point, annotated lists…with a lot of discussion, dissenting and opposing viewpoints — then it might as well be invisible to Republicans.
Let’s look at an example from the last election. In written communications, the first thing that’s important to conservatives are headlines. The article itself is often pretty meaningless. So if a big story hits the cycle, such as the Comey letter to Congress, what’s important to look at is not what people write in their articles, but what the headlines say, particularly in main stream media. I remember checking after the Comey disaster, and they all said some version of the same thing: “Clinton investigation reopened.” That’s it. Game over. Where there is smoke, there is fire. She is guilty, otherwise, why would the FBI reopen an investigation? Some of the worst headline writing I have ever seen happened in that news cycle.
And let’s be honest, The Noise works on Dems too. Not a lot of people wanted to wade through all the complications and ins and outs of the email scandal that was not a scandal, so they defaulted to The Noise. I heard a lot of liberals say, “Well, Hillary has some real issues there with her emails too…” but when I would ask for follow up, they couldn’t really tell me anything. The Noise works.
The left is absolutely horrible at creating concentrated, collective, and loud Noise — whether it’s countering fake news propaganda, or influencing The Narrative using Noise. The bottom line is that conservatives, particularly conservative males, don’t really think your beliefs are solid until you engage with them in a huge fight and beat them over the head with Noise. This was one of Obama’s biggest failings, not recognizing that there is a whole different way you have to engage part of the populace.
If we are going to be a successful party of opposition, we need to start using Noise much more effectively.
THE PACK (Brand Identity)
The last influencer for Republicans is The Pack. Human beings are pack animals. And conservatives, when I do market research in red communities, really want to a) strongly identify with and be a part of a pack; and b) they often like being smack dab in the center of the pack. Pack is everything. So much so, that conservatives actually have two realities — inside the pack, and outside the pack. That is why a small town can have an accepted cross dresser that everyone treats well, but these same people will vote for virulent anti-LGBTQ laws and discrimination. Or that infamous, “black friend” that conservatives love to haul out as proof they aren’t racists. In a twisted way, there is truth to their logic. Inside the pack, they really do treat people differently than they do abstractly, outside the pack. And they are completely comfortable with that essential conflict in ways liberals do not understand.
Democrats don’t think about The Pack strategically at all. If you want to start impacting voter patterns, you have to understand why these voters want to be a part of the GOP pack, identify exactly what are the attributes they associate with and relate to, and then you have to go about dismantling those pack associations ruthlessly, one-by-one. Destroy them.
This very issue just came up in a recent article about rural Kentucky Medicaid recipients being upset about the ACA going away, but still voting for Trump. At the end of the article, a woman said she voted for him “because she is a Republican.” Policy doesn’t matter. Pack is everything.
In general, I would say the GOP projects a brand of strength, of steadfastness, of success, of wealth, of aggression, of patriotism, of loyalty. So that’s where you attack them. Why would a rural Kentuckian want to associate with Dems? Liberals want to study them in order to help them, and give them “retraining” and “technical assistance”. (Who wants retraining and receive technical assistance? I know I don’t! Frame it differently people.) To a big slice of the country, we give off a vibe of being weak and lacking conviction, and we are essentially telling them if they come into our pack, they are weak and stupid and need help. Not a sexy, or effective brand identity for our pack.
==========
In the next post in this series, I am going to offer some thoughts on how to proceed in terms of messaging, given this model. Coming soon!!! Thanks for sticking with me on such a long post.
In the meantime, feel free to join us at www.dissentengine.com, where a collection of us share the small intentional acts of #DailyDissent that we engage in each day to remind ourselves that we support rights and opportunities for all Americans! Some are even fun!