Without a strong thread of pack identity across a country, a nation and a system of government, particularly a presidential system of government, can easily fail.
You see, it turns out presidential systems of democracy are rather fragile, as we are discovering in the good old US of A. They require a broad set of gentlemen’s agreements, accepted standards of practice, and civility in order to avoid descending into gridlock. (New democracies established since WWII, modeled after our system, mostly fail, while newly formed parliamentary systems of democracy succeed about 2/3 of the time.) In order to maintain the sort of civic discourse required by our version of democracy, a broad swath of the governed have to share some notion that they all belong to the same pack.
It’s time as progressives we begin tailoring our outreach to build pack ties (or break them as the case may be), by using pack dynamics to influence voting behavior and brand associations.
But first, a speed overview of where we are picking up in the series:
In my first post, I established a fundamental difference between right/left audiences. In the second post, I discussed a model for how conservatives think, how they are influenced, and how they store information. It has three components, listed below.
- The Narrative
- The Noise
- The Pack
The third part in this series was about making The Noise, with lots of examples of non-traditional ways to form positive brand relationships, as well information on some of the shortcuts conservatives use to weigh decisions. (Lest we be too judgmental, most of these are basic human tendencies anyway. Instead of railing about the shortcuts, we have to use the shortcuts to our own ends.)
Without further ado, let’s dive into the fourth, and final part of this series. The Pack!
THE PACK
You might believe it impossible to have pack tension and still function as a group. But the fact of the matter is, within packs, there are always disputes and shifting perceptions of status, yet the pack can still march on as a cohesive whole. Consider that in 1970, the Kent State shootings happened, a tragic example of left/right tensions in America. But at the same time, we were also passing some of the most important provisions of the Clean Air Act, which is evidence of a pack acting acting for the good of the whole.
Since the Cold War, Republicans and big money have been purposely whacking a wedge into the right/left tensions in our nation’s pack identity. They have been so successful in vilifying the left, “othering” its beliefs and its values to such a degree, that Dems have been essentially booted off the island. And this lies as the crux of why liberals are so upset, and what Republicans don’t understand, about the last election. Conservatives just can’t get why we are so mad that “our guy lost” — it happens all the time. But the election of Trump with the help of the Russians, represents so much more than that. It shows that Republicans would rather vote a wildly unpopular, unqualified, racist, sexual predator to the highest office in the land in order to defeat our pack. In every way they have essentially said, “You are no longer a part of our pack, or our country… we will take any choice over siding with you on anything.”
And when the pack breaks up, in our system of government, democracy can fail quickly and catastrophically.
Of course, it’s important to mention that this is the experience of the white members of the pack. Marginalized communities have long felt outside the pack — immigrants, LGBTQ folks, communities of color, and Native Americans to name just a few — have been living with this dislocation as a permanent state. And frankly, Anglos have really had to come to terms, in a visceral and uncomfortable way, with what it feels like to not be a part of the pack, which was so perfectly demonstrated on election night by Chris Rock, Dave Chapelle, and SNL: http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/election-night/3424956?snl=1
STATUS
One of the subconscious drivers in pack dynamics is the notion of status. As pack animals, we are constantly assessing and using status as a sort of shorthand throughout our days in big and small ways. Where we walk, who enters through a door first, who sits where, what place you decide to eat, where you like to vacation, what you study — everything says something about your status. In the marketing and branding work that I do, I use the notion of status frequently. People, places, products, and brands can be low status or high status. Neither is better than the other, they are just distinct.
The trick to achieving lasting brand relationships, whether you are a government agency, a political party, a company, a product, or a person is to create an authentic blend of both high status and low status characteristics for your organization, product, or person. So let’s look at what I mean by that with specific examples:
STATUS AND THE DEMOCRATIC BRAND. Like it or not, the brand of the Democrats is inextricably linked to the brand of government. We are perceived as the party of government. If the brand status of government is wrecked, then our brand is wrecked. Guess what? The brand status of government is completely wrecked right now. We live in a time of the extreme deification of the private sector, and vilification of government. We will never change our brand unless we improve the brand of government. Every government entity, from school districts to water bureaus to planning departments, needs to overhaul their communication budget and their operational focus around improving status perceptions. Why do I say that? Because one of the biggest issues with government’s brand is that its status relationships are exactly opposite of what they should be. They are high status in the wrong ways and low status in the wrong ways.
- Government High Status. We want government to be high status in the execution of its job. We want it to do a good job managing taxpayer money, and create benefit for our entire community. We want it to be efficient. Conservatives want government to use tried and true techniques for achieving benefits for stakeholders. Liberals want government to blaze a trail and try new things. (Sometimes you can take the same policy and frame it as either tried and true or blazing a new trail, depending upon your audience.) Unfortunately, government is perceived exactly opposite of that. Most American citizens think government is wasteful, both of time and money. Most people in the United States believe it’s not executing as well as the private sector. (Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Most private sector companies I know are hugely wasteful. And, I would challenge a private sector company to try and run its business with the type of oversight and transparency the public sector is subject to. Imagine never being able to make a single decision without exhaustive input from a wide range of people who don’t really know anything about what you do!)
- Government Low Status. We want government to be accessible, to help us interact with it as citizens, to be caring. Again, we have literally the opposite situation going on in practice. Governments often operate in silos, they don’t cooperate and collaborate well across departments or with citizens. When they engage the public, they often do it in a cursory way, instead of developing mutual understanding and education and then soliciting valuable feedback that can be used. Government is seen as monolithic and unapproachable.
I’ll give you an example of this flipped status relationship in government, using large school districts. Often, you will see parents support the high school track their kids go to, donating time and money to foundations and individual schools. But, if a bond comes up for the entire district, they will vote no. That seems astonishing that public school parents would vote against a public school bond. This happens quite frequently with large school districts though because there is literally zero pack identity across the entire district. Once, when doing interviews to help with communications in a large school district, I asked every stakheolder group when they interacted with the district as a whole. Usually people drew a blank. Students finally came up with, “Checking the Website for snow days.” People couldn’t even tell me if the district name was on the school buses. I mean, it’s like they are invisible in terms of brand. If the district is invisible, it is not high status in the right ways.
And regarding low status elements, if you ask parents about districts as a whole, administratively, the majority will either have no experience, or have a negative experience. The district is often perceived by parents and local schools as being inaccessible, opaque, and doing something that unfairly impacts a specific school or group of children negatively. They have no idea that the individual schools are essentially their brand evangelists. (In the school my kids attend, the principal is amazingly beloved by parents and students alike, she is an incredible advocate for her school. I also happen to know that the district office does not like her at all, and sees her as someone they need to make conform. What is this doing for the districts low status brand relationships? This principal should be a brand evangelist for the district, not viewed as an obstacle.
We need to start reversing status perceptions in government RIGHT NOW in order to improve our brand.
STATUS, RACISM, AND THE ELECTION. People who say this election wasn’t about racism are wrong. For a lot of white voters, it wasn’t necessarily about overt racism (although there was plenty of that). Rather, it was about a more insidious, and covert type of racism that is baked right into the very founding of this country. We have worked hard over the last few hundred years in the United States to create a permanent underclass based purely on race, beginning with slavery and the subjugation of Native Peoples, and then applying that later to subsequent waves of immigrants from communities of color. This was stated quite baldly by John C Calhoun, who served as a VP, Senator, Congressman, Secretary of State and Secretary of War in the United States. He hailed from the state of South Carolina:
“With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and the poor, but white and black, and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals, if honest and industrious, and hence have a position and pride of character of which neither poverty nor misfortune can deprive them.”
Boom. Baked in, permanent mid-level status for white folks, no matter their income.
This creation of a permanent underclass is particularly relevant because of the conservative desire to be identified as “middle of the pack”. I work a lot in red state communities, and I do a ton of branding workshops to improve marketing for places. One of the most interesting characteristics that comes out of my research is that conservatives generally want to feel that they are squarely in the middle in terms of status associations — from a social perspective, form the perspective of security, and the perspective of finances. (Which pretty much governs how you frame everything for conservatives — you are in the middle!)
If you create a permanent lower class, it means that white people always get to feel they are in the middle of the pack. That is until you have a black President. Every day, Obama’s presidency was a reminder that pack dynamics are being shaken up, that being white is no longer an automatic entry to middle of the road status. That is devastating for white people, particularly lower class white people, and elicits an almost primal reaction to protect their status, and a lot of it is entirely subconscious. Which is why they can say with the straight face, “I am not racist” while still voting for Trump, a proud and avowed racist, they are protecting their status without even realizing it.
IMPLICATIONS OF STATUS IN FRAMING FOR WHITE AUDIENCES.
White Working Class. Notice the name, they are called “working class”, rather than “poor”. Here’s the reality: in lower income communities, Dems usually require that people self identify as poor or downtrodden to be a part of our pack. That is a huge mistake with white working class voters. To help these groups, we have to place them squarely in the center. No one wants to have to receive retraining, for instance, it implies that they are stupid and in need of the adult equivalent of remedial spelling class. If you want to bring the a community of white working class people to the table, you have to first identify the unique strengths and skills that come out of their traditional economic base (manufacturing, mining, wood working, agriculture, ranching, whatever), and come up with new ways to apply those skills to create new economic activity.
Instead of saying, “You are poor and need help” we have to say “You have mad skills, let’s find new ways to create commerce with those skills.”
And for policy initiatives, it might be interesting to create toolkits for helping lower income communities based on ways they self identify instead of by income. So for instance, food assistance for rural, suburban, and urban communities. Even if they are literally the same program, if they are targeted to people based on their geography of choice, instead of their income, they might be more palatable and build pack ties across various groups.
White Upper Class. They want to see high status execution in government, and they are particularly sensitive to anything that might imply a loss of white status. By the way, this is one of the interesting implications of status that you have to remember in building brand relationships: almost every human being hates to lose status. And for most groups, and for this group in particular, when some other people’s status goes up, they feel their status has gone down, even though it hasn’t changed in an absolute way at all. Like it or hate it, it’s a reality, so use it! All framing needs to keep this in mind.
I’m going to go back to the big city, large school district example to illustrate this. In a lot of big districts, the most reliable and consistent voters are higher income, higher educational attainment white voters. If you want to pass bonds, you have to appeal to this group. Do you know what they care about most? That white kids aren’t being left behind. Yep, status again. (I know, it’s incredibly self involved and terrible, because that is clearly not a core educational problem. Why do they feel this way? Because in large, diverse districts, it’s common to have a school or two with kick-ass, high-performing Asian and Indian kids getting a lot of press for things like math team, or scholarships to Ivy League schools. This gives upper class whites the perception that their status is slipping. Part of me says, “Who gives a fuck?” But the part of me that works in marketing and branding just wants to make these voters do the right thing and pass the freaking bond, which benefits all kids.) This is why bond campaigns need highly tailored messages. First, you want every parent in the district to have their “parent of a school child” hat on, not their “taxpayer” hat. They should understand directly how they will personally benefit from a bond. Secondly, you need to create targeted materials for consistent white voters to be sure that they know white kids aren’t being left behind. Does this suck? Sure. Does it work? Yes. And while school districts can’t use public funds to do this, a foundation or a teacher’s union can. You know where they live. You know what they need to hear. Make it happen.
Different framing, different people, same policies. We need to make it our mantra.
BUILDING PACK TIES
ENCOURAGE NATIONAL PACK IDENTITY. Peer pressure works, but only if you are part of the same pack. Hurting your fellow Americans with policy, taking more than your fair share, being unwilling to do your part, none of that matters when you are dealing with people outside the pack. This is particularly important for conservatives. They really view the world as inside the pack or outside the pack. They treat these two groups completely differently. Being part of the pack is everything, and being outside is nothing. Liberals try to reconcile the two: treating them as equally as they can, maybe not always succeeding, but it’s an aspiration. If we can’t reestablish a more strong national pack identity across party lines, the country will be lost because conservatives literally don’t care about you if you are perceived as being outside of the pack.
On a local level, where my professional economic development work is conducted, I see people in conservative places working together, side-by-side, regardless of party affiliation, to improve their communities all of the time. The most innovative, interesting, and successful work in government is still happening at the local level, and it’s very heartening. However, this usually completely disappears at the State level and is long gone at the Federal level. Cooperation happens at the local level because everyone is still perceived as pack, regardless of political brand affiliation! Examples/opportunities for creating more purple include:
- Highlighting cross-the-aisle collaborations at the city/town level. We are all purple now! The NEA Mayor’s Institute of City Design Program is amazing and the National Main St program is amazing. The city of Miami’s work to deal with sea level rise and climate change is fascinating, and happening despite the State’ s climate change denial. We need to get these stories out there with specific framing around red/blue collaboration.
- Show/Support/Highlight red state places implementing perceived blue state policies. Utah is a great example. They are a very conservative state, but are doing some of the most ground breaking work in this country around homelessness, land use planning, and transit. Why? Because they are all pack on a State level, and they really care about what they are leaving their grandkids. They illustrate the conservative ideal perfectly: study the problem, execute with solutions you know will work, do it better than anyone else.
- Improve status relationships with conservatives, as described below!
- Lower Status with rural red voters. We need to work on massively lowering our status. To rural folks, Democrats as a party are viewed as being elite, in other words, way too high status. That’s why, in my last post, I suggested ways in which we could make our party, supposedly the party of the people, more approachable. We have to SHOW we are the party of the people, not just talk about it. So having Nancy Pelosi and some of her ilk out picking apples with some migrant farm workers would be an awesome way to lower status and make our party more approachable. Or having some senators washing cars to raise money. Or, going and working in a factory for a day in Ohio. Or helping a small farmer with a harvest.
- Raise Status with Well-to-Do Conservatives. With more well-to-do conservative voters, we need to raise our status around issues related to economics. I work in a lot of red communities doing economic development work. I bring up a ton of progressive ideas about how to tackle improving their economies, some totally whacky! And, I generally get zero push back on those ideas because I present an air tight case on why my ideas make economic sense. I know the numbers inside out. How it really works. I can speak to every concern of the private sector. When you speak to them in the language they care about, with content that they relate to, they can and do make changes.
An example of economic framing came up a few months ago at the #OurFirstStand rallies about saving the ACA. I attended one in Portland, OR which was featured a smattering of Senators and Congresspeople. The delegation that showed up went on and on about single payer, and helping people, and the human element, which is all great. And it was a blue audience, so that’s fine. I was really struck though that Kurt Schrader was the only congressperson that talked about the economic impact of the ACA — reducing the deficit, reducing healthcare costs, and the improved performance of hospitals, especially rural hospitals, with the ACA. Not surprisingly, this came from the Democrat most considered to be a closet Republican! Seriously, it was exactly the argument that would resonate the most with a red state crowd. (And on a side note, these appeals also do well with men of all political stripes.)
CREATE PACK PROFILES. We need to break down the red electorate and consider what conditions encourage: a) full defection from Republican to Democrat; b) partial defection to vote Democrat but still retain the Republican brand identity; or, c) not identify as a Republican and be demoralized enough not to vote. Areas of study include:
- Voters who change their brand affiliation from conservative to liberal. We need to quantify and codify the inflection points that come with this change, such as life circumstances, age, demographics, gender, income, education, geography, etc and pursue flipping more of those people. Oddly, my father has gone through a sort of liberal/conservative/uber-liberal arc in his life. If we can figure out this process, we can hasten it along.
- Study Republicans who haven’t changed their personal brand connection to the party, but who vote and/or contribute to Dems regularly. For instance, I know people who vote Democrat, but they still identify as Republicans because they first began their political lives as Republicans and it’s a part of how they see themselves. It’s like using Tide for life because your Mom did. These are people we should leverage and court more heavily. How can we flip them? Should we flip them? There are a lot of them out there.
- Study what characteristics most tie different demographic groups to the Republican part of the pack, and systematically work to a) break those connections with the GOP, and b) build new connections with the Dems. As was discussed previously, three big brand associations Republicans care about include: a perception of strength, patriotism, and success. So we should always work to portray them as weak, unsuccessful, traitors to their own pack, and try to woo them through stories of strength, patriotism and success in our own ways. To win red people to our brand, we have to give them positive reasons for being one of us. Again, to address the idea of status, we have to stop telling people, “Hey, you are a bunch of poor losers, and by the way, we can help you with that.” No conservative person will almost never join a pack that requires them to self identify as as a broke, uneducated dumb ass in need of retraining. As we talked about in the comment thread of my last post, conservatives are excited they are in the pack with a dude who has a golden toilet! That’s not a negative.
I know this was a long one! Believe it or not, I had to cut a ton of stuff! Ha. Anyhow, this is the final post in this series. Thanks for sticking with me and A thousand apologies for taking so long to finish it. It has been wonderful to engage in a discussion with the Kos community about these issues. Gives me hope for the world!!
Between and betwixt my actual life responsibilities, I also contribute to DissentEngine.com with resistance prose in the form of #HaikuThursday, the #DissentDeck (little cards with resistance quotes we collectively besprinkle around the country) and general small activities we engage in to retain our sanity. We are hoping to facilitate some larger resistance projects at the intersection of art and dissent soon too! You can follow us on Twitter @DissentEngine.