I am very worried that we progressives have strong majority support on almost every major issue facing America and yet we keep letting the Right Wing Noise Machine define us as “far left” and “radical” and “socialists/communists” and all kinds of things they think are epithets.
Perhaps the major difference between why they are successful in pushing their narratives and we are not is because they invest in their people and their messaging!
First, people. Bruce Bartlett, a disillusioned conservative who served under Reagan and Bush and later came to say that:
I had previously viewed Krugman as an intellectual enemy and attacked him rather colorfully in an old column that he still remembers.
For the record, no one has been more correct in his analysis and prescriptions for the economy’s problems than Paul Krugman. The blind hatred for him on the right simply pushed me further away from my old allies and comrades.
Bartlett is someone who has been in the rooms with big donors. At a recent event featuring Michael Tomasky for his book Middle Out Economics, at the Politics & Prose Bookstore, he said this (pulled from the transcript and edited for clarity by me):
I know and I'm not the only one who knows a lot about how the right got to its position of enormous power and influence and a lot of what it did could be copied, but the left adamantly refuses to do it.
…for example there are vastly more “right-wing” think tanks then there are left-wing thing tanks there are vastly more right-wing New Republics than there are liberal publications of that sort. And it simply boils down to resources. The right has vast resources but the left is not powerless. There are lots of progressive billionaires and if you look at the aggregate data for campaign contributions Democrats raise just as much if not more than Republicans.
It just seems to me that the left spends its money very, very ineffectively…
…I started to read your chapter about the foundations … and I've heard a lot of things. I'm not a person of the left. I've not dealt with these people directly but I've always heard for example that Progressive foundations give money for specific projects and they insist that the money be used only for that project and all that sort of thing, whereas the right [gives] money [for] General purposes and this gives the right wing foundations vastly more flexibility to adjust and take advantage of changing opportunities.
Also I think Progressive groups (at least non-profits) get a lot more [of] their money from foundations which by their nature carry certain strings attached whereas the right gets a lot more of its money from Individual wealthy people. I'll tell you just one thing. Back when I was still working for the right I was at a reception and I was talking to one of our richest donors of the organization I was working for and I was very curious: how do you decide how much money or who to give it to, and he said in my mind I've got a budget for politics and all the money I give to politicians or to tax-exempt organizations all comes out of that budget. And I was flabbergasted because I thought, well, isn't our tax exempt status worth something? And he said… you know it's not that important. [And] that always just stuck with me as something that I've never quite figured out in terms of how you attract wealthy people and mobilize them and get them to give money. Just today I was reading something about the Heritage Foundation a huge percentage of their income comes from bequests. Some of these bequests were made decades ago and now the money is pouring in and so it takes time and I just wonder whether the left is just not really up to speed about doing the things that get this stuff into motion and gives allied organizations and publications the resources to compete.
In addition to supporting their foundations and publications, they fund their people, often through non-profit entities that house their people. There are lots of them, and in my healthcare world, there are a core corps, as it were, of them: Avik Roy, Betsy McCaughey, Grace Marie Turner, and my least favorite, Sally Pipes. Pipes runs the “Pacific Research Institute,” where right wing money keeps the lights on and pays her very well to do her thing, which is spreading fear and misinformation about Universal Healthcare.
They invest in people. As someone who has helped with fundraising for a progressive organization, I can tell you the progressive foundations want return on investment, measurables, and finite projects, just as Bartlett reports. This remains a recipe for ineffectual advocacy. It needs to change.
Messaging. The high priest of conservative messaging is emblematic of conservatives supporting people and messaging. You all know who Frank Luntz is, so I won’t expound further, suffice it to say that his work has advanced conservative causes more than any group of conservative politicians since Reagan. Except maybe Grover Norquist.
There has been recognition on the left that we need to do better with our messaging. In fact, we have some great thinkers in this area: Anat Shenker-Osorio, Drew Westen, David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, and the venerable George Lakoff, among others.
Anand Giridharadas in his new book, The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy, puts together some of the ideas applying cognitive science to changing peoples’ minds, a particular interest of mine. One of the points made (primarily through Anat Shenker-Osorio) is about not being afraid to promote and defend one’s principles and ideals, something near and dear to our DailyKos cohort! Another is about listening to people, as uncomfortable as that is, to create active listening, rather than reactance, which is essentially as they say at The Argument Clinic, the “automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says!”
I have learned a lot about how to become a persuader, through the work of cognitive scientists and I have gathered a lot of it here, with my emphasis on healthcare, but it apples to all progressive persuasion.
I am out of time, so will stop here, acknowledging I have a lot more development to do on the “messaging” half of this diary! Which is funny, because my original intent was to write a piece about creating messaging to persuade young people using young people as the creators of the messaging, based on a section of Jonah Berger’s amazing book, The Catalyst. He describes an antismoking program designed by young people that was remarkably successful because, he argues that the ads allowed for agency, the concept of presenting information and allowing for us to decide what to do for ourselves, rather than just being told what to do or how to think. Novel concept, right?
Cheers!