Beyond "Messaging"
From thinking about media as marketing, to a participatory infrastructure for movement organizing
Recently, POLITICO reported on how a so-called centrist group of Democrats met to discuss “the party’s disconnect with the working class.” The reporting drew on a document of takeaways that mostly fixated on the messaging issues the party had, namely the “Faculty Lounge” problem of hyper intellectual language, an “over reliance on buzzwords,” “identity politics,” and of course “no clear economic vision.”
What struck me was how much the document fixated on the failures of messaging— not organizing, not infrastructure. Unlike the Right which has spent the better part of a century building alternative media as part of a political strategy, these Democrats did not fully take to heart the famous Marshall McLuhan adage: “The medium is the message.” Nor did these Democrats ponder a grand strategy of what they wanted to achieve. Part of me wondered, “To what end are you messaging, anyway? What can you actually authentically offer?” Taking jargon or identity politics out of a visionless story won’t solve a fundamental problem of vision.
For nearly a decade, I’ve beat my head against the wall with a chorus of other academics who study the Right, repeating the mantra of conservative media influencers: “Politics is downstream of culture.” We all identified the Democrats’ “faculty lounge” problem but the instinct to simply dress up neoliberal talking points in folksy language reveals a deeper problem: that messaging for Democrats is a top-down marketing project, not a participatory political one.
Media as Participatory Politics
Last year in March, I sat down with Steve Bannon to ask him about some questions about how style, narrative, and story played into his political strategy. I echoed this idea that Democrats often just thought the Right had a superior political message and internet echo chamber.
“It is not message: it is political power. We're not here to message.” He was emphatic that his podcast and media products were not just a marketing or storytelling exercise, but a form of political organizing. His goal may be to dismantle the administrative state and reshuffle the geopolitical order the U.S. established after WW2 because he believes this will help everyday Americans. You may disagree, but it’s a clear goal. He reflected on how his media products are a way to give language, story, and marching orders to listeners in pursuit of those goals:
“Remember Hollywood's basic core belief... They will tell you... You have to make all these films about how ordinary people do extraordinary things. I'm in the business of actually laying out the doing. Do not watch a fantasy, actually participate. It's participation. It's being part of it. This is all part of a process where you then are going to get online. You're going to send emails. You're going to get on people's faces at town halls. You're going to become an information warrior.”
Becoming an information warrior is very different than being an information referee. This top-down informational posture has manifested in a rather persistent strategy pushed by pro-democracy types in their pursuit of curbing “mis- and disinformation” through platform design interventions, fact-checking and government regulation. While these approaches have and had their place, they are fundamentally defensive — they also require friends in places that are now essentially Trump territory. One may try to control the means of production, but you also have to create the means for expression, vision.
True culture is not marketing material. Culture is the product and reflection of interests and stakeholders, of participants. As my day-job at the University of Washington has shown, contemporary conservative media is a well-resourced political strategy that is also incredibly participatory in the various subcultures it engages — I wrote with Kate Starbird about how right-wing media is highly participatory, like improv theater.
Yet I must underscore this: to mistake the style as the supra-ordinate strategy itself is missing the deeper issue: a lack of grand vision for what to do once Trump wrecks the administrative state, and an unawareness of how to build media infrastructure and resource the diverse stakeholders in order to participate in building that vision. Something Trump world had identified (and stoked) for the past decade is the very real public discontent with our housing, health, food, education, and relationship with the world. Simply promoting preservation without progress is actually quite a conservative posture and riding against the flow of the time.
Building Infrastructure
There are folks who are recognizing the need to not just “message” but to actually build infrastructure that speaks to and engages with a variety of working class American interests. This means not simply building bigger loudspeakers, but also handing an aux cord to communities that Democrats just thought to blast at.
Reece Peck and Anthony Nadler, both scholars of the American Right, recently wrote a great piece in Jacobin about the need for resourcing a media of the working class — in style and amplification. They write:
Murdoch and Trump have always held a media-centric theory of power, and, for the most part, their theory has proven to be correct. With the decline of unions and so many other forms of civic life, media organizations have filled the void and have even usurped some of the traditional duties political parties once played.
Not so far off, Jee Kim and Waleed Shahid, both communications leaders in multi-racial working class movements, identified similar issues in a recent op-ed for The Nation. They highlighted two problems: Democrats are losing both white and non-white working-class voters and they are losing the war for attention because they have not invested in the people behind communications, not just the consultants writing messages. They note:
Take the Conservative Partnership Institute. It doesn’t just train far-right movement organizations and leaders; it is a nonprofit that supplies them with staff, strategy, media booking, podcasting platforms, and an ideological home in Washington. It ensures that when the far right takes office, they don’t flounder—they build a movement and execute. It’s not just a think tank; it’s a media-steeped and savvy strategy hub that coordinates the insurgency inside the Republican Party.
All of these authors have a sense of direction and strategy for an America that serves the interests of the many, not the few. They know that connecting to the many — in their unique languages, locations, communities — is not simply a messaging issue.
Whether progressive or conservative, left or right, grassroots political movements will need to consider what they want to build in the wake of the deconstruction of the administrative state if they don’t want tech oligarchs building it for them. This crisi-tunity can be a moment to build something better than what we had, to write and execute a script that is more embodied than whatever some A.I. billionaire will have the machines whip up. Offering an alternative vision will mean building participatory and alternative amplification, communication, and messaging systems that include more people, not judge them or advertise to them. Advertising, after all, feels so 20th century.
By popular demand, I’ll soon also be sending out a postmortem on the Gavin Newsom - Steve Bannon podcast interview. Stay tuned.
Thanks for your insights. I hope the Dems can get it together and re-organize how they are doing things. Particularly in light of recent polls showing their approval rating at all time lows. Ugh...