Challenge Accepted: The Democrats' Communication Chasm
Dan Pfeiffer's observations on the Democrats' marketing problem inadvertently reveals the biggest chasm of them all
As I was doing my things today, I came across this in many ways excellent article by Dan Pfeiffer discussing what he calls the “Democratic Communications Chasm.”
Because I very, very rarely engage in these sorts of back-and-forth article vs. article on a given platform dances, before I go too far I want to say out loud that Dan is, per his bio here on Substack, “Co-host of Pod Save America, Former Senior Advisor to President Obama, Author of Un-Trumping America and Yes We (Still) Can.” So let’s go ahead and agree off the top that the man is not an idiot and probably has some noble motivation. This isn’t about a personal attack, I’m sure he’s well qualified and honorably motivated.
With that said, this article has two major flaws that point precisly to the reasons why the Democrats have a “communications (sic) chasm” and why it’s going to take a different sort of mind from Dan Pfeiffer’s - which doesn’t seem markedly different from the mind of any other left-wing professional working within the political world, an observation and not a character judgement - to fix it.
The first problem
The first problem with the article is the entire first half of his argument. Pfeiffer places this argument partially within the framework of suggesting that the democratic party has a communication problem because people don’t believe jobs have been created over the last two years.
Why is that a problem? Because jobs haven’t been created over the last two years. They have been replaced, and even with the extremely good numbers from February 2022 we are not yet back to where we were in December of 2019. Before Covid, we had 5.8 million unemployed; as of February ‘22 we have 6.3 million unemployed. We’re still half a million jobs down, and that’s not accounting for where the charts and graphs were headed before we knew Covid would happen including just the raw fact of there being more people of employment age now than there were two years ago.*
(* This is a reasonable educated guess on my part based on long-standing and well-documented population trends over time, but I didn’t look for the numbers; the deaths from Covid may have offet, mitigated, or reversed the usual population growth.)
Mr. Pfeiffer thinks this is a problem because “the public is ignorant or misinformed,” but the truth is - and this is gonna hurt, Dan - the public isn’t buying the narrative because it’s an obvious, clumsy, lie. Propaganda, and not even well-executed.
There are a million ways to legitimately frame the ongoing recovery of jobs from the pandemic losses in a way that favorably and honestly reflects on Biden and his team.
This narrative absolutely is not one of them, and people see through it.
The chasm here isn’t in reaching out to inform an ignorant public. It’s in not lying to them.
That’s the “problem” with the public’s opinion about unemployment; they’re not thinking in terms of the meticulous way the question was phrased. They’re thinking in terms of “do the people I know seem to be more or less employed than they used to be,” and right now for most of us “used to be” is before Feb 2020. It’s almost as though the questions were deliberately framed to evoke a response to an entirely different question, then use that response to retrofit claims that the public is ignorant.
That’s not really a problem with “the public.” That’s a problem with pundits and the people who write poll questions with the narrative that the poll is intended to support having been decided before the answers start coming in. That’s a problem with living in bubbles and dealing in numbers and statistics without taking into consideration feelings and emotions and social pressures and all the other illogical and irrational things that can drive human behavior…including the behavior of continuing to desperately push a dishonest narrative because it’s the best politically advantageous one anyone inside the bubble can come up with.
The problem with the employment zeitgeist isn’t that people are ignorant, although that is unquestionably a problem and one we need to face honestly. That’s what CUSTODE is all about.
The problem is that they’re being lied to and they know it, and that’s not a problem for the people being lied to. It’s a problem for the people perpetuating the lie.
The actual truth is, we still haven't recovered all the Covid job losses. This ongoing narrative by the Biden administration that the natural bounce-back from the greatest period of job loss in US history, in response to an acute catastrophic event, is somehow reflective of a major increase in employment in this country is madness. It doesn't hold up to logic. It's like saying if the guy who had my job before me killed 1000 people and I only kill 100 that means I've saved 900 lives, when nobody should be getting killed at all. No.
That’s the truth reflected in the poll Mr. Pfeiffer cited: the people weren’t responding to the question that was asked, which was crafted with lawyerly precision to detail for the purpose of using the responses to address a very specific question. They were responding to how they feel about the current employment and economic situation in this country, which isn’t super optimistic or positive, and they’re not real keen on trusting the government’s assertions about the numbers either.
Literally as I was taking a quick snack break while writing this, I came across another great example of this problem. This time it’s from White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki:
Again we see the establishment trying to put over establishment narratives to a public that has rejected the establishment. There’s nothing positive about increased fossil fuel production except a minor and temporary relief of fuel pricing. We need to be talking about how to not need fossil fuels, not how good we are at ignoring the problems they create because that generates profit.
Make no mistake, I don’t just “not dislike” Jen Psaki, she’s probably my favorite WHPS ever. Whip-smart, surgical wit, and a terrifyingly competent command of an incredibly broad range of facts, factoids, current statistics, administration policy goals and motivations, and politcal history combine to make her genuinely one of my favorite public figures right now…but she’s wrong here. Not just wrong, but entirely wrong from root to fruit.
That’s the communication chasm.
The really tragic thing is there's no reason they couldn't present the employment narrative honestly and take credit - within the framework of capitalism recovering the millions of jobs lost to Covid within two years is a hell of an accomplisment - and the failure to do so makes them almost incapable of addressing the issues that still exist.
This brings us to…
The Second Problem
The number one communication problem the Democratic Party has is that it's trying to prop up the old behaviors. The public appearance of believing in your own infallibility, never admitting you've done something the wrong way or made a mistake or need to take another swing at something; these are the old model.
Continuing to behave as though aspirational capitalism and the delusion that economies can just perpetually get “bigger” while relying on finite resources to function simply doesn’t play to a huge segment of the population anymore, and rightfully so because it’s a bad and broken paradigm that operates far more against the interests of the people than for them.
The world is evolving out of being susceptible to the standard-issue political tropes and rhetorical manipulation. The Democrats are trying to run a 21st century political party with a 19th century mindset, and they're still trying to compromise with the plutocrats on how to do what needs doing but also not cost the big boys, and thereby themselves, any money.
The truth we're now beginning to understand is that when you compromise your principles, your principles have been compromised and it's really hard to fix that once it's broken.
The Democratic Party continues the fiction that most of the first world has been drowning in for the last couple of centuries: that you can both unsustainably exploit every available resource for your own personal gain, and that such behavior can be sustained to ensure equality of opportunity so everyone else can also unsustainably exploit.
The real chasm here is that simply makes no sense on its face and we’ve been ignoring that reality at least since the dawn of the industrial revolution.
You can't have both; either we decide that we're just gonna give up and let the plutocrats exploit us into extinction after a relatively short and entirely horrific final chapter, or we decide we're going to start fighting for and living up to all this high-minded, socially acceptable, heavily clickable, performative handwaving about rights and dignity and freedom.
You can't have both; either you believe and fight for the best policies for the people, or you continue to perpetuate the inherently broken idea that human beings are obligated to earn their right to exist by generating profits for oligarchs and plutocrats, that your "right" to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" is contingent on your cooperation with the processes of securing and maintaining the power and privileges of the elite, for the elite, against your own best interests.
The punchline is, you really can't have the second one either, you can only have the illusion of it for short periods of time. First of all the idea itself is ludicrous and diametrically opposed to the very concept of human liberty, but more importantly that's not what rights are. Rights are not contingent on anything. That's what makes them rights.
I hope that Mr. Pfeiffer, Ms. Psaki, and anyone else reading takes this in the collegial tone it’s intended. I want these folks to “win,” I think they get far more right than the other team, and the rest of the league isn’t worth watching.
The way that happens is a radical revolution in communication consisting of an active, engaged, and energized commitment to tell the truth, educate the people, and end this paternalistic, oppressive paradigm of lying to us “for our own good,” which always comes down to either lying to us because the truth is unpleasant and profitable, or lying to us because the truth is too much trouble to bother explaining.
People are coming to understand that Jen Psaki putting over fossil fuel production growth as a net positive may be different in tone and nature and motivation of purpose, but they are fundamentally the same act: that of lying to the people as an agent of their government for the benefit of the officeholder you are or represent, rather than for the benefit of the people the office serves. To accept one and reject the other is another one of those compromises we’ve been making with ourselves, indivdually and internally, for a long time - maybe always - and we’ve finally evolved to the point where we can’t maintain that behavior and survive anymore.
Consequently we’re evolving the tools to grow beyond that behavior, and the current establishment of political communication experts who have been clasically trained and at their posts for a long time have in many cases not yet realized that.
You close the communication chasm with a bridge of truth, Dan, and that’s gotta start with every one of us individually, internally.
As always: “The revolution you’re looking for begins in the mirror.” - jh