This will get worse.
I have spent decades around local political organizing and professional consulting. I have taken time to reflect and have some deeply thought out considerations about the way money spent in politics affects the way the world works. Most of the analysis I have heard in the media entirely ignore the deeper dynamics of what is going on. It is not because they are not able to make the observation. They are paid for something different. This has been more and more prevalent over the past fifty years.
Democrats and progressives and anyone concerned about the middle class, the environment, and climate change - we all need to rise to a larger view of the world and the future. GOTV is a tactical innovation that arose with the first mini mainframe computers in the 1970s. However, we have been doubling down and doubling down on this tactic to the extent we have lost what Democrats who built the party had: First of all, the ability to think and not just repeat the wisdom handed down from the consultants and the geniuses that run groups like DFA or Wellstone.
Look around at how people live. Look at what the mental environment is made of.
Many people are afraid of the variety of things happening to the world we live in and don't understand it. Not a lot of people think very deeply and don't have time to. If they are young people with kids, they really don't have time.
It isn't about "messaging."
People trust the context of feelings. Look at what makes movies work. It is about emotional intelligence mixed with a sense of what seems true. The media that seems to reflect the fear and panic that can be felt by anyone seems to be on the same emotional wavelength. Look at it. Content is not the same as the emotional tenor in which it is delivered.
This is fueled by a great deal of money spent to influence the media by the special interests. This is in the range of billions. Just this year. But then think about the billions spent all the way back to around fifty years ago when this situation really began to arise.
This money being spent is not an accident or a byproduct of simple business focus on profit. This is a war on the public by the billionaire class. You might need to take a breath and let that sink in.
Has it sunk in yet?
Stop and meditate for just a few beats.
No one would spend millions or billions frivolously. These are business people who demand a return on investment and are serious about getting it. Deadly serious.
The simple answer to the question about why spend this money is to gain a return on investment. Billionaires and corporations spend millions to make billions. Trillions.
According to the stories around the LIBOR scandal some time back, a day's total banking action is at least 320 trillion. More than likely, it is around 500 trillion. It could be the same money being loaned and paid back each day. But that is a pile.
The Federal deficit that is used as a big issue to hit Democrats over the head with is about 15 trillion.
This whole thing arose in Texas in the seventies, as it happens, when I was in college at Baylor University. At the time I didn't pay it a lot of attention, but there was a lot of deepset anger motivating students in all those Bible meetings people were going to at least once a week in addition to Sunday.
The preachers were persuading these people that they needed to dedicated their lives to reversing the progressive reforms of the sixties. What was garnering such fury?
The rise of contraception. This was actually new. Actually, so was the bikini. Birth control allowed the rise of the sexual revolution led by articulate women like Gloria Steinem. Then, in 1973. Roe v Wade. In general, the paradigm of women's liberation and empowerment was larger that this, but birth control certainly got your attention if you were a single male in that era. It made things different not only from the generation previous, but all generations previous.
The civil rights revolution. There was probably nothing that roused the fury of Southern Baptists like the "change in the natural order of things" represented by the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights in general. In Waco, Texas where I grew up, this ran counter to the culture of the traditional God fearing Bible belt white majority. My home town was the headquarters of the Klu Klux Klan. I saw an old photo from a file in a local company archive that pictured a group of employees that looked like the company bowling league at first glance. Then you saw that this was the company Klan unit. This was in the 1920s probably. It was a matter of fact no big deal back then.
It is hard for most people who weren't exposed to this southern culture to understand how profound a change this really was. Just look at the simmering discontent with the first black president. It is a factor. If he were white, he would be perceived differently. He just would. Those who deny this mainly are just hoping to hide what is really there. It is true. It is really there and it is deeply profound throughout society.
The environment movement that succeeded in creating the EPA and regulations on pollution invoked the rage of the polluting industries and the millionaires and billionaires with vested interests in oil and gas, plastices, fertilizers, coal and other extractive and polluting sources of profit.
By 1980, there was a sort of marriage of convenience forged by people like Karl Rove, (who had been in Washington as the head of college campus Republicans in the early 70s) between the moneyed petroleum interests and evangelicals.
The big money guys mostly could give a rat's ass about religion. But their money could buy trainloads of Christian crazies ready to go out and knock on doors and make phone calls and mobilize the born again vote. If this would win an election, then why not? This became known as the East Texas strategy and it got George Bush elected governor of Texas, and then President of the United States.
This was about clever advertising tactics at first. But a lot of money can do more than buy ads. The think tank came to be a way to create an everyday sort of influence at the most mundane levels of news coverage and media messaging. People who spend all day working on this, and whole careers, could figure out all kinds of innovative ways to affect messaging through storylines and images. All you have to do in order to set this up is to have the money to hire all the brightest college graduates hungry for jobs in Journalism, PR and Advertising and even English Majors.
Some of that money likely sponsors bloggers who either study the psychology of members of the Daily Kos community or offer posts or comments that kind of "ping" to test arguments. Paid social media specialists could afford to spend time doing research and writing papers about how to use social media to advantage. Why would you not do this if you had the money?
Are Democrats doing this? Apparently not much. We argue and bicker and moan and groan in full public view like a married couple in a restaurant that doesn't care who is able to hear their loud fight. Not exactly message discipline.
That may, however, be a strength. No doubt Republicans are kind of in awe at this ability of ours to disagree vociferously and yet have an ability to come together around common agendas. We aren't driven by profit, which is a lot simpler.
We are concerned about ourselves along with the entire ecosystem we are part of and the future of the planet. That is a bit harder to get one's mind around. The additional problem of helping the public at large to engage is a really hard challenge.
But we accept that challenge and it is a conscientious one to take on.
That is why, in the long run, we are more likely to see profound changes and lasting policy foundations based on science and justice that are really progressive.
Huge amounts of money spent on bending the curve may prevail in a given election or over a period of years, but in the end it is not sustainable.
What do you have if you have a coalition of the most gullible people? What basis for policy that addresses real problems do you have if your constituents are the bigots, the misogynists, the fearful of the future, the anti-science denialists and the parochial people with a blinkered world view?
Democrats and progressives need to take some time to do some deeper thinking and engage in a more penetrating analysis and to read.
Over the holidays, everyone should read Naomi Klein's "This Changes Everything." It just might. This book really lives up to its title. Her research is impeccable and wide ranging enough in scope that it encompasses the entire world and the twin problems of climate change and globalization. It also probes likely solutions.
So does Lester Brown's "Mobilizing to Save Civilization."
We need to rise to a larger view and expand into very much deeper consideration.
Politics tends to be about the next election. What we ought to be considering is a long term path to reaching 2050 and then 2100.
We need to address long term and deeper issues than we have been able to, and if we don't we will continue to lose the attention of people who at least sense that there are deeper problems and solutions than anyone in politics is paying attention to.