Tribalism is real. An Up Close observation. Banned from a Progressive Facebook group.
This blog proposed a Theory of Candidate Branding. The leader shapes a brand that represents a big thematic idea, attitude, and personality. The brand attracts or repels. An attractive candidate then articulates policy particulars.
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| Crowd was cheering, not calculating. |
Yesterday and the day before this blog proposed that presidential candidates represented big brands, that their suite of attributes of party, biography, style, positions, and demeanor all created an archetypal character. By election day voters were choosing between big somewhat amorphous brands. Some highly motivated activists look closely at policy positions, but the vast majority of voters are not looking at some checklist, deciding which candidate best fit their policy preferences.
Voters operate from intuition, not calculation.
That is why this blog uses the professional wrestling metaphor. Stock characters play out larger than life battles using primarily body language. It is not a pretty analogy for how we pick a president, but I think it is far more accurate than one that considers voters to be making a complex rational evaluation of policies. Voters don't know exactly what to think, which is why they find someone they trust to tell them how to put sentiment and desire into operating policy.
If this understanding is correct, then Bernie's Brooklyn accent, his rumpled clothes and unkempt hair, combined with his denunciations of Wall Street billionaires, created an attractive brand: the principled iconoclast taking on the established powers.
Hillary's brand drew excitement from others, people who valued continuity, experience, professionalism, practical liberalism, who wanted progress but not fundamental change, and who thought it was high time a woman was president.
Trump's brand was the dominant, bullying, bull in a china shop breaker of rules and conventions who would shake up the system as an outsider.
Each brand has electoral strengths and weaknesses, which I likened to the strengths and vulnerabilities of the Rock, Paper, Scissors game.
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| Facebook group: This blog banned. |
Banned! The last two days' blog posts were the straw that broke the camel's back for a progressive Facebook group, Rural Progressives of Oregon. The administrator told me not to promote and link to this blog there anymore. This blog is not sufficiently doctrinaire progressive for them. A key principle of the Facebook group is unity of thought and protection of group cohesion. There are approved thoughts and beliefs. They have a centralized authority on approved positions. There is right thought and wrong thought.
This blog is too independent for them.
On the surface this would appear to undermine this blog's position that policies don't matter. After all, being doctrinaire is all about doctrine. The group locked in approved policies, apparently whatever Bernie Sanders proposed in 2016. Any deviation is heresy.
But I don't think it is actually about policy. It is about the group.
There is a team, a cohort, that is keeping the faith and flame alive. The suggestion in a Guest Post comment by Thad Guyer that Democrats might best nominate John Hickenlooper, the Democratic Governor of Colorado, created a stir within the group. It came on top of the suggestion by me that candidates other than Bernie were on the sidelines considering a run. Accusation of troll! Accusation of interloper! Amid the "likes" for this blog content came threats to leave the group if "disgusting" and "appalling" people were allowed to post links. People expressed "offense." There was something ugly and foreign in the group. (Xenophobia and disgust for is not confined to the political right.)
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| Facebook: Unity, Unity |
The Facebook group administrator defended her group. Blog not welcome here.
Political action is a group effort, with simultaneous contradictory goals, both unity in group strength and outreach to enlarge the group. At this point, this group is solidly in the unity-defense phase, defending the village walls. They are immeshed in a cold war of suspicion from Democrats who they believe hint or suggest--or outright accuse--the progressive wing of the party of having sabotaged Hillary and gotten Trump elected. My progressive friends are very sensitive to that implication, So does that Facebook group. The resent any hint of blame for Trump or any implication that their policies are anything less than correct morally and politically. They are clear the fault belongs to the establishment Democratic party and voters who nominated Hillary, not Bernie. Bernie would have won, while Hillary lost, they say.
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| Trump debates the issues |
I consider their bunkering evidence in favor of my description of presidential politics is brand warfare. In a policy perspective, Hillary and Bernie were very similar, and Trump the far outlier. But in a brand perspective Hillary, Bernie, and Trump were three essentially equal opponents.
Progressive Democrats had no obligation to support Hillary because the policy similarities between the two are not really the important thing, not in a conflict among brands. The key brand conflict was that Hillary was the establishment and Bernie intended a revolution against the establishment. The fact that they both supported easy access to college and universal access to health care were less important. In a conflict among brands, many Bernie-progressives did exactly the right thing, not support Hillary.
This blog comes to an optimistic conclusion about the future for the political left: a candidate who exemplifies iconoclastic independence is very plausible as a candidate that would be the next generation of Bernie's brand, and that candidate could simultaneously appeal to cultural conservatives. he Bernie brand of iconoclasm need not be socialist on economics nor immoderate on immigration, although the next candidate could be, so long as he or she simultaneously appeals to cultural conservatives on issues that cultural liberals will tolerate. Specific policies divide but brands create trust, which allows people to consolidate.
So here is the irony:
This blog was banned by the Rural Progressives of Oregon Facebook group the blog stated a position that essentially validates their very reason for banning me. They felt invaded. They are a team, a tribe with boundaries that has bonded to a leader. That bond is also why I can be so optimistic about the future, because when there is that bond a leader can exercise flexibility and judgement to deal with changing circumstances and bring his or her group along.
The world did not stop in 2016. Leaders need to be flexible.
So here is the irony:
This blog was banned by the Rural Progressives of Oregon Facebook group the blog stated a position that essentially validates their very reason for banning me. They felt invaded. They are a team, a tribe with boundaries that has bonded to a leader. That bond is also why I can be so optimistic about the future, because when there is that bond a leader can exercise flexibility and judgement to deal with changing circumstances and bring his or her group along.
The world did not stop in 2016. Leaders need to be flexible.
4 comments:
It occurs to me that while I don't think Regressive's minds can be changed, there are some erstwhile liberals who can be moved out of the "center" through discussion and debate, which builds support for Progressive social justice and environmental policies.
I would rather see them debate someone who is willing and understanding of their positions than exclude them.
This is particularly meaningful today, as earlier this week I was in a conversation concerning the role of Universities and colleges in stimulating minds, and challenging people to think. I was told that I just liked to stir up controversy, and it occurs and your observation about the unwillingness of a lot of people on the left to acknowledge different viewpoints is really pertinent.
I'm in that school who thinks the Bernie and Jill Stein purists who refused to vote for Mrs. Clinton truly helped lose the election and hand the country over to trump. Denial is a far stronger river than the one in Egypt, apparently, because I still see people claiming Bernie Sanders could have beaten trump, in spite of the fact that Hillary had millions more votes than he did before the Primary season even ended. I ended my support of Sanders when it became mathematically impossible for him to win, and I lost most of my respect for him when he refused to not only admit defeat, but continue to tear at Hillary Clinton, which certainly did no good for anyone except trump-.
These tribal subgroups of each party, whether neo-progessives or neo-conservatives cluster at the political polarities. They are maybe 40% of the electorate, with the majority 60% arranged at center, center left and center right. However they have power as only an activist base or core can. When organized early and effectively, they can propel a far left or far right candidate into a commanding and unstoppable lead to the party nomination.
Those ideological candidates almost always lose when challenging an incument POTUS' second term. The single exception in my lifetime was far right Ronald Reagan unseating Carter. In all other elections since 1952, only a centrist pragmatist has ever unseated an incumbent POTUS, which is very rare, to wit Carter and Clinton unseating Ford and Bush I respectively. Far left groups believe that Trump is an anomaly and historical precedent will not apply to his re-election in 2020, just as they believed it did not apply to his election in 2016. However, the predictive models from Yale, Stonybrook, Emory and American universities all forecast a Trump win based on conventional historical and electoral data. As a populist economic nationalist, he is not outside historical norms in American history.
That is why I have described the phenomenon as a centrist non-coastal governor "stealing" the nomination from the liberal or progressive favorite. Any nominee who is the favorite of the progressives who ostracized you from their Facebook tribe have a statistically near zero chance of unseating Trump (if he runs as a Republican) for a second term. Historical precedent tells us that only a centrist stealing the Democratic nomination from far left candidates can defeat Trump in 2020.
As Groucho Marx once said, “I would never join a club that would have me as a member.”
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