Today's guest post warns that I am dead wrong.
Currently Trump dominates the message war. That can change. Voters know he is a blowhard.
I have written that Democrats will become a majority party when a media-savvy, self-confident leader emerges to command public attention by providing a credible counter-narrative to Trump's. That role won't be given to them by party leaders. Indeed, it must not be. I write that a spokesperson's credibility must be won amid open competition among other Democrats and against Trump.
Rothschild left Harvard with a Ph.D. in 1966, shortly before I got there. He is a retired professor of English. His avocation was justice and peace work, beginning in the Civil Rights movement in Louisiana in the 1960s. He ran nonprofit organizations in Louisiana, New Jersey, Texas and Ashland, OR, some of which he founded. Since 2014, he has published a weekly column, first in the Daily Tidings, now in Ashland.news, which he started in 2021. The Bad Old Days is his memoir of the Civil Rights era.
Guest Post by Herbert Rothschild
In his blog on January 29 about still another of Trump’s egregious public lies, Peter bemoaned the current lack of an effective spokesperson from the Democratic Party to counter them. In the instance he cited, it was the California Department of Water Resources that issued a public statement setting the record straight, but obviously it commanded a small fraction of the attention Trump did.
The problem is real, and it’s difficult to solve because, as Peter pointed out, there are no longer news sources that the majority of Americans who follow public affairs look to for reliable information. They exist, but the info universe is far more fragmented than it was when the three broadcast networks—CBS, NBC and ABC—dominated the news field along with responsible print journalism at the local level. Further, all too many media outlets are geared to specific and politically homogenous audiences.
Anyone can now put out information on digital platforms, not just on niche ones but on those for the general reader such as X, Reddit and Instagram. So, there is enormous competition for our attention.
As Tim Wu wrote in The Attention Merchants, “The business model of the internet is the seizure of attention.” The President of the United States has an enormous advantage in that competition. His pronouncements aren’t transmitted only by the siloed media that favor him; they are also transmitted by news outlets that still try to keep us abreast of what’s happening despite the personal politics of their owners, reporters and editors. How can the POTUS advantage be challenged by his/her political opponents? Specifically, how can Democrats rival Trump for attention? Peter looks to the emergence of an articulate and media-genic Democratic politician from somewhere out there who, on his/her own initiative, becomes the public face of the party whether other Democratic leaders like it or not. Even if someone emerges quickly enough to help us when we need it most, we need only remind ourselves that Trump became the public face of the Republican Party in exactly that way to realize the undesirability, if not the danger, of that solution.
There is another solution. It’s for the Democratic Party to function more like the opposition party in a parliamentary system. In Great Britain, each party has a leader whether it is in or out of power. That leader speaks for the party, and if s/he deviates too much from the policy positions of the party, s/he is replaced. In that way, the party maintains a relatively stable identity and public presence. I know that our system is different. Also, I know that our two major parties no longer have the institutional apparatus they formerly had before nominees were chosen by popular vote in primaries rather than by party pros in convention.
However, we have one precedent for both major parties to choose a national spokesperson. Beginning in 1966, when Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen and House Minority Leader Gerald Ford officially responded to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s State of the Union address, both parties have designated someone to respond on their behalf. The media that cover the address usually also cover the response. I see no reason why this practice couldn’t be extended to other occasions.
I don’t want some charismatic leader to become the public face of the Democratic Party if there is no check by other party leaders on what s/he says. The Republican Party today is the Party of Trump. He has led it to temporary victories, but what will it be after 2028? Peter’s emphasis on personality rather than policy, style over substance, has important implications for campaign strategy—candidates would do well to heed much of his advice—but by itself it is a prescription for long-term disaster, not just for Democrats, but for our nation.
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17 comments:
Mr. Rothschild makes an excellent point. If Democrats follow the Republicans’ lead and started picking leaders based on their ability to command attention, there’s no guarantee their leadership would be any less malignant than Trump’s.
The GOP has gone mad and become toxic. The Democratic Party needs to be the sane antidote, committed to policies that defend the Constitution, establish Justice and promote the general welfare.
Thank you, Mr. Rothschild, for reinforcing the point about the current state of our media. I really think it's the heart of the problem, and any new leader would have to be more than charismatic to overcome it. If most Americans get their news from social media sources (as stated, it's the current successful business model), just consider who owns and profits from them. I don't trust the algorithms. And even if an opposition leader makes an intelligent, articulate, and convincing statement ( or solution to a real problem) if next up a stable genius comes out and relieves himself onstage ( or some other such vulgarity), which will we be talking about the next morning?
Did you really mention “charismatic leader” and “ Democratic party”in the same sentence? Com’on man! You acknowledge that we currently exist in an attention economy and then you offer Everett Dirksen as a model for a solution? Republicans have been become masters of social media and podcasts, and Democrats are still offering us buggy whips.
The issue for Democrats isn't about having a charismatic leader. It's about policy. The Democrats have left middle-America, and now they just represent the east-coast and west-coast elites. Most Americans have problems paying their bills, and they don't want to deal with illegal aliens and transsexuals. It's all about priorities.
From what I have read, there is a lot of infighting happening in the Democratic Party right now over what the party’s message is going to be. It seems to me that the infighting would have to resolve into some clear conclusions before the party would be able to do the kind of thing that Mr. Rothschild suggests. I don’t see any signs of that so far.
It looks to me like the elites are supporting Trump, since he's planning to increase their obscene amount of wealth. The joke is on those poor saps who believed Trump would lower the price of eggs. That's why I call them Trump's chumps.
PS: You can stop obsessing over transsexuals now. Your molester-in-chief has declared there are only two sexes.
Doctrinaire progressives as an article of faith view America qua America as a glass half empty, as a net negative, even a pathogen, in global terms. Most Americans, whether Trump acolytes or not, understand that’s viewpoint to be a feckless Marxist canard. Unworthy Trump is a beneficiary of this dynamic. But a viable Democratic spokesperson needs to speak the unvarnished truth, however uncomfortable, while yet staunchly rejecting the leftist “America Bad, Period, From The Outset And Since” hogwash.
Exactly, LD. It is what I have been saying repeatedly (repitiously) for several years. It this new era, Democrats need someone who is sufficiently independent and free of bad history to be a truth teller. Jimmy Carter was one. He critized bad behavior wherever he saw it. Trump was free to say that some orthodoxy within the gop was wrong. Trickle down, e.g. the right person will citizens the Dem leadership for tolerating and hiding Biden's decline. They gaslighted America. Say so. Break the code of silence.
"Doctrinaire progressives as an article of faith view America...as a net negative, even a pathogen, in global terms."
America's founding values, such as equality and the rule of law, are quite beneficial. The progressives I know are committed to making ongoing progress toward achieving those ideals. Trump and his Republican toadies are taking a wrecking ball to them.
Here’s a thought: What if political parties and “opponents” have suddenly becoming as irrelevant here as they are in Russia and China?
Look, Trump and his team are overwhelming our institutions with a blitz of engineered chaos that destabilizes or even dismantles the guardrails of a functioning democracy and setting up a strongman government. The gloves are off, the nobody has the will or power to stop it. He seems to have very high public approval today.
Legislative action (regardless of party) and the courts are no match for the velocity and breadth of his “decrees”. It will be too late when the faithful find out they have been defrauded. The collateral effects will be felt for generations. It’s easier is to slash and burn than build.
He’s had 4 years to amass smart and power-hungry operatives to engineer his regime. I’m a hopeful and positive person but I’m struggling to be optimistic about democracy here. This battle is not about political ideology. It’s about power.
Per the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Nikole Hannah-Jones of “The 1619 Project”, core exemplars of the modern progressive Left, in the academy and otherwise, America’s founding values—in fact, America’s very raison d’etre—are, and remain, class oppression, capitalist destructiveness, and white supremacy. That calls for revolutionary denunciation of a misbegotten travesty, not a good faith community effort at improvement as needed.
Maybe “progressive” is the wrong word after all.
To LD. I consider Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Nikole Hannah-Jones of “The 1619 Project”, to be a straw man argument. It would be roughly equal for Democrats to consider Matt Gaetz or John Eastman to be representative of Trump. There would be some truth in it, but it would be unfair. Attack one's opponent's strongest argument and messenger, not its weakest. Pete Buttigieg, Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer, and Gavin Newsom are not out promoting the 1619 Project. I feel that people who cite them are revealing the weakness of their own argument because they needed to cite straw men.
Coates and Hannah-Jones reflect the academy, so teachers too, and most Democratic politicians (in public) and media/journalism types, on domestic politics as well as foreign (Israel, in particular). If (if) Buttigieg et al don’t actively promote ‘1619”, neither would they be caught dead disavowing it. It’s assigned and taught in public schools nationwide. It’s orthodoxy, like George Floyd and, until it beclowned itself, BLM. “Bad America” is, unfortunately, no straw man. It’s de rigeur for much of the modern Left, still driven by fundamental hostility to capitalism and the Judeo-Christian tradition.
(BTW, I would posit Gaetz as representative of Trump!)
That is a seriously warped and twisted interpretation of the 1619 Project. Even the Cato Institute, which can hardly be accused of being "progressive," offers a far more rational view: https://www.cato.org/blog/1619-project-confronting-legacies-american-slavery
The Cato Institute’s much longer and more detailed—and also, er, “warped”—summary came a year later—“The 1619 Project, An Autopsy”. It includes a refutation of Coates.
What Nicole Hannah-Jones has said is: "Our Founding Ideals of Liberty and Equality Were False When They Were Written. Black Americans Fought to Make Them True."
I realize that isn't what we were taught in grade school, but that doesn't make it incorrect.
No issue with her statement you’ve quoted. Her claim that the American Revolutionary War was fought to preserve the slave trade, on the other hand? Incendiary crapola, including per left-leaning historians.
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