Spencer Critchley

Communication and Change

Spencer Critchley

Presidential Campaigns Are Not Logical, but Mythological

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Tapestry: King Arthur as one of the None Worthies
King Arthur

If you’re trying to make sense of a presidential campaign, it helps to realize that it’s not logical, but mythological. We’re choosing a leader, not a manager, and the process has more in common with mystical, ancient rites than with reviewing resumes.

What we look for in a leader hasn’t changed much since the beginning of history, or even before, when we were primates gathered in troupes. We’re looking for the one who will fight, and win, for us.

The judgment of who that is isn’t really based on judgment, but on instinct. It’s necessary (or should be) for a candidate to be qualified and to have solid policies, but it’s nowhere near sufficient. What catches our stronger interest and ends up persuading us is what is expressed in a fleeting facial expression, the tone of a voice, and the way a body moves, along with how all of these happen to interact with the culture of the moment — the right leader at the wrong time won’t succeed.

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The “Democratic Establishment” Is Working & Middle Class African-Americans

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Narratives settle in and effectively become reality, even when they’re wrong. The story that the “Democratic establishment” turned around the primary for Joe Biden is not only wrong, but insulting to the very voters Democrats need in order to win. Biden’s campaign was saved by the mostly African-American, working and middle class people of South Carolina, with a huge assist from a trusted local leader, Rep. Jim Clyburn. Otherwise, Biden would have lost, or squeezed out a disappointingly narrow win, and we wouldn’t have seen the cascade of support for him on Monday. On Tuesday, he won other states thanks to a lot of other working and middle class voters, with more strong support in particular among African-Americans.

A key reason for the willingness to believe the “establishment” narrative is also a key reason why Democrats lose elections we should win: we’re strong on economics and really bad on culture. The narrative depends on the mistaken belief, going all the way back to Marx and still hanging in even among people who don’t think of themselves as Marxists, that there’s a monolithic working class and that its economic struggle against the capitalist class explains everything about history and politics.

But as Marx might have learned if he had lived long enough to overlap with the field of psychology, there is a working class when it come to income levels and some shared economic interests, but not when it comes to behavior. Instead there are millions and millions of individuals who are members of wildly variable cultures.

I’d guess, for example, that many people would be surprised to learn that even though a huge majority of African-Americans are Democrats, only about a quarter identify as liberals.

Culture frequently trumps economics when it comes to behavior — as it did with Trump, BTW. This leaves many on the left scratching their heads and wondering what just happened to them — again. They ask themselves questions like, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” Their confusion comes from a mistaken worldview that thinks economics drives everything.

What’s the matter with Kansas is that a lot of white working class people who used to vote Democratic stopped doing that because of culture.

And more black people might too, if they keep having the experience of being overlooked, taken for granted — or outright insulted, like we’re seeing right now.

Liberals: Great at Substance, Terrible at Messaging. So We’re Talking About “Socialism”

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Senator Bernie Sanders

If Bernie becomes the nominee, I want him to win. The country will need him to win to save democracy from Trumpism.

But here’s the problem: we liberals are great at substance, and terrible at messaging.

Great at substance because we believe in science. Terrible at messaging because we’re stuck in our heads. Effective messaging is emotional, not rational.

To wit: arguing about the meaning of the word “socialism.” This is, I’m sorry, idiotic messaging. But as Bernie rises, that’s what we’re doing. If Bernie becomes the nominee, maybe he’ll win anyway, and for all our sakes, I sure hope he does. But why climb a mountain when there’s a perfectly good tunnel right through it?

What Bernie is campaigning on isn’t even socialism: it’s social democracy, aka FDR-style progressivism. FDR was one of the most popular and successful presidents in history — partly because he wasn’t dumb enough to call himself a socialist when he wasn’t one.

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The State of Our Union: It’s Being Sovietized

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Thoughts on the #SOTU:

1. A man who has repeatedly insulted and dishonored the military, who offers to rent them out to as if they were mercenaries, and who is recklessly sending more troops away to foreign battlefronts, shamelessly exploited a military family reunion for his own political ends. Of course he did. Because he understands, in a way his opponents don’t, that our culture now runs on emotional moments, and those moments don’t need to make any sense—sense is beside the point. They just need to deliver a jolt of entertainment. Neil Postman called it way back in 1985 in “Amusing Ourselves To Death:”

“Our Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian. It does everything possible to encourage us to watch continuously. But what we watch is a medium which presents information in a form that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment. In America, we are never denied the opportunity to amuse ourselves.

“Tyrants of all varieties have always known about the value of providing the masses with amusements as a means of pacifying discontent. But most of them could not have even hoped for a situation in which the masses would ignore that which does not amuse.“

2. I feel real compassion for Rush Limbaugh for his cancer diagnosis. But you can feel compassion for someone and see them clearly at the same time. Limbaugh got rich harming his country. Like a modern day Father Charles Coughlin, he exploited the power of media to stoke ignorance, fear, and hatred, and their inevitable compound, bigotry.

He was a ringleader of the racist birther conspiracy. He described the modern NFL as looking like a game between Crips and Bloods. He insulted and belittled women, only gudgingly apologizing after calling Sandra Fluke a “slut” for days on end.

This quote from 2009 brings together Limbaugh’s major themes in the perfect symbolism of a white woman — an annoyingly independent one — kissing a black man’s grave:

“But now you got the Clintons back in the news cycle taking credit for all these wonderful things, Hillary’s over in Kenya kissing Obama’s grandfather’s grave and talking about whatever corruption she’s finding over there. Just a bunch of total BS. It’s all just a bunch of BS.”

He finishes the thought with this:

“There is no truth. And to the extent that they think you believe in truth, you are the target. You have to be disabused of that notion.”

It’s the essence of the right wing media bubble in all its resentment, paranoia, and profiteering (“Only we will tell you the truth”), captured in a few phrases by its poet laureate.

No wonder Trump gave Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom, thereby inverting the meaning of that honor, like he has so much else.

Limbaugh helped create Trump.

3. And then there were the lies. Big, in a blizzard, Soviet-style. No this is not the best-ever economy; it’s performing well below levels set in multiple previous administrations — including the Obama administration. No, manufacturing is not coming back, it’s declining under Trump. No, his administration is not protecting coverage of pre-existing conditions, it’s attacking it in court, trying to have it declared un-Constitutional.

And on and on and on. The state of our union is that it is being Sovietized.

How Do You Tell If News Is Reliable? Here’s One Simple Tip

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Even well-educated people often have trouble judging the quality of news outlets. Here’s a simple but very effective tip: look for paragraphs like this one, from an recent article in the Washington Post:

This account of how McConnell and enough Senate Republicans blocked witnesses from entering Trump’s trial — the issue that was most in question during the contentious proceedings — is based on interviews with 13 senators and other officials familiar with the deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk frankly.


You just won’t see careful, accountable sourcing like this in unreliable or outright fake news sources. Instead, you’ll find heavily biased sources mixed with unsourced assertions.

But what if the Post just made up those sources it claims it has? No mainstream news source does that, and the claim that they do is simply a lie, told by people who benefit from undermining trust in the facts.

To be a mainstream news outlet is to follow the rules of news reporting. Those rules are well understood, carefully guarded, and strictly enforced when they’re broken. On the rare occasions when a mainstream reporter actually has invented sources, that reporter has been fired and the outlet has published prominent corrections. For example, see the case of former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair from 2003.

Mainstream news outlets follow the rules of reporting partly because their staff actually believe in those rules and that’s why they became journalists, more pragmatically because those staff members are in the profession of uncovering and publicizing wrongdoing and so are the worst kind of people to try to enlist in a coverup, and even more pragmatically because the mainstream outlets’ business model depends on it: their advertisers want to reach a large audience of the kind of people who want reliable news, and corporations, investors, and others who are making critical decisions need reliable news on which to base those decisions. Unreliable news would cost them a lot, and so they would get their news from some other outlet they could trust.

Unreliable news outlets make their money by selling sensation; reliable ones make their money by selling accurate information. Apart from the real ethical considerations involved for mainstream outlets in following the rules, it would just be stupid for them to do anything else.