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As Democrats continue to sift through the ashes of Tuesday’s election, they’ve begun the process of trying to understand what happened to them and their country. This was no mere fluke like 2016, and there is no single tactical or strategic decision — other than, perhaps, Joe Biden’s refusal to step down after the midterm elections in 2022 — that can explain why so many Americans decided to double down on Donald Trump. In the end, Kamala Harris never really had a chance.
That’s in large part because her party is still fighting elections like it’s 2008. Harris had more endorsements, including most of Trump’s former cabinet. She raised more money, spent more on conventional advertising, and had the most sophisticated “ground game” — that combination of phone bankers, door knockers, and other volunteers dedicated to annoying people into voting — in American political history.
Trump, in contrast, outsourced his own ground game, such as it was, to Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk. And while his campaign was often accused of being “terminally online,” that’s actually where it did its most important work. MAGA Republicans have controlled the alternative media space in America for years now, whether that’s podcasts or streaming or other non-conventional sources of information. When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, that cemented the right’s control over the digital ecosystem where most Americans — and especially young men, who broke overwhelmingly for Trump — get their information and news.
Democrats, on the other hand, still tried to filter their message through the remnants of the mainstream media. News outlets mostly did their jobs, looking critically at what was happening in and to the country under the Biden administration. The mainstream media cautioned, wherever possible, that Trump’s plans were unrealistic and often dangerous. But this warmed-over stew of complex information transmitted primarily through traditional mediums was no match for undiluted digital propaganda.
As former FBI agent and legal expert Asha Rangappa said on social media, “Democrats aren’t going to win elections again until they build a well-oiled information ecosystem that extends to podcasts and every social media platform and can pierce the right-wing propaganda bubble. It doesn’t matter if you delivered on the economy or we are actually safer if people are being pummeled by domestic and foreign disinformation that crime and inflation are up. It’s an information war at this point.”
And when it comes to the internet, well, we’re not going back. As Infinite Scroll’s Jeremiah Johnson wrote, “I can’t help but think back to the 2000s and 2010s when people would dismissively say things like ‘The internet is not real life. Twitter is not real life. You need to log off and talk to real people.’ If that was ever correct it’s certainly not any more. It’s almost more correct to say that people knocking on doors need to get off the street and get back on the internet. To compete in modern politics you *must* be fighting in online spaces.”
Fox News has, of course, been tilting the table like this for years, pretending to pursue “fair and balanced” journalism while in reality doing the exact opposite. But the combination of social media and MAGA politics has made Fox’s influence look dowright pedestrian by comparison. Whether it’s on YouTube, Spotify, or Twitter, the right’s domination of the digital airwaves is now impossible to ignore.
As Jon Stewart told the New York Times’s Ezra Klein, it’s time for progressives to start fighting this inferno of bullshit with some fire of their own. “We have the mechanisms. We have the talent. We have the people. We just need the will. Roger Ailes built Fox News Media out of tenacity and will and skill as a producer. We have to match that with the same intentionality that he brought to it.”
No, that doesn’t mean engaging in the same sort of naked propaganda that tends to characterize some of the most popular platforms on the right. But it means declining to rely on the mainstream media to communicate their message for them. It means making major investments in building up new voices and platforms that can reach the voters they’ve so clearly lost, whether that’s Gen-Z or working-class Latinos. And it means understanding that the facts, whether they’re about the economy or immigration, simply won’t speak for themselves anymore when there are so many places eager to disseminate “alternative” facts.
I’d bet heavily that this lesson is arriving far too late to save Justin Trudeau’s Liberals from a similar fate. Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives, after all, have been dominating Canada’s comparatively quaint online and digital spaces to a similar extent, and the Trudeau government’s $600 million bet on backstopping the mainstream media has only served to turn even more people against it. They — and indeed, all progressives — will have to build their own ecosystem if they want people to actually hear their message.
If they don’t, we know what will happen. The messy complexities of our world are no match for someone armed with a simple message and a digital megaphone, and whining about the unfairness of the situation won’t do anything to actually change it. Instead, it’s now up to those of us who care about things like truth and decency to start fighting for them more effectively.
Comments
As always, bang-on
This could explain why some polls showed older voters like me breaking for Harris, and why we may not have seen this coming. Consumers of legacy media, we are still living in the 20th century. I know next to nothing of what happens in this "inferno of bullshit," as ,Jon Stewart calls it, nor do I particularly want to. But it's not my world anymore.
It s not mine either but our msm have sold out to stupid, and while I do not know anything about the alternatives sources, clearly our governments are not using them either.
Please here are some extra tax dollars, go buy your way in and learn to speak to the young in their own language and tell them what s going on. All they hear are lies. They dont know what s real.
Why isnt government and other sources of knowledge( universities? what are you doing???) need to step up.
Yup bang on again.
And let's not forget the influence of big money in the USA by not only Musk but the 100 PACs financed by the Koch Brothers.
In Canada we are seeing the influence of big money lobbyists on government in our food chain, pharmaceutical companies, housing crisis and the reduction of trust in government.
In the US it has taken 45 years since Milton Friedman convinced President Reagan to give Reaganomics and PM Thatcher, Thatcherism a whirl.
Not only has social media and misinformation become prevalent, it is now the word of God to many .
And now we North Americans are going to get a dose of trickle down economics on steroids in the US and Canada. And hopefully it will be a wake-up call, but I doubt it
Is it even possible to combat the right's inferno of bullshit, in which increasing numbers of people seem to have fully immersed themselves? I know the platforms can be built, but can the truth compete with bullshit? I, for one, have no interest in a competing left wing inferno of bullshit.
All very true. But for different reasons, I'm not sure either the Democrats/Liberals or the actual left are capable of doing that. The Democrats and Liberals and other centrists can't do it because they have no message. The right wing social media has fiery, motivating messages--they're blatant lies dedicated to getting people to act against their own interests, but the lying messages are strong, and the lies are motivating because they are based in a fundamental truth: Stuff is not going well, for a lot of people; there's something rotten about the status quo, and people want someone to come and tell them yes, something is badly wrong, and we are going to fix it.
The Democrats and Liberals don't have a message. Their position is that everything is hunky dory and we just need to stay the course and trust the moderate technocrats who have been running things all this time. As per Mackenzie King, do nothing by half-measures when quarter-measures are sufficient. Nothing to see here, move along is not a motivating message. And although many of the half-things they half-say aren't in themselves technically false, they are based on a deeper lie, the lie that everything is OK. And that lie is one that people have already seen through--that's why they're willing to listen to the right wing lies in the first place. There's plenty of pro-status-quo money, so the centrists could pour money and expertise into trying to make a centrist socialmediasphere to defeat the right wing echo chamber, but without a strong message it would probably fall flat.
The left has a message . . . roughly speaking, take money and power away from the very rich and corporations, and give them to real people. It is a powerful, compelling message. Like the right wing message, it acknowledges there's a problem, it blames villains for that problem, and it promises to solve the problem and give the villains a comeuppance. Not only that, IMO it's true--at a minimum, there isn't this weird disconnect between the problem and proposed solution that you see with right wing stuff. I mean "Your job is crappy and underpaid because the money and power are being siphoned up to the billionaires, so you will have more if we take it back from them" hangs together better than "Your job is crappy and underpaid so things will be better if we stop trans kids from going to the bathroom". Unfortunately, for some reason those same very rich people and corporations seem unwilling to bankroll left wing organizations to push that message . . . go figure. So the left has no money.
The right has plenty of money because there are some billionaires and corporations who really need a politics of the gullible and reality-denying, for instance fossil fuel interests. And some who are just racist pieces of crap. And their fiery messages don't threaten those rich backers because the fiery messages are mainly irrelevant to the real problems and the elites actually causing those problems. So the right can have both the money and their message.
The centrists cannot have a message without leaning left, at which point they will start losing their money. This is why Kamala Harris failed to adopt any Sanders-style or even Walz-style policies, or to campaign much on the few vaguely economically progressive things that were technically in her platform. The Democrats preferred the risk of losing the election than the risk of losing their financial backers.
The leftists cannot get money without leaning far enough to the centre to lose their message. This has happened to left-ish political parties many, many times. Usually in Europe this results in a gradual slide into irrelevance.
It's a conundrum. I'm reflexively on the side of doing left wing powerful messages (that I happen to agree with) and trying to come up with ways to overcome lack of money and hostile media. But I have to say I'm not seeing anyone much in the first world making that work . . . maybe Jean-Luc Melenchon.
Thank you, Max for confirming in modern terms what I ve been saying for years. The cons own the narrative. I knew msm wasnt cutting it but as a non social media user, am out of my depth.
Yes it seems the hate on trudeau messaging has sunk deep but surely there s a tiny hope that pp can be exposed for the foreign owned mini trump he is.
Or that counter voters to this messaging can be brought out of the shadows to offset this brainwashed disaster.
Can t counter messaging be mustered fast enough for that? Maybe a little inspiration?
Surely our collective horror at what s happened to the south will inspire push back.
Surely.
Cause we re juicy meat in the sandwich between our south and north neighbours.
We don't have another storey yet and until progressives do, no chances.
Try George Monbiot's new book Invisible Doctrine The Secret History of Neoliberalism 2024. In it he clearly and succinctly explains the last 45 years of politics and economics
A quick easy read of where we have been and what's next without that storey.
And a letter to the Tyee Editor suggested do not use the word Neoliberalism as it sounds like capital L liberal or socialism.
Any suggestions other than Trickle Down which has been Trickle Up, Reaganomics or Thatcherism?
And as the the US and UK continue on the increasing inequality paths, when we voters rebel? Seems like never
Well, if it comes to slogans, Occupy Wall Street's "The 1% vs the 99%" resonated.
That one makes a lot more sense and would surely resonate even more now, but remember how silly they got with that on the topic of leadership, i.e. they didn't want to so openly favor any ONE person over another to be in charge....like the overly idealistic NDP trying to reinvent the wheel and have more than one leader, which worked about as well as focusing FAR too much on gender-bending and changing basic pronoun usage to a plural describing one person.
As Katie Couric said, "it's a steep learning curve" so how about just be like any other growing, evolving person first and foremost, knowing you're protected from harm by law and relying on what gay people accomplished after going through hell with AIDS, and how about also noting where women STILL ARE, after all this time despite comprising HALF of humanity--- that even a horror like Trump is STILL preferable to ANY woman. Any woman. And not just that, we're now starting to go backwards to the time when birth control of ANY kind wasn't considered health care FFS! Serious, sick Catholicism is set up for a comeback with Project 2025 and being a recent convert, J.D. Vance is in the cue to bring Americans his Yale version of hillbilly heroin.
With all the aforementioned crap online, the dizzying tower of babble BS, how about somehow reviving our fragile, enigmatic "creatureliness" in the face of catastrophic climate change? And that message is also unique to us.