Afternoon all. This new post and interview should be seen as a companion to the one I sent this morning, where I argue
I think a central reason there is broad disappointment in the pro-democracy movement right now is there is a sense that our leaders are not adequately recognizing, articulating and organizing around the actual threat we face. That while we have had successes, and are working hard, the sum is not greater than the parts; we have no big animating call to action, no core narrative we are working around. That we seem small when we need to be big. That there is too much business as usual and not enough fight. That there is politics when what we need is patriotism - unrelenting, full-throated, deeply courageous, throw the consultants and ad testing overboard, old fashioned American patriotism.
They have Make America Great Again. What do we have? “Make sure 15 million don’t lose their health insurance”….. Seems good, but not what is required now, don’t you think?
This August as we rest up and recharge we must also work collectively to find a higher gear; tell a bigger story; develop a language, a narrative, a rallying cry and a battle plan commensurate with the deeply dangerous moment we find ourselves in.
This morning’s post was heavily inspired by a conversation I had with New Yorker writer Nathan Heller a few days ago, a conversation that I can’t stop thinking about. You can find a recording of our discussion and a transcript above.
Shortly after the 2024 election Nathan wrote an important article for the New Yorker called Republican Victory and the Ambience of Information. It’s subhead read:
For years, Democrats have sought to win elections by micro-targeting communities with detailed facts. What if the secret is big, sloppy notions seeded nationwide?
If you cannot get past the New Yorker paywall I have included a passage from the article most relevant to us, below. Here’s my favorite part:
Detail, even when it’s available, doesn’t travel widely after all. Big, sloppy notions do.
Planting ideas this way isn’t argument, and it’s not emotional persuasion. It’s about seeding the ambience of information, throwing facts and fake facts alike into an environment of low attention, with the confidence that, like minnows released individually into a pond, they will eventually school and spawn. Notions must add up to a unified vision but also be able to travel on their own, because that’s how information moves in a viral age. And national media is key. Trump’s command of the ambience of information wouldn’t have been possible without his own platforms, such as Truth Social, as well as allies such as Fox News’ C.E.O., Suzanne Scott, who in 2020 excoriated her team after they fact-checked Trump, and Elon Musk, who, hoping for executive-branch power over his own sector, largely funded more than a hundred and seventy-five million dollars’ worth of pro-Trump outreach, was read into early voting data, and tweeted lies, conspiracy theories, and mistrust of media on his network, X, which boosts his posts. The communications researcher Pablo Boczkowski has noted that people increasingly take in news by incidental encounter—they are “rubbed by the news”—rather than by seeking it out. Trump has maximized his influence over networks that people rub against, and has filled them with information that, true or not, seems all of a coherent piece.
All of a coherent piece. A narrative. A story. A slogan like Make American Great Again.
I could go on but I want you to watch the interview and read the article or the excerpt below. The argument Nathan makes here about the current way information flows and how we have to rethink our pro-democracy communications strategy is compelling and in my mind correct. This article, and this interview, are major contributions to our our ongoing discussion about what we can learn from our 2024 defeat to get stronger, better and more effective. They are now a very important part of our understandings here at Hopium, and I will be referring to Nathan’s big “ambience of information” take often in the days ahead.
Watch this interview. Read Nathan’s seminal article (or excerpt). Share them with others. And note that Nathan does have a mild stutter which you will catch in the interview itself.
Keep fighting hard all. We have a lot of work ahead of us - Simon
An Excerpt From Nathan Heller’s “Republican Victory and the Ambience of Information”:
Why didn’t the speeches register? Why did people persist in thinking that Harris was short on policy; that Trump’s programs would boost the American economy, despite a widely broadcast consensus from sixteen Nobel Prize-winning economists to the contrary; or that he would lower taxes for working people, though the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy calculated that he would increase them? Even many of Trump’s critics think his first term marked a high point for border patrol, though more unauthorized migrants have been forced to leave under Biden. (Why was Biden’s Presidency widely dismissed as desultory, when, in fact, as my colleague Nicholas Lemann recently put it, “he has passed more new domestic programs than any Democratic President since Lyndon Johnson—maybe even since Franklin Roosevelt”?) How did so many perceptions disprovable with ten seconds of Googling become fixed in the voting public’s mind? And why, even as misapprehensions were corrected, did those beliefs prevail?
Democrats, during their hair-shirt rituals, gaze into their souls and find “bad messaging.” There is talk of a poor “ground game,” an élite failure to “connect.” But the Harris campaign set records or near-records for fund-raising, volunteer enrollment, and in some districts voter registration; it is hard to imagine what a better ground game or a closer connection might have looked like in three months. And the messaging, which hewed to the middle-class experiences of Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, neither of whom is Ivy-educated or grew up rich, was hardly misguided in a race that ostensibly came down to the economic and exclusion anxieties of working people. Yet Democrats did make a crucial messaging error, one that probably (as the line goes) lost them the election. They misjudged today’s flow of knowledge—what one might call the ambience of information.
Harris’s approach this year was distinct from her failed effort to run a more identity-centered campaign in the Democratic primary of 2020. Instead, it leaned on strategies that had carried her toward her two most improbable electoral victories: her first race, for San Francisco district attorney, which she entered while polling at six per cent, against a powerful progressive incumbent and a well-known law-and-order centrist, and won by more than ten points; and her election as California’s attorney general, which at least one major California paper initially called for her opponent on Election Night, before Harris gained ground in the continuing count and, in a reputation-making vindication of her strategy, pulled ahead. Her magic in those elections had come largely through micro-targeting—a focussed, intensely local effort to engage voters on tailored terms and to mobilize small communities that traditional campaigning missed. In the early two-thousands, this was the cutting edge of ground strategy. Harris’s political peers regarded her as one of its first virtuosi.
On the trail with the Vice-President, reporting a profile for Vogue, I was struck by how reflexively her mind and methods ran to the local frame. When I noted, in an interview, that one of her policy signatures seemed to be investing in community-development financial institutions (C.D.F.I.s)—which offer capital access to struggling communities—Harris lit up and elaborated a neighborhood-centered theory of market-based improvement. She touted C.D.F.I.s’ contributions to “the economy of the community.” Laying out her middle-class economic-opportunity programs, she invariably talked about a woman who had run a nursery school on her block.
If Americans still arrive at a theory of the world through their communities, the boundaries of those communities have broadened and diffused. Harris’s micro-targeting home run in San Francisco came before the iPhone. Her second unlikely victory, in the race for California attorney general, roughly coincided with Facebook’s introduction of a proprietary sorting algorithm for its News Feed. In the ensuing years, there were major changes to the channels through which Americans—rich Americans, poor Americans, all Americans—received information. As early as 2000, the political scientist Robert Putnam, in his landmark study “Bowling Alone,” noted that technology, not least the Internet, had an individuating, isolating tendency that eroded the network of civic bonds—he called it social capital—that joins and holds people in groups.
It is wrong to suggest that people now relate only through digital screens. (People still show up at cookouts, dinner parties, track meets, and other crossings.) But information travels differently across the population: ideas that used to come from local newspapers or TV and drift around a community now come along an unpredictable path that runs from Wichita to Vancouver, perhaps via Paris or Tbilisi. (Then they reach the cookout.) Studies confirm that people spend less and less time with their neighbors. Instead, many of us scroll through social networks, stream information into our eyes and ears, and struggle to recall where we picked up this or that data point, or how we assembled the broad conceptions that we hold. The science historian Michael Shermer, in his book “The Believing Brain,” used the term “patternicity” to describe the way that people search for patterns, many of them erroneous, on the basis of small information samplings. The patterns we perceive now rise less from information gathered in our close communities and more from what crosses our awareness along national paths.
The Democrats didn’t look past national-scale audiences—Harris sat with both Fox News and Oprah. But she approached that landscape differently. The campaign, it was often noted, shied away from legacy-media interviews. It instead used a national platform to tune the affect, or vibes, of her rise: momentum, freedom, joy, the middle class, and “BRAT” chartreuse. When she spoke to wide audiences, her language was careful and catholic; one often had the sense that she was trying to say as little as possible beyond her talking points. The meat and specificity of her campaign—the access, the detail, and the identity coalitions—were instead concentrated on coalition-group Zooms, and on local and community audiences. Harris micro-targeted to the end.
Donald Trump did the inverse. He spoke off the cuff on national platforms all the time. He said things meant to resonate with specific affinity or identity subgroups, even if they struck the rest of listening America as offensive or absurd. (“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs!”) As my colleague Antonia Hitchens reported, his campaign was boosted by a traditional get-out-the-vote ground effort late in the game—despite this apparently not being a priority for Trump—but the canvassing was less about delivering policy information than about tuning voters’ ears like satellites to the national signal. (Election fraud was a theme.) Trump’s speeches at rallies, many people noticed, had a curious background-music quality: they went on forever, aimlessly, and people would come and go at will. The actual speeches didn’t seem to matter; they existed simply to set a vibe and keep certain broad suggestions (immigration big problem! Biden Administration so corrupt!) drifting into the ether. Trump seemed to think that much of the voting public couldn’t be bothered with details—couldn’t be bothered to fact-check, or deal with fact checkers. (“Who the hell wants to hear questions?” he asked at a town hall in October before deciding to dance and sway to music for more than half an hour.) Detail, even when it’s available, doesn’t travel widely after all. Big, sloppy notions do.
Planting ideas this way isn’t argument, and it’s not emotional persuasion. It’s about seeding the ambience of information, throwing facts and fake facts alike into an environment of low attention, with the confidence that, like minnows released individually into a pond, they will eventually school and spawn. Notions must add up to a unified vision but also be able to travel on their own, because that’s how information moves in a viral age. And national media is key. Trump’s command of the ambience of information wouldn’t have been possible without his own platforms, such as Truth Social, as well as allies such as Fox News’ C.E.O., Suzanne Scott, who in 2020 excoriated her team after they fact-checked Trump, and Elon Musk, who, hoping for executive-branch power over his own sector, largely funded more than a hundred and seventy-five million dollars’ worth of pro-Trump outreach, was read into early voting data, and tweeted lies, conspiracy theories, and mistrust of media on his network, X, which boosts his posts. The communications researcher Pablo Boczkowski has noted that people increasingly take in news by incidental encounter—they are “rubbed by the news”—rather than by seeking it out. Trump has maximized his influence over networks that people rub against, and has filled them with information that, true or not, seems all of a coherent piece.
This is the opposite of micro-targeting.
Nathan Heller Bio
Nathan Heller, a staff writer at The New Yorker for more than a decade, has written and reported prolifically on subjects from literature to film to politics to American intellectual life. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in essays and criticism and an on-air essayist for the “PBS NewsHour”; his work has been anthologized in the Best American series and elsewhere. He is at work on a narrative book about the long shadow of Bay Area thought on culture and politics from the postwar period to the present.
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