The Left's "Messaging Problem"
The widespread phenomenon of victim-blaming in late state capitalism informs much of the rhetorical admonishing of the left, whose lack of success must be our own fault.
In their typical haste to blame the left for right-wing successes which are in reality outside of our meaningful control, the media often presumes that the phenomena of “incels,” “men going their own way,” and other groups of disaffected young males who adopt fascist iconography and beliefs are a result of a lack of effective recruitment among leftist campaigners. We must surely be alienating these otherwise open-minded potential allies with our judgmental tone, impossibly high standards and open honesty, and consistent pro-LGBTQ+ positions. This places the onus of the apparent unpopularity of leftist ideas wholly on the left’s own rhetorical choices, absolving the right of their eager and shameless adoption of the inverse of the aforementioned downfalls of the left: their massive, well-funded propaganda network, no-standard cult-like recruitment methods, and tendency to cheat outright to inflate their own visibility. The right has a well-documented tendency to resort to any means necessary to “win,” and the implication of criticizing the tone and content of leftist outreach is that these methods are legitimate. One glaring example of this fraudulent practice in action:
In November 2019, Donald Trump Jr.’s book Triggered debuted at the top of the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list. A week later, the paper’s books desk released a report that a nearly $100,000 bulk purchase of the book by the RNC had contributed to the ranking.
Trump Jr. wasn’t the first in his family to discover the joy of bulk sales—three decades earlier, as the New Republic reported in 2017, his dad encouraged owners of Trump properties to buy thousands of copies of The Art of the Deal, helping it ride the list for 48 weeks. Since then, dozens of nonfiction books each year—including by politicians like Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, and Sarah Palin—have appeared on the list with an assist from bulk buys. Many of those authors used campaign funds to finance the purchases, which the FEC allows as long as the author doesn’t keep the royalties.
The right’s popularity, and their appeal to young males especially, is a race to the bottom which capitalizes on the worst aspects of their potential targets’ character and amplifies them in the process, and much of it is manufactured, illusory, and fleeting once adulthood is reached. To adopt these methods in order to artificially shore up the left’s own numbers is to ask reformers to abrogate their own principles and magnify rather than sublimate this unconscious prejudice, to lower ourselves to the level of charlatans rather than ask potential recruits to act like their better selves and think rationally about their places in the world instead of leaping eagerly into the arms of the first group who will accept and assure them that their prejudices are not only tolerable, but are understandable statements of courageous defiance against “woke tyranny” or feminist extremism. This is the kind of recruitment and exploitation which is practiced by gangs, cults (Scientology, for example), and other scammers, nothing to be emulated by the left.
In doing so, the left would invalidate our own principles and morph into something more akin to the Democratic party, which occasionally adopts leftist positions out of necessity to maintain controlled opposition status while consistently sacrificing the vulnerable (see for example their inaction on Covid protections, striking rail workers, and new restrictions on asylum seekers) and boosting predatory capitalist interests at every step.
The left could start simply recruiting by gunpoint, or illegalizing right-wing thought; that we do not is a testament to our adherence to principles of fairness and openness rather than raw numbers and the appearance of success. There is a reason the right so often recruits young males, but it is an indictment of them rather than an argument in their favor: American boys are raised in a culture which worships and amplifies their worst instincts and simultaneously instills a fragility of ego which is necessary to maintain the illusion of their dominance and the morality of proactive violence, avarice, and subjugation of others. This is the incongruous nature of fascism in action—men in general are simultaneously idealized as powerful apex predators who let nothing stand in their way but also implicitly cast as weak, easily-led cowards who need to be protected from critical race theory and other forms of “woke” indoctrination. Similarly, the US military is at once an unflappable killing machine with no equal and an institution that cannot function without all-encompassing worship. Attempt a real dissection of either men’s rights ideology or the character of any American soldier and witness the resulting tantrums from the right. All of this histrionic behavior is meant to preclude critical appraisal of economic and social systems as well as the value of potential allies. The assumption that putative success is to be emulated at any costs rests on a number of unsupported assumptions, such as the existence of an open marketplace of ideas in which the most popular ideas are the most consistent and well-argued ones, a discourse which is plainly nonexistent in 21st century America.
The right-wing program to defund and privatize schools under the guise of freedom of choice is part of this fact-spurning encouragement of real powerlessness through the illusion of strength. There is some value in meeting potential allies on their own terms within reason, but abandoning standards entirely does nothing to build up or enlighten these allies—doing so only pulls us down to their level (or worse, what we imagine is their level). This principle would in short order result in a predictable race to the bottom as we encounter other groups with more explicitly problematic and hidebound beliefs than those held by the typical “reachable” young male, such as eugenicists, fascists, Randians, and those who live by the mantra “better dead than red.” There are some will likely never come around no matter how we tailor our arguments—for them, a punitive solution might be necessary if marginalization and deplatforming fail to reign in their influence. If those who would come around are capable of meeting a rational standard of behavior and thought, and others would never come around under any reasonable aegis of leftist thought, then what is there to lose by maintaining our principles and asking young men to meet these (hardly lofty) conditions?
A typical example of this victim blaming in action.
Conversely, asking an explicitly feminist group of people to address uniquely male grievances is akin to asking a comparably diverse and inclusionary group to address uniquely white grievances. The act of revolutionary political change is meant to address everyone’s issues in general and of uniquely marginalized groups in particular wherever necessary; the rising tide in this case does lift all boats, but in this analogy some boats are leaky due to years of abuse (for example, at the hands of institutional racism or patriarchy). Addressing these issues benefits everyone, including the power holders who were abusing others (though they might protest otherwise), and combating injustices of this kind does not abrogate principles of equality and fairness as some on the right would argue (see “reverse racism” critiques of affirmative action or critical race theory) because they correct past abuses by which whites, men, and the rich gained their disproportionate and harmful hegemony. This explains the lack of calls for similarly expedient and specifically tailored outreach toward disaffected young women; the maintenance of patriarchal social structures is an explicit aspect of rightwing outreach to young males as it exists presently. These youths are being trained to objectify and marginalize young women as a central goal to maintain male hegemony, and to act in defiance of an imagined social tyranny. This is essentially toxic masculinity, expressed through the preemptive violence of the fascist whose power has been largely unchecked for a century but must cast themselves as the victims to justify their actions. If the left are indeed losing, as this messaging critique implies, then where has the primacy of the right gotten any of us, including young men? Should they not be secure in their status by now, or at least by the time they have reached a certain age?
The tendency of older Americans to lean rightward over time might seem to call into question the assumption that the naivety of youth uniquely lends itself to susceptibility to right-wing proselytization, but this too is dishonesty of a different but comparable stripe. This exploitation preys not on youthful indiscretion but to age-related mental degradation and the lifelong accumulation of years of ceaseless propaganda, buoyed by the aging American’s subconscious need to reconcile their moral instincts with their many cowardly capitulations in the service of surviving in a late stage capitalist system. Any American who has lived three or more decades as an adult has both witnessed and taken part in uncountable daily atrocities, all of which, they are told, were being done in their names (or the names of gods they overwhelmingly still worship). At any rate, this tendency (such as it ever was) is changing:
The shift is remarkable. According to an analysis by the Financial Times, if millennials were following previous trends, someone aged 35 would be about five percentage points less conservative than the national average and would gradually become more conservative. The reality, says the FT? “They’re more like 15 points less conservative, and in both Britain and the US are by far the least conservative 35-year-olds in recorded history.”
I know what you’re thinking, because I thought it too. You’re thinking home ownership is largely to blame. (Perhaps you were thinking about what to have for dinner, in which case I apologise.) As we know, millennials spend all their money on avocado toast and takeaway coffee, meaning that they have lagged behind other generations when it comes to owning their own home. If they had mortgages to pay and property prices to protect, they would probably be a lot more conservative, right?
Turns out it isn’t as simple as that. John Burn-Murdoch, who authored the FT analysis, tweeted: “If Millennials owned homes at the same rate as boomers did at that age, they would be a couple of points more conservative, but only a couple.”
There are deeper issues at play. “The most likely explanation is a cohort effect – that millennials have developed different values to previous generations, shaped by experiences unique to them, and they do not feel conservatives share these,” wrote Burn-Murdoch. To put this in my own, blunter, terms: millennials have been royally screwed by an inequitable economic system and a runaway climate crisis. Only an idiot with loads of money would be happy with the way things are.
Rather than being too harsh on young men, the left is in fact not harsh enough given their elevated status in a society which, despite right-wing propaganda to the contrary, still holds all others as second class citizens. But this harshness is liberating and uplifting. If young men are uniquely predisposed to Nazism, on the other hand, to such a degree that they require coddling or arguments that mimic national socialism to listen to alternative viewpoints, this is in fact a more stirring indictment of their character than any committed misandrist would be capable of offering in their angriest moments. To presume that they are able to freely and without reservation set aside whatever prejudices and superstitions they inherited from their parents’ worldviews and engage with others in a pluralistic society as enlightened beings is precisely the opposite of ostracizing or writing them off as lost causes.
This author’s own story is likely not uncommon. Raised by parents with some outdated and questionably consistent beliefs, I began my foray into the world of online political discussions in the early 2000s with a chip on my shoulder and aggressively hateful thoughts in my head. It was only the firm and often scornful corrections of leftists who saw my ignorant warmongering, prejudices, and post-9/11 angst for the empty reactionary blathering these positions were. By the age of seventeen I had been cured of my inherited right-wing tendencies along with the teenage aggressions which had been fueling them and I have been a committed, if misanthropic and perpetually disappointed, socialist ever since. This is not to argue that I am an unqualified success or even a particularly valuable ally, only that I was able to pierce the veil of upbringing without being overly coddled—in fact, the shame of admitting that the jeers and counterarguments were correct was such that I could no longer fool myself into thinking that I was consistent in my beliefs just to spite these principled leftists. If the right-wingers (and the concerned leftists and centrists who argue for the adoption of conservative messaging strategies) were correct, I and countless others who regret our past selves would have instead doubled down on our irrational hatred and become Proud Boys or worse. Despite their media-amplified image, these are still fringe groups with only small followings.
What is needed to counter the right-wing propaganda machine then? The odds seem insurmountable—put simply, the forces of oppression and exploitation have acquired all the resources and none of the compunction against cheating. They can therefore ensure their meritless arguments are nonetheless broadcast loudly at their targeted audiences, who are seen as little more than animals which they need to convince to vote against their own class interests by manufacturing moral panic. For the left to succeed, the inborn appeal of simple and self-evident messaging is evidently insufficient to combat this, and we lack access to many funding sources outside of the very marginalized and impoverished individuals who are least able to give and participate freely (and who are becoming less able to do so by the day), the very individuals it is our impetus to serve. The system itself is grossly unfair, designed to urge conscientious leftists to feel hopeless in our cause and to adopt the unscrupulous victor’s morals in our own messaging, which they are aware will never serve us in the same way it does them. Treating potential allies as human beings capable of reason might not in and of itself lead to a leftist resurgence, but it is a necessary precondition, and its inverse would surely lead to the sacrifice of our ideals and a disastrous failure of a very different stripe: the invariably fatal failure which accompanies compromise with the forces of evil.
The reality? The left is too open-minded and too welcoming of incongruous views: