Features > February 9, 2007

Dreaming Up New Politics (cont’d)

Too often, we progressives pitch our cause in reactionary terms of hanging on to what we have and holding the line. Or we make appeals to guilt and sacrifice, asking people to give up what they already have so that others might have a piece of it. These are appeals to the past or to a diminished present. They take for granted that the best we can do is redistribute what we have already attained and that we cannot all gain more. Because of this they are doomed to failure.

For a moment imagine an advertisement that asks you to stay where you are, to accept things as they are, or, if you are looking for social change, promises to make things personally worse for you. Progressives often do this and, tactically speaking, are insane for doing so.

Advertising also requires us to “think different” about the very way we think. We like to think we derive our truths through linear logic, but the trick of advertising is its ability to circumvent such logic, substituting associations for equations. A picture of a happy family is placed next to a picture of McDonald’s: Bingo—Big Macs are familial bliss. The goal is to equate unlike items, collapsing difference into unity.

How can progressives hope to appropriate such a principle as association? Why would we want to? To answer the second question first, we must. Linear logic belongs to the age of the sentence and the paragraph; associative logic is in tune with the present visual era. If progressives wish to communicate in the present, they need to learn the language of association.

Conservatives use it all the time. Think of the propaganda of the second Bush administration in preparation for their war in Iraq. By constantly referring to Iraq in the same sentence as terrorism, and Saddam Hussein in the same breath as al-Qaeda, the administration effectively forged an association that continues today.

But is that what progressives should do: elide the truth and play a cynical game of realpolitik? I don’t think so. We can find ways to harness the power of association without slipping into a moral morass. Associations conjure up an ideal, not an equation of facts. But this does not mean that associations must be built upon lies.

Lines of connection and association have been traced by progressives before. These were the lines that Martin Luther King Jr. wanted us to follow when he asked us to consider where we get our sponges, our soap, our coffee, tea, and toast: “Before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half of the world.” Associations were what King was describing late in his life when he drew out the connections between the war in Vietnam and poverty and race hatred in the United States. More recently, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, in their provocative 2004 white paper “The Death of Environmentalism,” argued that the environmental movement needs to articulate a wider set of associations, articulating (and publicizing) links between industry and weather, resources and war, nature and values. The principle of association is an opportunity for progressives to move past the timid linear logic that inspires no one and to harness a powerful tool of persuasion.

But it’s not enough to draw connections between things we do not like; associations can also communicate what we are for and what kind of world our policies might create.

Reclaim fun

Progressives can use association at the level of organization building as well. I learned this in mid 1990s working with the Lower East Side Collective (LESC), a community activist organization I co-founded in New York City. We didn’t fundraise by applying for grants, sending out direct-mail appeals or badgering people on the street. Instead, we raised money for our organization by throwing huge, raucous dance parties. We goofed around and socialized while tabling for causes. We prided ourselves on our cleverly worded signs. And, working with groups like Reclaim the Streets and More Gardens!, we turned our demonstrations into festive carnivals. In brief, we enjoyed ourselves.

The projection of “fun” was part of a conscious strategy on our part to counteract the public perception of leftists as dour, sour, and politically correct—a stereotype that had some validity, at least in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the mid-1990s.

LESC had a standing working group whose function was fun. We called it, with tongue firmly in cheek, the “Ministry of Love.” Within a year of our founding we had more than 50 activists working with us and were engaged in six simultaneous campaigns. We also had been attacked by several on the sour left for being too joyous. That’s when we knew we had succeeded in transforming the association of progressive activism from sacrifice to pleasure.

The importance of fun in politics is not just the luxury of the privileged activist. In the middle of the murderous civil war in El Salvador, Salvadoran women would immediately create three committees when setting up new refugee camps: one on sanitation and construction, another on education, and a third, comité de alegría, on joy. Yes, activism involves sacrifice—a sacrifice of free time as well as the bliss of ignorance. But activism is also social, exhilarating, rebellious and fun. Which make better selling points?

Modern politics is about appealing to people; you need to attract activists into an organization and supporters to your cause. The hair shirt wearing, self-sacrificing progressive may be a suitable candidate for sainthood, but politically they are a liability. Branding is the new buzzword in advertising; it’s the set of associations attached to a product or corporation. Politics, whether we like it or not, are branded too. The important question is what sort of brand we want to build.

Advertise desire

The most valuable lesson progressives can learn from advertising, however, has to do with the power of desire. Advertising circumvents reason, working with the magical, the personal and the associative. A journey of emotions rather than an argument of fact, advertising’s appeal is not cognitive, but primal. This emotionality, perhaps all emotionality, disturbs progressives. As heirs to the Enlightenment, progressives have learned to privilege reason. Feelings are what motivate the others: Bible thumpers, consumers, terrorists, the mob. All true, but emotions also can motivate progressive politics. The problem is not desire, but where desire has been channeled

Progressive desire (as well as some rather more base ones) has provided material for copywriters and creative directors for decades. In its own convoluted way, and for its own pecuniary objectives, Madison Avenue has been an invaluable propaganda bureau for progressive ideals, keeping hope alive. Each advertisement, along with this or that product, sells the dream of a better life. Now it is time to turn the tables. Advertising has provided us with sophisticated techniques to reach people and connect with their desires; now progressives need to use these tools to redirect progressive passions back into progressive politics. Karl Marx once argued that only socialism could unlock the material promise of capitalism; today I believe that only progressive politics can free the fantasies trapped within advertising.

Have a dream

Embracing our dreams does not necessitate closing our eyes, and minds, to reality. Progressives can, and should, do both: judiciously study and vividly dream. In essence, we need to become a party of conscious dreamers.

Right now the only people flying this flag are sequestered to the far fringes of progressive politics. Some of this marginalization is of their own choice. Many street activists and political performers are suspicious of more mainstream progressives who, in their eyes, have abandoned the utopian dreams that once directed and motivated the left. They also have contempt for the tactical (non)sense of a bumbling, fumbling Democratic Party. “At least we shut down Seattle and opened up a discussion on the politics of globalization,” they brag (an estimation shared, with some concern, by the editors of the Financial Times). Disgusted by the conciliation and incompetence of their more moderate comrades, these progressives often keep their own company.

But this marginalization is not entirely of their own making, for progressives ensconced in the center show little interest in their left flank. Here conservatives have something to teach us. The Republican Party learned to look to its margins. Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed, Karl Rove, Ronald Reagan—all these men at one time might have been described as people whose fringe politics guaranteed their irrelevance. They are also the very people who led the Republicans to power over the past few decades. During the same decades groups like the Democratic Leadership Council argued that the Democratic Party needed to abandon its margins and move to the center. They were successful. As a result the Democrats have virtually no connection to the aesthetic and political fringes of the progressive movement today.

It’s a shame because these activists—in all their marginality—have a better understanding of how the center operates than do the centrist professionals inside the Beltway. They understand the popular desire for fantasy and the political potential of dreams, and they know how to mobilize spectacle. They have a better read on the attractions of popular culture and the possibilities of harnessing this for progressive politics than the “pragmatic” center who, secure in their sense of superiority, stick to their failed script of reason and rationality.

It is time to cut our losses and try another tack by moving the strategies, tactics, and organization of the margins to the center. This will take convincing on all sides. Those on the margins need to take power seriously, giving up the privileged purity of the gadfly and court jester and making peace with the dirtier aspects of practical politics: the daily compromises that come with real governance. Those in the center have to be open to a new way of thinking about politics that challenges some of their core beliefs about the sufficiency of judicious study and rational discourse and the efficacy of a professionalized politics. The centrists need to acknowledge that their model of politics is, ironically, out of touch with the cultural center of our society. They must be willing to dream.

• subscribe to print magazine

  First Name Last Name Home Address City State Zip Code Email

  2-year, 24-issues, $44.95 1-year, 12-issue, $24.95

• stay in touch with our email newsletter

  Subscribe to our regular weekly e-mail newsletter. It's packed with updates on recent and upcoming stories, events, campaigns and things every progressive should be informed about.

   

• email this article to a friend

  Your Name Your Email Recipient Email

  Personal message Thought you might be interested in this article from In These Times.

   

  Please help us prevent spam by verifying the word you see in the image above

  Send to multiple recipients. Just separate each email address with a comma.

• Reader Comments

  Lovely ideas, Stephen.

  Stories, associations, branding, whooping it up! All good stuff.

  I’m still having a bit of trouble getting past the ‘Grand Theft Auto’ prejudice, since the level of rudeness is pretty extreme, but see what you mean. We can keep our integrity and still reach across idealogical borders…

  Posted by jimprues on Feb 9, 2007 at 2:35 PM

  It’s much simpler and less either-or than the author makes it out to be.  Brillant plan or demented rulers can exist together, and have existed together throughout human history.

  As for the rest of the essay, so-called progressives need to learn from Dick Cheney. The example I have taken to using is the vice presidential debate of 2004. Gwen Iffel asked a question about African American women and HIV/AIDS. Cheney looked directly at the moderator and said he never had thought about it; John Edwards ignored the moderator and the question, choosing instead to ramble on about some earlier ineffective comment he had made.  Then, when the 2005 State of the Union rolled around, lo and behold, George Bush made a comment about African American men and HIV/AIDS.  I like Dick Cheney, in so far as I know him; I have come to respect him as a political leader. However, I do not want Cheney’s policies to be anywhere near my government or in control of my life. I lost any respect I had for John Edwards as both an individual and as a political leader, and never trusted his foreign policy anyway.

  What I have learned through hard experience over the past 15 years is that progressives do not listen. They are so caught up with their own ideals of change, even though they frequently find it hard to articulate those ideals and even harder to change their plans when people who would have to live by them point out little, or not so little, errors.  As a person who now lives in an early presidential selection state, I am looking very, very hard at any candidate with ties to the Democratic Leadership Council. I think that the DLC is so concerned with upper middle income families that they have chosen to wipe out the lower and moderate income earners, which also hurts the upper lower-income class.

  Posted by SillyLeftist on Feb 10, 2007 at 5:39 AM

  Lots of stuff here.

  I love this idea of throwing street parties and Mr Duncombe nailed it:  protests are boring. 

  People feel passive, lectured; and marching around stopping traffic doesn’t engender a feeling of involvement.  Video games are popular because, unlike television, some interaction is going on.  Organizing a good party is challenging.  And I’d think it would be tough to get people to rock out while getting political.  So maybe the trick is to keep it light and just use the fun to build up a sense of cool.  Luckily, lots of party people tend to be progressive from the get-go, because the staid and stolid conformists already frown on their activities.  (I can’t remember which Prodigy album had the painting of a bunch of police stopped at a chasm on the other side of which was a party in full swing after the rope bridge had been been severed, but it’s a relevant image.)

  Anyway, reading these ideas brought some of Oscar Wilde’s to mind.

  Duncombe: ‘Karl Marx once argued that only socialism could unlock the material promise of capitalism; today I believe that only progressive politics can free the fantasies trapped within advertising.’

  Wilde: ‘There is also this to be said. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair.’

  Zizek echoed a similar sentiment about Soros, Gates, et al. in an ITT (and LRB) article, ‘The Liberal Communists of Porto Davos’.

  I recommend all progressives read Wilde’s The Soul of Man if they have not.  There’s a lot in there about individualism, joy, sympathy, etc.

  As for branding, it’s been done.  (www.disinfo.com).

  I think a lot has to do with attitude.  Fact: a lot of today’s progressives come across as milksops and do-gooders.  Where are the laughs? the guts?  The scorn?  You need these to get others to want to better the world with you.

  If progressives want to get something accomplished they’ll have to really start mucking around in mass consciousness.  Personally, I think this entails abandoning simple activism (which is usually boring) for good art (which never is).

  Posted by TheoPapathanasis on Feb 10, 2007 at 5:55 AM

  I have two problems with this statement: “The truth does not reveal itself by virtue of being the truth: it must be told, and we need to learn how to tell the truth more effectively.”

  Those problems are… A. What and B. How to sell it
  --------------------------

  A. What:  “The truth does not reveal itself by virtue of being the truth:”
  --------------------------

  Consider this: “We hold these Truths to be SELF EVIDENT...”

  What is true is so — regardless of our perceptions, hopes and wishes. Eventually it will be revealed. It may not be as soon as we want and may not be what we thought, but truth will ultimately be what it is.

  We are overloaded with people proclaiming their truths from every corner of the world at literally the speed of light and we are still left with the age old question, “What is truth?”

  Perhaps all we need to do is measure it against those broad principles declared in The U.S. Constitution. How does this candidate or party’s ideas hold up against the preamble?

  Our current problems have mostly come from those who are positive know they know the truth (their truth) and are on a mission to see that we get it (whether we want it or not). While their truths are advertised for all, the benefits go to those “more equal than others.”
  --------------------------

  B. How to sell it: “...it must be told, and we need to learn how to tell the truth more effectively.”

  Proposing to follow this author’s line of reasoning and adopting these practices is not “New Politics” — it is as old as politics and what we should be trying to overcome. Adopting the techniques and schemes of the Republican, the Democrats or any other “successful winning team” is totally repugnant. The credibility of both parties is at a low as the “truth” of their actions and inactions has surfaced.

  As one who worked in advertising for over forty years I find the author’s proclamations absurdly naive. The media is NOT the message — the ad is NOT the product.

  “We need to burrow deep into it, (advertising) drilling past the sizzle into the steak. There we’ll find its DNA, the code that guides its various permutations, no matter what product is being sold.”
  
  Nonsense!

  All that sizzles is not steak and when you end up with hamburger you’ll know it. Only the most gullible customer falls for the snake oil sales pitches. Only an idiot becomes a return customer.

  We are need candidates with goals and ideas for a better America. Their ideas will stand or fall on their own merit. They need to promote the general welfare for ourselves and our posterity. (Does that sound familiar?) We need to be on guard against a well spun ad program.
  
  When you see the ad, “One size fits all!” be on guard.

  Posted by whattheheck on Feb 12, 2007 at 8:07 AM

  America needs a one term political system. Perhaps a lottery..... two years in any term and out you go. No more billions on election campaigns. No more political parties.

  Posted by texasindependent on Feb 12, 2007 at 7:00 PM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 64 posts.

Member Login

Also by Stephen Duncombe

• Dreaming Up New Politics
  Thinking different in an age of fantasy