Blinded By Messaging

A problem with political management is thinking communication strategies solve something.

A year ago I had commented that Keir Starmer was in many respects one of the best examples of the modern Social Democrat political leader. He was basically the unexciting government managerial personality and gave off the impression of not having particularly strong or radical viewpoints the way most people see the stereotypical leftist firebrand.

I know there's a number of people in the UK that will suggest Starmer does have very strong viewpoints. But the optics were always more significant than the substance and that is the point I was and am going at.

A recent opposition criticism suggested that much of the Labour government's recent difficulties can be said in the point that it believes in a permanent universal. Not simply that universality is globalist, that every country should be as similar as possible, but increasingly universalism also means that time doesn't move forward. Not literally but that human achievement can reach an ideal in a temporal moment. This is similar to the idea that 19th century liberalism would have pitched on self-actualization. An ideal set of Human Rights can be achieved in a moment of time and be maintained.

A general premise of this notion is that we know what the outcome is supposed to look like. The challenge is figuring out how to get there. Increasingly however, too many of those that believe in this line of thinking seem to struggle with the unexpected or if something that they try doesn't necessarily go the way it was supposed to. The same universal thought seems to cripple adaptability.

I don't necessarily disagree with any of that, but I do think it misses one of the bigger problems a number of current governments run into. And it isn't simply left-wing governments that have this problem.

Virtually every political party before it achieves electoral success usually has some idea in its head over what it wants to do when it gets there. Many of these aspirations typically lack practical thought over the exact methods they're going to use to get it through government channels. But one thing almost all of them become obsessed with is how they message the media.

In modern times this means everything from choosing what medium you're going to use, if there's any particular news outlets you want to avoid, how often you want to be on the air, and whether or not you have particular members of your party that you wish to use in certain situations. Of course these are only a handful of them. That there's so much that goes into this tells you why for a number of election campaigns the communication staff is typically the largest component of party headquarters.

Controlling the narrative is usually ascribed to politics on the left, and from theoretical models that's true, but most messaging departments regardless of their philosophy use the same principle. One of the catches with this is it's reliant on the assumption that you're able to keep the news cycle busy most of the time. An odd paradox is that it's become easier as news has become more pervasive in every moment.

The constant 24-hour news cycle actually helps with the ability to constantly be feeding new information. Even though most of it is fairly empty fluff it does keep people absorbed in what the messengers are trying to purvey. In fact the population becoming increasingly addicted to constant news flows helps those that believe that they can manage information that is more important than actually getting something accomplished.

This is where those that believe they already know the answer, what the outcome the government has to accomplish is, yet struggle with the method that they're going to implement and end up continually resorting not just messaging but using it as a crutch. This constant ability to actually appear as though they're winning the news wars gives an illusion that they're actually succeeding when they very well might not be.

Unlike what one would think is happening when political management can't get its desired effect and would try a different approach, increasingly most will resort to simply changing how they sell it to the public and assume that it'll work anyhow. Communication and messaging strategy allows any government to ignore that it doesn't actually know how the particulars of management includes a methodological approach to reaching the goal.

It's very possible the public believes that the Press Secretaries' good news every day means that something is actually transpiring. Then 6 months later when it's discovered that their plans ended up in smoke there's more bewilderment. But there's also the ability to try and change the dialogue in the narrative to make it appear as though they've actually shifted gears when they really have no idea how to do that.

It's turned politics into being less about actually what you can accomplish and trying to achieve goals and more about constantly winning information wars.

Let’s use a counterfactual. We still live in a world without 24-hour instant information or an online environment. Governments are limited to three news conferences a week. Other than making sure that you are absolutely prepared for those conferences, it means communications generically is going to be less important. The government is going to have to spend more time on actually trying to problem solve the implementation of what their policy is going to be rather than trying to constantly market it as being the best thing ever. What was happening in most people's lives outside of the media bubble would have much more fact on how somebody saw things going.

I don't think it's an accident that universalism within government management strategies took hold in the late 1990s at roughly the same time that there was a massive shift in how information was disseminated. Whether it was happenstance that was unintended or there was a mutually reinforced plan going on, it would be difficult to imagine either political Communications becoming dominant and universalism becoming embedded philosophically happening on their own.

For a government like the UK currently has the issue as far as they're concerned has always been trying to change how people perceive what they're saying. The same thing was true with the Trudeau government in Canada. There's never any contemplation that either the solution that they're seeking is wrong or that they might try a different approach on how to manage day to day affairs. It's this construction of everything being a messaging problem that has buried so many that end up in the universal mind lock.

It's in that shift that you spend more obsession on marketing that is giving so many of these governments that believe they have to have the right answer to so many issues. It's not just the public they're propagating either, they can easily be convincing themselves at the same time with the same rhetoric.

If you couldn't rely on communications to constantly sell the program, it would be easier for most governments to recognize something wasn't working. Simply trying to do a sales job isn't going to convince those who aren't getting anywhere. Instead it would be more likely they would try and shift gears because they weren't constantly having to explain to the news reporters why they were doing.