Ask A Genius 1202: Propaganda Models in the States and Russia

Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/11/13

Rick Rosner: What made American Republicans so bad compared to broader times? How did they get so bad? And that leads to related questions: How did Democrats get this way if they did? And how did things, in general, get so bad? Are today’s Democrats akin to the Republicans of the nineties or 2000s? Has there been a fundamental shift in the political landscape?

The Republicans have been the way they are—shifting towards their current form—since at least the days of Newt Gingrich and Ronald Reagan. You could even trace some of it back to Nixon. But instead of asking how things got so bad, we should be asking how things got so weird. The answer to that is simple: we’re living in the future, and things are fundamentally different now.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How so?

Rosner: The “normal” you think of is likely different from what I recall as normal, given our age difference. Pre-climate change, pre-computers and cell phones, when TV was king and phones were attached to walls, and huge American cars guzzled gas at 12 miles per gallon without anyone caring much because gas was only 50¢ per gallon—that’s my frame of normal. That’s more old-school, rooted in the seventies. By the nineties, things still felt relatively simple, even with early tech entering the scene.

But it’s not the nineties anymore. We’re a quarter of the way through the 21st century, and things are bound to be weird. Republicans, as I’ve said countless times, chose to align themselves with a base that’s, frankly, less informed. They’ve been riding that “dumb people” strategy to power for 50 years. A major reason Republicans seem out of touch is their inability to grasp that we’re in a completely different era.

Jacobsen: That’s a strong statement.

Rosner: Take the example of trans people fighting for their rights to be recognized as full members of society. Republicans blame Democrats for “pushing” this, which is ridiculous. The GOP’s reliance on an ill-informed base is one leg of the stool. Another significant leg is money in politics, which has been steadily increasing and then exploded after Citizens United, the Supreme Court decision that equated money with speech.

The decision meant that if you’re free to express political opinions, you’re free to express them through monetary contributions. This ruling opened the floodgates to unlimited funds from corporations and individuals. While there are limits on direct donations to candidates, donations to political action committees (PACs) are virtually unlimited. This cycle means that politicians and those around them are constantly fundraising, treating it like a second job. Cold-calling donors, appeasing wealthy supporters, all while trying to legislate—that’s the modern reality.

Jacobsen: So, it’s a mix of catering to an uninformed base and the relentless pursuit of money?

Rosner: For instance, this time around, one-third of Trump’s ad funding—$500 million—came from billionaires. In contrast, only 6% of Harris’s funding came from billionaires. The influence of big money keeps the system skewed and constantly in need of more financial fuel.

The misery of constantly fundraising, along with other unpleasant aspects of political life, attracts people who are scumbags. So, there’s that. Then there’s everything else we’ve discussed before—like gerrymandering. The Republicans figured out how to supercharge it in 2010 with the REDMAP strategy, which focused on taking over state legislatures since they control how congressional districts are drawn.

Democrats do it too, but as a result, about 90% of the seats in the House of Representatives are safely held by one party or another. This means that whoever wins the primary essentially wins the general election because the district is overwhelmingly Republican or Democrat, giving the opposing party almost no chance. Since more extreme members of the party show up for the primaries, you get extreme candidates. For Republicans, who have long depended on less-informed voters, this means more extreme or even unqualified candidates emerge.

That results in candidates who are not just extreme, but also incompetent. You get bad actors on the Democratic side too, like Bob Menendez—a politician who accepted bribes from a foreign government in the form of gold bars and left them lying around his house. He’s a piece of work, caught before but learning the wrong lesson from it, thinking he could get away with it. And then he did get caught again.

Jacobsen: What else contributes to this mess?

Rosner: 24-hour news channels are a big part of it.

Jacobsen: What’s your suggestion?

Rosner: 24-hour news channels allow for continuous propaganda. Russia engages in this, and social media facilitates the spread of propaganda even more efficiently. Then there’s the randomness of history’s key figures. The “great man” theory, or variations of it, suggests that history can hinge on specific individuals. For instance, World War II wouldn’t have unfolded the way it did without Hitler. Would we still have had World War II without him? Or Stalin? Possibly not, but with those two, the war was inevitable.

Nixon is another example. He was a skilled politician but unscrupulous, and he taught Republicans that maybe you can get away with criminal behavior. When you look at presidential elections, Republicans have only won the popular vote once since 1988. No candidate since Reagan has won more than about 53% of the popular vote. That’s not huge, but it shows that Republicans have been drawing the wrong lessons from history. A lot of what we see now hinges on the behavior and influence of individual presidents.

So, Jimmy Carter, president from 1977 to 1981—a smart guy, a nuclear engineer. But he was thoughtful and came across as wimpy. He told Americans what they didn’t want to hear. He put solar panels on the White House and urged Americans to conserve energy. He even made a speech wearing a sweater, telling people to turn their thermostats down to 68 degrees. Americans hated that, so they elected Reagan.

Reagan, the movie star backed by gathering forces of powerful and often sinister individuals, came in with his cowboy boots and opened the doors to all sorts of questionable policies. He wasn’t very popular during his first term, or at least parts of it, but surviving an assassination attempt helped. He was shot in the ribs and managed to keep his folksy charm by telling his wife, “Honey, I forgot to duck.” It’s absurd, because who can duck from an ambush like that? But people loved it. That moment helped him, and as the economy improved, he became beloved by Republicans and tolerated by others.

But people didn’t fully grasp what his presidency was setting in motion. Then came Bill Clinton. He was smart, lucky, and probably a decent president overall. Lucky because he didn’t face the kind of crises we’ve seen in the 21st century. He moved to the center politically when he was unpopular and gained approval by doing so, picking up more support from the middle. But he couldn’t control his personal issues, which led to scandals like the Monica Lewinsky affair. And that set the stage for Bush versus Gore.

Gore was intelligent but socially awkward. He somehow alienated the press and didn’t push back when they misrepresented him. The media often twisted his words, like the infamous claim that he said he “invented the Internet,” which he didn’t. He let that slide, thinking he was above addressing such nonsense.

Jacobsen: What should he have done?

Rosner: He should have said, “I worked on the legislation that made the Internet legally possible, you dumb fucks. Shut up.” But instead, he stayed silent. The press also mocked him for supposedly saying that the male character in Love Story was based on him. The truth was that the author had based the character on four classmates at Harvard, including Al Gore. That would have been another chance to say, “Here’s the deal: I was one of them. End of story. Now, move on.”

He didn’t seize those moments. He let those narratives persist when he could have shut them down firmly.

Gore thought he was above responding to attacks. The same thing happened to John Kerry later with the swift boating incident. No one can afford to be above responding to bullshit anymore. You have to jump in and call it out. Anyway, Gore was awkward and ridiculed in the press for trivial reasons, while Bush seemed more relatable. The election was extremely close and came down to a recount in Florida.

Then there was the infamous Brooks Brothers Riot, where Republicans flooded the recount offices with dozens of lawyers in suits—hence the name. They disrupted the process and eventually took it to the Supreme Court, which ruled along political lines to stop the Florida recount. If the recount had continued, there was a decent chance Florida would have gone to Gore. This taught Republicans another bad lesson: file frivolous lawsuits and fight aggressively.

Republicans were already predisposed to learning bad lessons because they rely on systems like the Electoral College and the Senate. Each state, no matter how small, gets two senators. So California, with its 40 million people, has the same Senate representation as Wyoming, with less than a million.

Republicans control more states, which means they often control the Senate even when they only have around 40% of the popular vote. These structural imbalances reinforced bad habits. Then came the worst president in U.S. history, who expanded these bad lessons and acted as a useful idiot for foreign influences.

He admired dictators, which aligned perfectly with Putin’s ambitions. Putin, who might be the richest man in the world, is skilled at propaganda. Russia has been pushing propaganda for a century, but Putin took it to new levels using social media.

So, it’s a mix of structural issues like the Electoral College and the Senate, clever Republican strategies, and certain historical accidents that brought us to where we are now—three days before an election that could determine if the most divisive president in modern history gets another term.

But we also need to touch on what makes the Democrats less than ideal. One major issue is the “big tent” problem.

Republicans have moved significantly to the right. A 2022 Pew study shows that Republican legislators have shifted four times as much to the right as Democrats have moved to the left. This leaves the Democratic Party with a wide range of political views under one umbrella—from far-left socialists to moderate centrists. It can be hard to reach a consensus within such a broad coalition.

Another issue is that Democrats tend to be more earnest and believe that their goodness and charity will convince reasonable people. We wouldn’t even say “charity towards men” anymore; we’d say “all people.”

Meanwhile, Republicans reject that “kumbaya” approach. They’re more about “by any means necessary” and believe that the ends justify the means, even if that means using trickery. This often results in Democrats being outmaneuvered because they’re playing by a different set of rules, hoping that goodness will prevail. It’s a fundamental difference in approach.

That’s enough on that for now. And Democrats have terrible messaging. We don’t put enough effort or money into concise, catchy labels for issues or into broadcasting a unified party voice among pundits and politicians. When something happens that’s relevant to Republicans, they have a quick, consistent message across all their voices. Democrats, on the other hand, rely on the idea that we’re on the good side and that people will figure it out on their own. No clear message. So, there you go.

In a nutshell, there are probably ten more reasons why Republicans are flawed, Democrats are flawed, and why the future looks bleak, but those are the main points that come to mind. 

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