I had spent a huge amount effort as a progressive activist trying to exhort people to vote, to persuade people to vote for candidates and causes. I had gone door to door. I had phone banked. I had crafted media. I did this through a bunch of election cycles.
Then one day I found myself driving a cab and not having anything to do with any election effort at all for the first time in years. I drove people around doing errands all day which were usually kind of depressing. A couple had been evicting from someplace and were moving their meager belongings to a cheap motel in a cab. Couples were splitting up because of money troubles and moving someplace else in a cab with even less stuff. One woman I remember spent most of the trip staring at the meter in horror as we went through a series of errands. To a laundromat. A grocery store. The post office to drop off a bill payment.
We were in the cab for a while so I asked her if she was going to vote. She said no.
I asked a number of people about the election and voting. Most of what I got were looks that said a lifetime's worth of complex thoughts about the prospects for being someone powerless to have an impact on their own lives, nevertheless contemplating having a larger impact. Stunned silence. But I understood.
I was in fact, on that day, one of these people.
I wrote in a notebook about this. I sat on the hood of my car after a long day of this, very tired. Tired enough that the ground seemed to be moving a little. I looked into the distance at the city at night.
You see the lit up buildings and the glow around it that is only lost to the night as you look up to a high altitude and the stars beyond.
Several miles away, you can hear people who are yelling or laughing or talking loud as a distant crowd sound mixed in with police and ambulance and fire truck sirens that rise and fall like waves. You hear motor sounds as a general roar like the sound of surf endlessly washing against a shore, a pulsing that merges with the sound of your own blood pressure in your ears in a quiet park.
It echoes your headache.
Thinking of the election from this perspective, all of the ads and news about issues and candidates had melded into a large cacophany of senselessness. The competition to project negative ads that have more impact than the last negative ad does achieve results: an unanticipated and possibly unintended consequence.
If you are feeling stressed or really hammered, what you may get from this is a kind of emotional paralysis.
Here is a question: Does this come about on purpose?
I once took part in a discussion with a really great political consultant whose winning track record was really awesome. The subject of non-voting came up. How can we get more non-voters to vote? What do you want to do that for? If a side effect is that some people don't vote, fuck 'em. The people who we want to vote will have more impact on the total.
That time, non-voting was only a side effect that didn't matter.
But what if you were thinking of it in terms of suppressing the vote. Could you have such an effect on purpose?
I think you could, as a side effect, if you had enough resources to create a larger echo chamber.
I have watched the media phenomenon around conservative politics for a long time. The TV commercials that are on the air a lot during elections are only a part of this phenomenon over time.
You watch TV in a number of cities and you come to wonder what influences the way people on local news project a constant attitude of contempt for politics, or activism. You wonder why newspaper coverage slants the way it does. You wonder where the memes come from that support a perception about politics that seems jaundiced from everywhere. Other people talking. Letters to the Editor. FaceBook comments. Pretty much everywhere words can come across.
Think tanks are groups of people who have been hired to figure out how to influence editors and reporters at newspapers and television stations, and to come up with lines of argument or memes.
The amount of money behind this is so huge that it is not possible to really wrap your mind around it. But it happens that I have known a number of people over the years who moved from journalism, where they started out as I did, into corporate public relations because it is where the job opportunities are. Some of these know that they are crafting speeches and arguments to promote corporate images and purposes, and some of them seem less clear that that is what the job is.
But there are whole careers being funded to support a general bending of the environment we live in so that the very oxygen we breathe is sponsored by a special interest.
I think if you are someone who has not had an education in media and how it works, has not attempted to ever be a communicator, and has not worked in any way that has something to do with this, you probably need to have it pointed out.
If you are someone who has always believed that being an honest hard working American is the way to go, and wonders why you just have to work and work and work and are just tired all the time, you may not have time to analyze what is happening.
If you are just fighting fatigue and trying to get by and are just horrified by how much it can cost to do errands on the day your car broke down, what comes across from the media about the election may just hurt you. It may not make sense. Some of it may not make sense on purpose. But it just makes you feel that much worse because you can't make sense of it. You feel pain. You may be tempted to just curl up in a ball in the corner and pull yourself up into a fetal position until it is all over.
So a side effect of the intensity of negative advertising, whether intended or not, is a demobilization.
I would say that Democrats are more likely to be affected than Republicans, just in a general brain wiring kind of way, in that to be a Democrat is to have empathy with others and to be sensitive and given to thinking about things. Thus, we are more vulnerable to negativity and emotional manipulation than are conservatives.
What can we do with this? Does this feed into the old argument about more gentlemanly and objective ways of addressing issues in advertising? Probably not, since attacking on a negative basis is a classic option in any debate format.
What we probably could do is to be more aware of the deeper impacts that media have on people. It is like a kind of pollution in our mental environment.
But the pollution comes from, appropriately enough, the polluting interests who are concerned about buying up as much of the electorate as possible in order to protect profit from concerns about the environment or climate change.
Naturally, they are going to be in denial about this form of pollution. They may have actually seen it coming and embraced it. Maybe they spent money trying to make it happen.
My tendency is to think about finding more and different ways to reach out to the Democratic voters that are in the non-voting categories. I think we need long term education about the stakes that exist and the ways that media can be used against people with sensitive intellects and honest emotions.
There hasn't been much focus over the years on media literacy. Perhaps now there should be. GOTV is not the only strategy that could be employed or contemplated.