Message in a Bottleneck

“The public is not simply asking for louder performances. They are asking for something harder: a real reckoning with the failures of the old order. Yet much of the mainstream political class — campaign consultants, television pundits, party strategists — continues to mistake the appearance of fighting for real action. A fiery speech on MSNBC, a viral fundraising email declaring a once-in-a-lifetime ‘fight for democracy,’ a triumphant Twitter clip of a senator ‘owning’ the opposition: these are treated as victories in themselves. They confuse performance with renewal, noise with transformation. But the public knows the difference. And they are running out of patience.” Interesting take from Evelyn Quartz: The Public Wants a Reckoning, Not Another Performance. “Consultants, pollsters, media strategists — many of them earnest — operate within a system that treats public trust not as something to be earned through outcomes, but as something to be engineered through messaging. The internal logic is simple: if the right message is delivered in the right tone, to the right demographic, legitimacy will follow … This kind of technocratic language is, frankly, B.S. It’s the same ‘game plan’ that has so thoroughly divorced politics from real meaning that it now operates more like a spectator sport. “