Halitosis, Subversive Communists, and Campaign 2024

As I write this, it’s a few days after Biden’s State of the Union address and the bizarre Republican response by Katie Britt

Reactions have had time to come in and observers note how stark the two visions of America that we were presented really are.  Using logic, it’s difficult to process.

Biden outlined this vision of reflecting on what we’ve accomplished after the disastrous Trump years, the January 6th insurrection, and COVID and how, working together, we can move forward.

Katie Britt, on the other hand, painted this dark picture of a country in crisis, huddling in her kitchen like some kind of bunker, waiting for dark-skinned “illegals” to beat down her door as she’s baking cookies or for scary drag queens to kidnap her children.  She even affected a meek, child-like voice, cracking with emotion and whispering with paranoia - a manufactured voice, ingrained into some bizarre, extreme evangelical cults like the Duggar family.

The rest of us who are sane and looking at Britt and the GOP, wondering what the hell is wrong with these people.  Why is the GOP and its political leaders so remarkably bizarre?

If you want the answer, it doesn’t lie in any kind of logical analysis about “economic anxiety” or Trump triangulating on abortion or Social Security (if you can call anything Trump does as “triangulating”).  And it’s not the red/blue divide and “reaching out across the aisle” to seek compromise.

Nope, you can squarely place the blame on where we are by looking at the advertising and marketing industry.  And, in particular, the logical conclusion of what happens when that industry fully embraces the science behind emotional manipulation.

In the 1920s, the marketing and advertising industry first emerged in its modern form.  It was a period of big m fast moving advances in sciences and research.  We began trying to apply research and scientific methods to just about everything in society, from communication to food to transportation, so why not advertising?

The pioneers of the marketing and advertising industry looked at increasing sales as a problem that could be solved with research.  What made the pitch of a door to door salesman, carnival barker, or an ad in the newspaper work?  How did it motivate consumers to take action?

The answer was in another emerging field, psychology.  Advertisers and marketers started examining these motivations and observed they were based on very basic emotions - longing, comfort, belonging or fear, paranoia and alienation.

Over the decades, testing and refining emotional responses to advertising became a fine art.  By the 1950s, the public was generally aware of this manipulation and embraced it as modern and scientific.  You might use images of fun, belonging, and happiness to get people to buy soda pop.  You could increase brand affinity of a food by associating it with images of mom, home, support, and comfort.  Or you’d convince people to buy mouthwash with the fear and paranoia of social isolation and rejection.  It was so common and openly discussed in media that the public had become cynical and blasé about it in the 1960s.

Then, there was the 1972 election.

Many people on the left correctly point out that Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” was the foundation for the modern “big tent” coalition of the Republican Party, embracing rural voters alienated from the Democrats by that party’s embrace of Civil Rights.

But something else happened in 1972 that was a landmark.

That was the year that the GOP pioneered the use of computerized and detailed voter analysis.  While the marketing and advertising industry had used psychology in campaigns before (“I Like Ike”, for example), the year 1972 was when political parties in the US really started looking more closely as geographic and cultural voting blocks.

All this was made possible by the availability of smaller, more powerful computers pushed to market by IBM and other firms.  In the 1950s and 60s, the tv networks worked with technology companies on exit polling and analysis of election returns.  It was an expensive, cumbersome proposition, requiring processing by banks of equipment that took up remarkable amounts of space.  And these computers could only be within the reach of government agencies, the military, large research institutes, or the biggest banks or utilities.

As the 1960s progressed and by the 1972 election, progress in computer design and manufacturing had put this computing power within reach of medium-sized businesses.  CBS News, in 1972, did a one hour news special about this shift in campaigning.  And this is where American politics started going terribly, horribly wrong.

We really were divided in 1972.

America was split on the Vietnam War and our role in foreign policy and our influence in the world.  The Civil Rights, feminist, and LGBTQ movements were pushing for change.  The public debated the merits of maintaining or expanding FDR’s expansion of government in balancing the interests of business and labor and social welfare.  Downtowns were crumbling and crime increasing as people and businesses fled cities to live in suburbia all through the previous two decades.  After the violence of a succession of assassinations, the role of government in gun control moved to the forefront.

These were all classic liberal-conservative issues on the role of the federal, state, and local government, normally worked out through debate and compromise.  But something happened to change the nature of how liberals and conservatives discussed and interacted with each other on the national stage.

Using modern data analytical techniques, made accessible to the campaigns with recent advances in computer technology, the Nixon campaign looked for a way to win in this divided country in 1972.  Were there voting blocks that could be moved to get boots on the ground for the Republican Party and switch from the Democrats?  Were there demographic groups who were disengaged from politics that could be motivated to show up at the polls to vote for Nixon on Election Day?

Nixon’s campaign advisors, particularly Kevin Phillips, identified blocs of alienated voters that fit with the Republican party’s basic values of “small government”, intense and often unquestioning patriotism, and the infallibility of business and self-governing principles of capitalism.

There were groups of whites dissatisfied with “big government” telling them what to do about their “race problem”.   The “super patriots” were intensely anti-communist and upset that a more aggressive stance wasn’t being taken in the Vietnam War.  Evangelicals were confused and disturbed by the emerging feminist and LGBTQ movements and the “free love” and drug culture of the Hippies.  And, getting back to economic anxiety, there were rural whites alienated by all the talk of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, that seemed to be helping cities with recovering from decaying urban areas, but making little difference in the poverty they experienced every day in areas of Appalachia and other parts of the country.

Taking the next step in any marketing and advertising campaign, like anyone else selling a product, the campaign looked at what would motivate these disenchanted voters and bring them to a new, expanded “Big Tent”.  And that motivation was fear - the Southern Strategy.

Over time, this approach evolved into a well-oiled machine.  Nationally, or in states that were “purple”, the Republican Party would send a more mainstream message, mixing a variety of positive and negative emotional appeals.  Nationally, or state-wide in “purple” states, the message was “mainstream”, with only hints of fear and alarm to remind their new voting blocs that the Republicans had their back.  Locally, however, they would promulgate messages of fear and stir up hate.

It worked, at least  for a while, propelling Reagan to two terms in office.  “Talking out of both sides of your mouth” was openly discussed at the time, but just seen as part of how campaigning worked.

What the Republicans didn’t realize - and what Democrats failed to notice - was that there was a reason these appeals to basic emotional fears and paranoia worked (and continue to work) with the extreme right of the GOP.

For many decades, rural voters lived in isolation, with the outside world distant and “somewhere else”.  The world they saw on tv or radio was distant and alien, far removed from their own values and culture.  The advances in technology, economic mobility, and even transportation were passing them by.  While the rest of society moved on, becoming more diverse, and working out their differences, rural voters in many areas were still just as socially and culturally isolated as they were a century before.

The John Bircher anti-government types, the formerly Dixiecrat racists, and gun nuts had retreated into a self-reinforcing information bubble.  Evangelicals were still alienated from the social and cultural changes happening in society they could never reconcile with their basic beliefs.  Insecure men, a component of all these groups, embraced what we now call “toxic masculinity”, an issue so common it was a major them in the popular “Barbie” movie.

From a marketing and advertising standpoint, these voting blocs continued to put up walls against any change in their beliefs and core psychological values.  They couldn’t be motivated by emotional appeals that were healthy and positive, like mainstream, mentally balanced average Americans.  Fear was, and still is, the only psychological pitch that gets them to take action.

Essentially, this was (and still is) a national mental health crisis.

The Republican Party, in its quest for votes, embraced voting blocs that were (and still are) socially and culturally isolated, unable to break out of unhealthy psychological patterns, festering for generations.

Reagan, through his massive push to defend and close mental health programs and clinics, just exacerbated the problem.

It’s no surprise, really, that these demographic groups have a steady and increasing prevalence of anti-social, paranoid, and criminal behavior - rape, incest, sexual abuse, paranoid obsessions leading to gun hoarding or violent and deadly family or public attacks, and apocalyptic fantasies about the end of the world that result in harmful behaviors to themselves, their family members and others.

Astonishment at the cult-like devotion to Trump is a common trope when writing about the MAGA controlled GOP these days.  But is it any surprise that these voters view a narcissistic, bullying, rapist, fraudster insurrectionist as “one of us” and have complete devotion to every bizarre outpouring of word salad at his rallies?

As balanced, mentally healthy “normal” Republicans and independents flee the GOP, and the Democrats look on in horror at what’s happening, they all ask “What’s wrong with these people?”

What’s wrong with these people?

Since Goldwater and Nixon, the Republican Party has fueled the unresolved mental issues of a good third of the country, slowly making that bloc of voters more paranoid, more disconnected from reality and their communities, and reinforcing violent, anti-social, and self-harming behaviors.

In 2024, keep this in mind as you go to the voting booth.

The consensus of many political observers that 2024 will be a reckoning for the Republican party’s embrace of racism, bigotry, and divisiveness.

But, this mental health issue isn’t going away, even with a major party shift that could see the GOP going the way of the Whigs and a new center-right party emerging.

The 2024 election really should be a day of reckoning for the marketing and advertising industry for its role in exacerbating this problem.

And, with technology companies, who make billions from advertising, and the advertising industry itself embracing new techniques to use emotional appeals and motivators at an individual level with “customized and personalized” pitches automatically generated by AI, we should all be concerned about where we’re headed next.

When you have a third of the country - the hardcore, MAGA extreme right wing - suffering from mental illness and advertising and marketing reinforcing that illness, a widespread mental collapse is inevitable.

As a society, we are not at all prepared for deal with the final consequences of the damage done by the Republican Party, in partnership with the marketing and advertising industry, to a third of the country over the past fifty years.

This is the ultimate consequence when you weaponize fear, paranoia, and deep-set mental illness to sell a political candidate.  Or a tube of toothpaste.