Compare and contrast two message strategies between the left and right

Happy Saturday! 🥳

Bear with me this week while I shoe-horn two slightly disparate topics into one newsletter!

I was in Downpatrick, the town near where I live, this week. It’s only a 15 minute drive away but I don’t often go because it’s usually a depressing experience.

My morning spent in Downpatrick reminded me — yet again —  just how far western countries have gone in destroying small towns and working class communities. 

Downpatrick has been a draw for visitors and pilgrims since St. Patrick began his mission there in 432AD.  It was further developed by a Norman nobleman and was a thriving market town for centuries, as is evidenced by some lovely old Georgian buildings that line its narrow, hilly streets. I was speaking to my neighbour yesterday and she told me she had been on a seaweed gathering expedition, where the lady leading the group described how local people used to pick seaweed from the nearby beaches and bring it into Downpatrick town to sell on market day. In addition to the market, the town used to have a train station, a prison and a court. This mix of different functions the town centre used to have is evidenced by the formerly grand buildings that still stand, mostly in disrepair, throughout the town.

Downpatrick today, however, is a shabby place. The prison, market and train are long gone. There is still an administrative node, a massive complex of council offices, social services and police, but it sits on the outskirts of town, removed from the people and businesses it oversees. As I walked around I realised that what Downpatrick has become is emblematic of what has happened to the common people, for lack of a better phrase, throughout the English speaking world.

Also on the outskirts of town is a large housing estate, called Model Farm, inhabited by low-income locals. The road leading into it is lined with political flags marking it as a stronghold of Irish Republicanism (our version of identity politics); the strip mall has a small supermarket and off license, a Chinese takeaway, a charity shop, a butchers and various state-funded care organisations. I will admit that I haven’t gone in to interview the locals to verify this, but if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say it’s a close-knit but economically inactive place.

In the centre of town live a lot of immigrants who come mostly from Bulgaria to work at a nearby meat packing plant. They congregate outside Bulgarian food shops, in tenement-style housing and many get to and from the meat packing facility on foot or by bus. 

This is the Neo-liberal globalist agenda in a microcosm. Keep the native poors offside, fat and drugged on prescription pills; and bring in even poorer and more vulnerable foreigners to do the dirty work that the native working class in no longer in any shape to do. And it drags down the whole town. Many storefronts sit empty. While there are shops catering to the more prosperous farmers who live out in the countryside, the town itself reeks of permanent recession. 

This basic reality (played out across the wealthy west) is one of the foundational pillars of our current social, economic and political crisis.  Another foundational pillar of the crisis is the fact that the “left” — across the west — has ceased to represent the common people in any useful way at all.

 I’m sure if this detachment is the result or the cause of the left’s dismal and alienating messaging.

I have written before about Steve Bannon and his daily podcast which I listen to regularly. And for that I have been roundly attacked by liberals who see him as modern-day Goebbels, and therefore have reality-free reactions to him that verge on hysteria. (Including one media personality who reached out specifically to tell me I was a terrible person for writing admiringly about Bannon’s show.) 

What liberals and the left cannot and will not address is what makes his message so powerful, which is this: he speaks to his audience as if they were in the drivers seat. It doesn’t matter if you agree with his version of reality or not. Bannon delivers hope and empowerment along with a coherent and information-laden narrative. His show delivers the message that regular people can and will fix the problems we currently face. The listener comes away not just informed, but energised. 

Let’s contrast that with a well-known left-wing commentator, Aaron Maté. He also gives his audience solid breakdown of the geopolitical forces that have shaped our current societies. It’s a fact-based and coherent narrative, whether you agree with his analysis or not. But what it is not, in any way, is hopeful, energising or even humane. It’s utterly defeatist, hyperbolic and verging on nihilistic. In this Triggernometry episode, he compares the United States to Nazi Germany and the Death Star.

How is this supposed to appeal to blue-collar workers and small town Americans, millions of whom have served as grunts for the very US imperialism he compares to the Nazi occupation of Europe? He repeats over and over all the things that the government “should” provide. But what can us poor schlubs actually do about that? Are we to just sit in our Lay-Z-Boys and wait for the bureaucratic cavalry to come give us free stuff?

If this is the best the left has to offer, I despair. Everything the left says — whether factually correct or not — is the opposite of the granular, actionable messaging offered by the Bannon juggernaut. Ironically for a movement that invented the word, today’s left offer zero solidarity — it’s just everything is terrible,  we are all fucked. End of story.

By contrast, for a masterclass in providing information, analysis and giving a reason to fight, watch this:

https://www.warroomforum.com/threads/war-room-pandemic-episode-1267-9-16-2021.17794/

Within the first ten minutes of the show, he makes the case for solidarity of the global working class from the United States to China. And this, we are supposed to believe, is dangerous right-wing demagoguery. Hey, maybe it is. What do I know? I’m not a policy wonk. But it sure sounds to me like what the left used to say.

For the working class in the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, I sometimes fear we are past the point of no return. While I have seen up close a lot of truly stellar community activists in working class communities in parts of Belfast and elsewhere in Northern Ireland, truly dedicated people who make a huge difference to their neighbourhoods, it does really seem like the path to truly economic independence (which is the only real way to actually be independent) is blocked. I fear for what this means for the future.