I am utterly sure that Democrats have done more to create the myth of the Republican master strategist than members of their own party ever could, or would want to. Since the 1990s, hand-wringing liberals have cried up the awesome power of the Frank Luntzes, the Lee Atwaters, the Roger Stones of the world-- burnishing their images more no doubt in the eyes of prospective clients than anything their promotional materials could achieve. "Look, Republicans are so evil!" this line of liberal argument runs. "They have these Machiavellian geniuses." And then the usual corollary, added with a twinkle: "Couldn't we get one of those for ourselves?"
We are like distressed villagers calling in the services of the Magnificent Seven. We need an outlaw gunslinger of our own, but fighting on the side of good rather than evil. Or, less sympathetically, perhaps we are like Denethor, contemplating the prospect of laying hold of the One Ring: the Democratic version of Lee Atwater could be "hidden deep in the vaults, never to be used, unless at the utmost END of need." You could trust us with one!
In a recent post I explored some of the ethical problems with this line of thought, which are perhaps already obvious. Arguing on these terms as I did, however, I was still largely taking it for granted that the Republican master strategist is a real thing -- a malevolent sprite with power to deal actual damage in the world.
Recent events, though, have made me wonder if we haven't all been exaggerating the efficacy of the master strategists and their "dirty tricks" all along, quite apart from the question of their moral validity. Roger Stone these days is still as astonishingly villainous and dishonest as always, to be sure. But now that he is caught, this fact no longer makes him seem an intriguing Mephistophelean figure; now he just looks ridiculous. His recent lies lack both honesty and believability -- in short, they don't even work as lies.
So too, I was noticing that whoever writes Trump's speeches these days (probably Stephen Miller) seems to be read-up on the most notorious electoral skullduggery of the last few decades; but whether any of it is remotely persuasive to anyone is another matter entirely.
Thus, we had the example of Trump's speech when he commandeered the airwaves for an eight-minute address to the nation in January, during the government shutdown and spending fight -- remember that one? At the time, we thought that this is when he is planning to make his Palpatine bid for emergency powers (that ended up coming later). Instead, we just had a very tired rendition of some warmed-over late '80s Lee Atwater specials about being "tough on crime." And hey, it worked against the Democrats then, why couldn't it now?
The speech was heavy on the Willie Horton, with a light sprinkling of Kitty Dukakis. First, Trump (that is, Miller) went through his usual appalling litany of crimes allegedly committed by undocumented immigrants (rhetoric that actually, of course, goes further beyond the pale than anything Republican tacticians tried in the Willie Horton affair. The Horton ad was not formally affiliated with the Bush campaign, and in it, the underlying doctrine of racism and collective punishment was kept somewhat more implicit. By contrast, Trump and Miller are openly using alleged actions of individuals to call for the arrest and exclusion of entire groups of people who happen to have the same immigration status).
Then Trump pivoted to try the notorious Bernard Shaw Kitty Dukakis question -- except on the nation at large, this time, instead of on a candidate that he wants that nation to oppose (kind of missing the point of the tactic). "Imagine if it was your child, your husband, or your wife," said Trump, in the lugubrious monotone he reserves for when he is ploddingly reading the products of Miller's pen from a teleprompter. It's the same chess move Birch Barlow once pulled on Mayor Quimby -- but I think it may have had more success in that case.
And that's just the point. Does anyone think that re-using this old maneuver actually worked, in this case? Trump may have walked away from the shutdown fight and subsequent budget battle with more funding for border barriers and expanded detention than he ever should have, given his weak bargaining position -- but that position was indeed weak, and he ended up with far less than what he had asked for. Members of his party in Congress were not interested in following him into another shutdown again. Further, and more importantly, the American public didn't buy Trump and Miller's attempt to convince us that we were in the midst of a national emergency at the U.S. southern border. The fear-mongering about crime didn't work the way it did in the past -- despite deploying exactly the same tricks.
How could this be? Well, because the world has changed since 1988. A device that worked then falls flat on a contemporary audience. You can't just study your Lee Atwater and replicate everything he did, because the underlying circumstances are different.
But if Atwater's tactics only worked in the first instance because the timing was ripe (and if the Kitty Dukakis coup was really not his idea at all, but happened to be delivered into his lap by a supposedly "neutral" TV journalist, who just liked to ask "tough questions" all around), then was the end result really attributable to his strategic insights? Or is it really more the case, as Tolstoy famously argued, that history unfolds through a number of blind and random collisions of factors, by which some are mysteriously elevated to success and others cast down, and only afterwards do we attribute success to the deliberate intentions and forethought of the winners?
Perhaps, in short, the Republican master strategist is a myth.
I finally finished Lawrence Freedman's massive history of strategy this week, and this is one of the major themes of the book, when he attempts to assess the ultimate value of strategy as a discipline or body of thought. Throughout the history of strategy -- in warfare, social movements, and business alike -- attempts have been made to boil it down to a "science" or a doctrine of natural law -- a set of definite precepts that can be applied in every instance.
When you are dealing with human beings and their history, however, this approach runs into several major obstacles that cannot wholly be overcome.
One is the factor already discussed, which has come to be known in business circles as the "halo effect," after a book by Phil Rosenzweig (and summarized for the likes of us by Freedman). It operates like this: it is often only after an enterprise has achieved an extraordinary success that it becomes an object of interest to journalists and business historians. The reasons for this success are therefore reconstructed on the basis of a fait accompli, and anything that the leadership of the enterprise said or did previously is re-interpreted as one of the crucial factors leading to the success.
In other words, what may have been random luck, accident, or actively counterproductive behavior on the part of leadership (that simply happened to be counter-balanced in a given instance by other factors) -- all these things nonetheless acquire a "halo" on the basis of later success.
Freedman notes one aspect of this fallacy as: "the tendency to explore explanations of success without worrying whether the same factors might be present in failures." I was reminded of this earlier this week when a friend showed me the recent Netflix documentary about the fiasco that was the 2017 Fyre Festival -- a promotional event for an online App that was supposedly going to be a concert on a Caribbean island with an array of luxury amenities, but which utterly collapsed as the planners slowly realized that their millennial leader did not have the resources, time, or forethought to pull this off.
What was remarkable and disturbing about the documentary was not just the depth of the business failure, however -- it was also the fact that, up until the moment of the fiasco itself, it plays exactly the way a similar documentary might that told the classic story -- beloved by journalists -- of the "improbable business success." All the same tropes are there. We have the visionary leader that no one believes in, who everyone thinks is going to fail. We have the nay-sayers and the voices of caution being overruled by the one person with the courage, grit, and tenacity to plunge ahead in the face of obstacles...
The movie feels very much like Empire of Dreams, in short -- except at the end of it in this case we got, not Star Wars, but rather a class action lawsuit, a criminal investigation for fraud, and virtually the entire population of a Caribbean island suffering massive wage-theft at the hands of over-privileged millennials unable to recognize their own arrogance.
If the Fyre festival had succeeded against the odds, that is to say, this tragic hubris could well have been recast as a business virtue -- enterprise, risk-taking, determination, etc. Such is the power of the halo effect.
To return to our main question, then, have the Lee Atwaters of the world simply been benefitting from the halo effect all these years? Maybe so, or maybe it is simply a strategic error in itself to apply the lessons of the past too rigorously and narrowly to an altered circumstance -- a mistake natural to a rookie like Miller, but that Atwater himself would never have committed.
In this case, however, strategy is evidently not a scientific field, but a sort of creative art, and attempts to master it through propositions will face the same difficulties as trying to write poems on the basis of theoretical prescriptions.
In the realms of poetry and rhetoric, if not yet in strategy, we have long recognized that creation is not simply a matter of applying rules, however finely honed. In each field of the arts, and in religion too, we have a few innovators, and then the host of the ideologues who follow them, attempting to harden what was once a creative idea into a permanent doctrine, which itself becomes barren of useful ideas until another innovation comes along.
This is what gives us, say, the French classicists taking an initially fruitful aesthetic theory of the unités -- perfectly fine in itself, as any aesthetic theory goes -- and turning it into a bizarre series of mental straight-jackets: all action must take place within the same 24-hour period, all major incidents must take place off-stage and only be described in retrospect, etc. (Florence King has a delightful essay in which she does little more than summarize the various contortions and contrivances that these rules induce into the plot of Racine's Phèdre).
This is an idolatrous level of rule-making that must inevitably offend the freedom-loving spirit, and which Pope in his "Essay on Criticism" used as the basis for a somewhat chauvinistic dig at the French national character. The same nation renowned for its doctrine of absolutism in monarchy would inevitably come up with a similar divine right of the stage-set, he writes in so many words, whereas Britons never will be slaves, etc.
Of course, Pope's condemnation of legislative approaches to poetry is itself written in mostly impeccable iambic pentameter. As has been remarked before, then, creativity is less a product of defying all rules than it is the result of a dialectical interaction between individual expression and the demands of form.
Future innovations, however, inevitably exceed the bounds of whatever rules are prescribed -- even if they do not wholly overthrow existing forms -- and the new works must either be rejected, or the rules re-written again to accommodate them (at which point they can rest until the inevitable next innovation comes again). Thus, as Ezra Pound puts it in his ABC of Reading, "Ignorant men of genius are constantly rediscovering 'laws' of art which the academics had mislaid or hidden."
Continuing with our analogy, therefore, perhaps the best strategist is not someone who has mastered a discipline, but someone who proceeds by "ignorant genius" -- grasping the element of the new in each situation and responding to it without needing recourse to rules that were designed to apply only to past innovations, past contexts, past successes.
Here we face the problem, however, that human beings are nearly incapable of processing and responding to wholly new and unrecognizable situations. As Freedman explains, summarizing recent work in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, a great deal of human thought is best understood not as ideas, but as a series of "scripts," which kick in once we recognize the contours of a familiar situation. Or, as George Lakoff writes (since we were just speaking of hand-wringing liberals in the '90s who were worried about the evil genius of Lee Atwater and Frank Luntz) -- "People think in frames [...] We may be presented with facts, but for us to make sense of them, they have to fit what is already in the synapses of our brain."
This results in an apparent paradox, however, if we take it too literally: if facts can only be assimilated through "frames," how do those frames get there in the first place? If we can only encounter new ideas and experiences when they evoke for us some conceptual "script" that we already command, how do we ever learn anything new to start with?
We can resort to Plato's solution to the problem, which was to posit that any learning or knowledge is never really gained, but only "remembered" from some previous stage in the process of metempsychosis. This, however, is to suggest that all the insights of strategic thought are in fact "out there," somewhere -- or rather, within us -- and existing attempts to enumerate them have simply been incomplete.
In the realm of strategy, however, this has serious limitations. There is a specific reason why strategic maneuvers need to be fundamentally innovative, in order to succeed. It's not just that we haven't come up with or remembered all the possible tactics yet -- there is also a critical advantage to be gained in the very fact of novelty.
This is due to what Freedman describes as one of the oldest dilemmas in all strategic thought -- the law of diminishing returns to trickery. Deceptive maneuvers will only work a few times, before people begin to look for them. There's only so many times you can leave a wooden horse inside someone's city walls before they start to distrust Greeks bearing gifts.
Furthermore, once you have used a trick once, you have made your opponents aware of it, leaving them free to deploy it against you in turn. This means that you have to maintain a constant level of deception while escalating it and gaining a temporary advantage, until your opponent learns to recognize your new tricks as well and comes to emulate those in turn, leading to a constant struggle for marginal -- if not vanishing -- gains. As Freedman explains, this is a variant of what has come to be known as the "red queen effect," after a line in Through the Looking-Glass: "[I]t takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."
This is partly why we know Miller to be a lesser epigone of Atwater. He is attacking the same place twice, re-deploying the same trick more than once. He has missed out on what Inspector Clouseau would identify as the all-important "element of surprise." (Clouseau being, come to think of it, a fine example of the perpetual beneficiary of the "halo effect" on the basis of unintended success-- this is one of the main jokes of the series.) Miller is trying the same devices over again, not realizing they might not work in a world and in an American society that has changed profoundly since the Bush v. Dukakis debates.
In Miller's case -- and the case of the recent budget fights -- this has worked to our advantage. Liberal strategists, however, face precisely the same obstacles. Just like Miller and the rest, our only tools to fall back upon in processing new information are often scripts and frames that we internalized in the past. Our ability to respond to the genuine novelty of our own (and every) historical situation will therefore be extremely limited.
And in many ways, the problem of novelty confronts us even more starkly than it does Team Trump. Miller et al. are up against a series of Democratic challengers, most of whom are playing out stale factional disputes familiar from the late '60s and before. We, by contrast, have not seen anything quite like this before.
Trump certainly did have the "element of surprise" on all of us, when he was elected, even if he seems to have lost it since. No one -- not even Trump himself (according to the Cohen testimony) believed he could actually win. Yet he did, and here we are. Do we have any scripts or frames to hand that will serve us for such an apparent impossibility?
Probably not. But there's a more optimistic way to look at novelty as well, which might provide a bit of encouragement.
Feeling the need recently for a Sherlock Holmes fix, I finally got around to reading the first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet. And the great detective says something interesting there, to the ever-plodding Dr. Watson (who, rather like Big Bird in Sesame Street, must always be kept a few mental steps behind the reader/viewer, so that we can feel slightly triumphant as we follow the lead of the genius Holmes at a just slightly faster clip).
Holmes says: "what is out of the common is usually a guide rather than a hindrance," in solving any mystery. By this point in the novel, he has elaborated the point more fully elsewhere. "It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery," he says. "The most commonplace crime is often the most mysterious because it presents no new or special features from which deductions may be drawn. This murder would have been infinitely more difficult to unravel had the body of the victim been simply found lying in the roadway without any of those outré and sensational accompaniments which have rendered it remarkable. These strange details, far from making the case more difficult, have really had the effect of making it less so."
We have, in the case of our current presidential administration, certainly a number of "outré and sensational" elements. It is certainly out of the common run of our political experience. We have here corruption, vulgarity, crudeness, lewdness, cruelty, bullying, villainy, on an operatic scale. We have narcissism, pettiness, childishness, back-stabbing, deception, betrayals. We have affairs, pay-offs, espionage, and the deliberate interference in a U.S. election by a hostile foreign power. None of these things are entirely unfamiliar to our politics, sadly, but in this concentration and magnitude, they certainly do stand out.
Can we in some way come to regard these elements as a "guide rather than a hindrance"? Can we follow this bizarre series of clues to a solution whereby we can defeat Trump?
Yes, I think we can come to see the relative novelty of our situation as a strength rather than a weakness. Perhaps it is precisely because the Millers of the world are working against a Democratic opposition playing out very familiar patterns, after all, that they have grown overconfident, and therefore continue to try out the same old tired rhetorical gambits that no longer work on the American public.
We, however -- we've got something that no one else has had. We are faced with a president in office who directly and viscerally offends against the fundamental American creed and our basic shared ethical assumptions of what makes someone a good person. We have a president who does not make even a pretense of favoring traditional American ideals of openness, pluralism, and the belief that all people are created equal. He cheats, he lies, he verbally abuses people, he separates families. This has got to be a tactical asset, to those who oppose him. If we can keep our heads and not alienate the people we will need to form a winning coalition, we can gain from the crucial advantage of having the moral capital on our side.
And this is one advantage, moral capital, that is diminished rather than strengthened by a resort to "dirty tricks." This is yet another reason why it is time for the liberal fantasy of the Democratic gunslinger to hang up its spurs. We don't need a liberal version of Lee Atwater, hidden in our vaults or otherwise. We just need to appeal to what the vast majority of people in this country recognize as the right thing to do.
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