- There is little doubt that the Committee investigating the Insurrection will be presenting findings of huge importance.
- I feel confident that the people on that Committee have the ability to make the case with great skill.
- What’s doubtful, unfortunately, is what kind of impact its presentation of those findings will have on the American electorate.
- Yet that impact is of extraordinary importance, because of the extraordinary threat that American democracy now faces.
- Therefore, the Committee should avail itself of the best possible advice on how to compose and orchestrate that presentation to achieve maximal beneficial impact.
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1) It’s already clear that the Committee will have abundant evidence that much of the Republican world is implicated in an attempt to overthrow the government of the United States, is complicit in an ongoing assault on the Constitution that all its members took an oath to defend, and has become an authoritarian movement.
2) That much is already abundantly clear: what has already been visible right out into the open would be quite sufficient – were our nation politically sane and healthy -- for the American people to reject that Republican Party quite overwhelmingly.
But the futures markets are saying that the great likelihood is — on the contrary -- that the American electorate will reward the Republican Party by giving it additional powers (control of both Houses of Congress).
And the polls indicate that — despite the abundant evidence that has been publicly presented repeatedly — that Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen has retained great power. Nearly three-fourth of Republican voters believe that Biden stole the election, and only 55% of the American people generally acknowledge the well-established truth that Biden won fair and square. And the Republicans are continuing to use Trump’s Big Lie as a tool to steal power against “the will of the people,”
If – after all that the American people witnessed about the Republican effort to overturn a legitimate election, all the way up to the attempted coup d’etat in which Trump and his allies were engaged – the truth as thus far presented is faring so poorly in the American electorate, then surely the Committee should assume that “more of the same” kind of presentation of this dangerous reality will not suffice.
(The presentations in both Impeachment trials were, by my lights, quite excellent. But it seemed as though putting those fine presentations out into the nation was like the proverbial water off a duck’s back. If the Committee makes yet another outstanding presentation of the same kind, is there any reason to believe this one will have the larger impact that’s needed?
(“More of the same” does not look promising. Julia Ioffe, who has shown herself expert in matters of political darkness, pretty much despairs of the Insurrection report having any impact: like “putting a band-aid on a big hole in the dike.”)
But if we were to say that there’s no way to persuade a majority of the American people can be persuaded to punish, rather than reward, a political party that remains complicit in an attempt to overthrow the government of the United States, would that not be tantamount to saying also that American democracy is already dead?
3) The impact on the electorate must be considered the number one goal of the Committee in its determination of its means of presentation. That’s because a plausible case can be made that -- if the futures markets are correct that on our present trajectory the Republicans will control Congress next year – it could be “Game Over” for American democracy.
4) Given the stakes in the coming mid-terms, given how vitally important what the investigation into the Insurrection will make clear, and given how all the already much-reported evidence has failed to move the American people to where they really need to be (with even a significant portion of “Independents” believing obvious lies), the Committee cannot complacently just employ the modes and style of presentation whose inadequacy has already been demonstrated.
Therefore, before they embark on their important effort to tell the American people what they need to know, they should assemble a group of people whose various talents and expertise might enable them to design a strategy of messaging that will reach and move the people who need to be reached and moved.
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I concede that it is possible that no kind of messaging that will “reach and move” those Americans who either don’t recognize or don’t care about the threat that story of the 1/6 Insurrection – the lead up to it, the event itself, and what has happened since – demonstrates that the Trump Party poses to the survival of American democracy.
And I concede that, if there is some kind of messaging strategy that would reach and move those people, I don’t know what it is. (In my view of things, the kinds of well-crafted presentations that marked the two Impeachment trials were outstanding, and “should” have persuaded any reasonable and responsible American citizen.)
But if more of the same seems destined to fail, something else or something more should be tried.
And if I were in charge of designing the presentation of the Committee’s findings, I would convene a group to brainstorm about how it might most effectively be done.
In that group, I’d include such people as
- Film-makers (like Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and…?);
- PR and advertising creatives (like those who worked on the Lincoln Project’s ads);
- Outstanding “teachers” using media (like Neil deGrasse Tyson, Ken Burns);
- Strategists of political messaging (like Democrat James Carville, and Never-Trump Republicans Steve Schmidt and Rick Wilson);
- People expert at and/or capable of utilizing social media to reach various audiences;
- Historians of American politics (like Jon Meacham, Michael Beschloss, Doris Kerns Goodwin).
(I’m sure that list could be improved on.)
Could such a group, meeting for a day, help the 1/6 investigation Committee come up with a more effective way to “reach and move” the American electorate than what the Committee’s outstanding group of elected political officials could come up with on their own?
I don’t know. But with the stakes being what they are, with the record of recent congressional attempts being what it is, how can it not be tried?