By Michael
The marketing mantra that the next election is the “most important of our lives” has been a staple of both parties for decades. As the Vietnam War raged, the 1968 Nixon campaign used the slogan “This time, vote like your whole world depended on it” in print and TV ads to arouse Nixon’s “silent majority.” Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 “Daisy ad” warning of nuclear holocaust if Barry Goldwater were to be elected still stands as the most notorious example of the genre.
Donald Trump has turned this tactic into a new pop-art form. In 2018, Barack Obama routinely deployed the “most important election” line in stump speeches for Democratic candidates, and variations on the theme are already a regular part of 2020 election news on both sides.
The use of this desperation tactic is an admission of intellectual bankruptcy. It is repeated with numbing regularity in inverse proportion to its truth, while social media pump the poisonous message into the political bloodstream 24/7 until it seems incontrovertible.
Scare mongering in political campaigns is as old as the republic. During the Civil War era, presidential candidate Lincoln was depicted as a tree-dwelling ape with a lunatic wife who would lead the Union to perdition. However, the amplification and dominance of this tactic in modern campaigns are sure signs of a failing democracy in which political consumerism and lurid media spectacle are displacing citizen-driven civil innovation.
Try something different
In 2018, I began reading about PACs that were already raising tens of millions of dollars for prospective presidential candidates. If even a small part of this money went into the imaginative work of Reimagining Politics rather than the transient excitements of another multi-billion dollar election spectacle, the results would be transformative.
Reimagining Politics is planning the boldest grassroots media projects ever attempted on a national scale for 2020, but it cannot happen without the support of readers such as you.
I know that with a hot-eyed herd running perpetually for everything from president to dogcatcher, everyone is after your money. But Reimagining Politics offers you the opportunity to try something truly different.
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