Alexandria Ocasio-Ortez as clickbait

[Photo from here–an example of how to photograph women politicians.]

We are now at the point where, if a second assistant to a dog catcher in South-south-east Nowhere says something negative about AOC, it’s news. If it’s a Democrat, it’s going to be all over Facebook.

At any given moment, there are political figures saying critical things about other political figures. If you watch Fox News, you will never hear about conservative criticisms of the current most powerful GOP figure. Fox promotes the notion that there is a binary—people are loyal to “conservatism” or they are “liberal.” The only opposition voices it allows are supposedly liberal, and amount to Fox paid stooges who will present dumb versions of “liberal” arguments, intended to persuade single-source viewers that they are getting both sides. They aren’t. Fox is all tribal loyalty, and its handling of AOC is proof of that. It doesn’t surprise me that they are in full smear mode–they spent 25 years doing that to HRC (quite effectively)– and I doubt they can be persuaded to stop doing it until there is no longer an audience that wants to shout at the TV.

The non-GOP media, however, are also handling AOC in ways that are actively harmful to democratic deliberation, and that’s something that we can change by not clicking and sharing outrage porn about AOC.

My objection to any propaganda machine is that every one of them (“left” and “right”) presumes a binary of political options—you are us or them. That is a red herring—we are now arguing about the identity of people making the arguments instead of arguing about the policies those people are advocating.

American media sucks because it is profit-driven, and there are three ways to get people to click on and share a link about politics (and thereby make a profit), and all of them involve avoiding policy argumentation:

• outrage porn, in which the pleasure is being outraged at the idiocy of Them (some out-group);

• a cat fight (a fight between two women);

• personalizing politics, so it’s never about policy, but about the identities of the people on the two sides (non-conservative sites generally accept the two sides fallacy).

Any one of those is more likely to get a click than something that offers a reasoned discussion of the various (non-binary) options we, as a community, have available to us.

Effective deliberation doesn’t require that we ignore the identities and bodies of the people involved—those are important considerations—but it doesn’t rely on the assumption that we should derive everything from assumptions (and projections) about identity. The identities of the people involved constitute one consideration among many, not, as media generally present it, the only thing we need to know.

So, a for-profit media and democratic deliberation are inherently at odds (as George Orwell pointed out in the under-appreciated Homage to Catalonia). Were the media oriented toward enabling effective democratic deliberation, it would focus on candidate’s policy arguments (with consideration of their identity as indicative of whether they’re sincere or not). A media interested in generating profit won’t do anything like that. It will identify the people who are so polarizing that any article about them gets clicks, and give them a lot of coverage (think about the disparity in coverage of Clinton and Trump in 2016).

Even supposedly “liberal” media doesn’t cover policy, and even it emphasizes fights between personalities. Think about how the non-conservative media covered the choice between HRC and Sanders—not through discussions of their relative policies, but with articles about their personal conflicts. So, for instance, the very real, and very important, questions of their very different policies were evaded in favor of not important questions about their feelings for each other. There was a lot of outrage porn (we now know much of it generated by pro-Trump bots) instead of policy argumentation.

I think there were good reasons for supporting Sanders over HRC and vice versa, but whether someone in either campaign said snarky things about the other isn’t one of them. And the notion of a stolen election is a non-starter, in that it was (and is) rationally indefensible, but it was useful for fomenting in-/out-group hostility within groups that might vote against Trump.

Just to be clear: I’m saying that I think that the important questions about policy were evaded by media in favor of clickbait articles about personal conflict. And it hurt the Dems. And even supposedly non-conservative sites engaged in it.

And I think we’re seeing the same in regard to AOC. Supposedly “liberal” sites post articles about a second assistant to a dog catcher in South-south-east Nowhere saying something negative about AOC (with a photo that makes her look fanatical). It’s the stinkiest clickbait there is because:

• that controversy, even if entirely manufactured, will get clicks;

• any mention of AOC warms the outrage/attraction desire on the part of people who drink deep from toxic masculinity in order to get chuffed about the possibility of dominating her;

• it’s politically useful for GOP rhetoric to create any kind of rift among the people who might vote Dem, generally on the basis of whether some Dem is being snarky about another one;

• potentially Dem voters are prone to the narrative that the Dem party is hostile to progressives (it is, but I don’t think we should get porny about it).

Anything about AOC is good for generating outrage on the part of misogynists, but anything about any Democrat criticizing AOC is the perfect outrage porn. It’s money shots all the way.

It’s a good Two-Minute Hate for anti-“liberals” because they can hate on AOC as the ultimate liberal (she isn’t) and feel contempt for the Dems who like her and take pleasure in Dems tearing each other up. But it also plays to the porn-y pleasure that people take in a cat fight (as a friend pointed out, it’s much like the faux fight between Kate Middleton and Meghan Merkle or various other celebrity women non-fights—nothing like a good catfight to get clicks). And, of course, it’s a (probably often cunning) repeat of the strategy that worked so well in the summer of 2016—get potential Dem voters to hate each other by fomenting (or even fabricating) a supposed fight between Dems. We really need to learn from 2016. We don’t need to have pure unity, but we need to stop falling for clickbait outrage porn.

I recently posted something about a profoundly irresponsible CNN article that was picked up by USAToday. The claim of the article was that a Democrat (Claire McCaskill) has talked trash about AOC, but neither article had any quotes to support that representation of what McCaskill said. That the articles didn’t quote McCaskill talking trash made me think that it’s likely that McCaskill hadn’t condemned AOC specifically, or even the newly elected fresh class. Video of that interviewed showed she didn’t verbatim say what either article claimed she had said—she said other things that motivism and a hard spin could turn into criticizing AOC.

Maybe that hard spin was an accurate inference of what McCaskill actually meant; maybe it wasn’t. Why go to the trouble of that motivism and spin? Who cares? Why are we arguing about whether McCaskill is a patronizing jerk rather than arguing about AOC’s policies?

It’s all clickbait, and it’s all distraction. And it’s all undermining democratic deliberation.

What matters is that both articles cunningly played into various very stinky baits for clicking, essentially several different kinds of outrage. Dem haters would love the articles because it showed AOC (a potential powerhouse in the DNC) was awful and because it showed Dems tearing each other up. Many lefties would take pleasure in it because it confirmed a narrative of democratic politics being the worst thing ever. (A narrative Russian bots used quite effectively in 2016.) It would also play to the intra-Democrat outrage wars of progressives v. centrist (which often turns into weird ageism—with snarky and bigoted comments about millennials or old farts). All of those narratives are pleasurable, and they’re all about the identities of some other group being essentially evil. That’s fun. And they’re all damaging ways to think about politics.

AOC is a politician with important ideas about policies. Her policies and ideas can and should be debated. What shouldn’t be debated is whether she is uppity, divisive, or a pretty good dancer. Let’s not argue about whether other Dems have criticized her, or how other politicians feel about her.

AOC has policies; let’s argue about them.

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