The New Neo

This election has generated so much to think about that it could serve as subject matter for posts for years. And yes, books will be written about it – although not by me.

So I’ll just start tackling topic after topic, trying to pace myself, knowing that I’ll only be able scratch the surface of what has happened.

I’ve already read many articles on the post-election fights within the Democrat Party in which one group blames another. For example, there’s this one that describes the war of words between the head of the party in Philadelphia and the Harris campaign:

McPhillips added: “If there’s any immediate takeaway from Philadelphia’s turnout this cycle, it is that Chairman Brady’s decades-long practice of fleecing campaigns for money to make up for his own lack of fundraising ability or leadership is a worthless endeavor that no future campaign should ever be forced to entertain again.”

The criticism directed at Brady, the longtime head of the Democratic City Committee, came shortly after the former member of Congress told The Inquirer that he felt no responsibility for the red wave that descended on the state.

Brady said money was an issue, and criticized the Harris campaign for paying only about “half” of the money the city committee requested for its get-out-the-vote effort. Those funds, otherwise known as “street money,” are used to pay committee members to get out the vote.

Then there’s the Biden people versus Harris people versus Obama people issue. For a good example of a piece describing that brouhaha, please see this:

President Joe Biden is furious that he is being blamed for Kamala Harris’ failed campaign and is going to war against his detractors in a bid to reunite the Democratic Party behind his middle-class credentials.

Biden remains convinced that his longtime ties to the trade unions and working-class men would have swayed the 2024 presidential election vote in his favor. Right to the end of the campaign, he insisted he would have beaten Donald Trump. …

The president’s circle was enraged that the finger-pointing had already begun in the Harris campaign within hours of Trump’s resounding victory, with most of the barbs aimed directly at the Oval Office.

According to Politico’s ‘Playbook’, Biden loyalists were especially bitter over unnamed quotes in a Politico article claiming the president was the “singular reason” for the damning defeat and saying a Democratic primary race would have given Harris more time and opportunity to run a better campaign.

The Biden aides blamed Barack Obama’s advisers for the Harris missteps that ultimately cost her any hopes of the White House.

You get the idea. Success has many fathers but failure is an orphan.

Most of these articles assume that politics is a game that’s all about tactics and strategy. And I have little doubt that tactics and strategy are huge. But they’re not everything. And they can’t overcome a lousy product. I don’t think the Democrats have learned the lesson illustrated in this classic story, which is that maybe the dogs didn’t like it:

Once upon a time a pet food company created a new variety of dog food and rolled out a massive marketing campaign to introduce the product. Despite hiring a first-rate advertising agency, initial sales were very disappointing. The agency was fired and a new agency and a new campaign was launched. Sales continued to disappoint. If anything, they fell even further. In desperation, the CEO called in all of the top executives for a brainstorming session to analyze what had gone wrong with the two campaigns and how a new campaign might revive sales.

The meeting went on for hours. Sophisticated statistical analysis was brought to bear on the problem. One VP argued that the mix of TV and print ads had been messed up. Another argued that the previous campaigns had been too subtle and had failed to feature the product with sufficient prominence. Another argued that the TV ad campaign had focused too much on spots during sporting events and not enough on regular programming with a broader demographic. Another argued the opposite–not enough sports programming had been targeted. After the debate had raged for hours, the CEO felt they had accomplished very little. He asked if anyone else had any theories that might explain the failure of the new product. Finally, one newly hired employee raised his hand and was recognized. Maybe the dogs don’t like it, she said.

In recent years the Democrats have been serving the American people some dog food that tastes like – dare I use the word? – garbage. Of course, some dogs like garbage, but a lot of dogs want something tastier. To use another famous saying, this time one ascribed to Lincoln – you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, you cannot fool all the people all the time. If the deception is too egregious, you will have trouble fooling enough people to win an election.

The truth is that they managed to accomplish it in 2020 (or was there a large cheating factor? More about that in another post coming soon). They didn’t manage in 2024, in part because I think the public recognized that Biden hadn’t been as advertised. People have experienced the Biden administration and suffered from many aspects of it. Then there was the obvious deception later on, as Biden’s cognitive powers declined further and the pretense was maintained that he was fine. More trust was broken when there was a sudden admission by the party that Biden needed replacement, and then instead of asking the people what they might want, Harris was installed as substitute. Then there was the further pretense that she was “joyful” instead of strangely inauthentic and tremendously inarticulate. Plus plenty of other obvious lies such as the idea that inflation was caused by widespread price gouging rather than the Biden/Harris policies. And that Harris was supposed to simultaneously be of the administration and yet not of the administration. That was too much of a bogus Zennish koan for the public to swallow.

And on and on and on. No amount of “messaging” and “narrative” will change those things. But the Democrats seem to think they can say anything and people will believe it. Vance is “weird” says Walz, one of the weirdest candidates ever. Kamala is the gracious uniter, as she spews mendacious venom about Trump and Republicans. And on and on and on some more.

You can summarize the whole thing by saying that this election represents the triumph – for the moment, anyway – of reality over imagology. “Imagology” is a word used by Czech author Milan Kundera in his book Immortality, in the following passage :

…[C]ommunists used to believe that in the course of capitalist development the proletariat would gradually grow poorer and poorer, but when it finally became clear that all over Europe workers were driving to work in their own cars, [the communists] felt like shouting that reality was deceiving them. Reality was stronger than ideology. And it is in this sense that imagology surpassed it: imagology is stranger than reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built, how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of, what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world; she met the whole village every day and knew how many murders were committed in the country over the last ten years; she had, so to speak, personal control over reality, and nobody could fool her by maintaining that Moravian agriculture was thriving when people at home had nothing to eat. My Paris neighbor spends his time an an office, where he sits for eight hours facing an office colleague, then he sits in his car and drives home, turns on the TV, and when the announcer informs him that in the latest public opinion poll the majority of Frenchmen voted their country the safest in Europe (I recently read such a report), he is overjoyed and opens a bottle of champagne without ever learning that three thefts and two murders were committed on his street that very day.

…[S]ince for contemporary man reality is a continent visited less and less often and, besides, justifiably disliked, the findings of polls have become a kind of higher reality, or to put it differently: they have become the truth. Public opinion polls are a parliament in permanent session, whose function it is to create truth, the most democratic truth that has ever existed. Because it will never be at variance with the parliament of truth, the power of imagologues will always live in truth, and although I know that everything human is mortal, I cannot imagine anything that would break its power.

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I think it’s a brilliant description, but I think that often reality, if obvious enough, can break the power of the imagologues, and that we’ve just seen a demonstration of that. And now we’re seeing the imagologues blame each other for not using imagology effectively enough, when in fact (to mix the metaphors) maybe the dogs just didn’t like it.