Support First Things by turning your adblocker off or by making a  donation. Thanks!

Great article by Sabrina Schaeffer in Forbes.  The most important lines are:

A central tenet of political behavior research is that public opinion can be massively influenced by elite discourse, especially if elite opinion is all coming from one side . . . huge shift in opinion, across the political spectrum, can occur if the flow of political communications becomes one-sided. 

There is more good stuff, but that gets to a big part of our current political dynamics. A large (and disproportionately young) fraction of our population hears political communication that is overwhelmingly one-sided.  The vast amount of political communication from the right-leaning populist media is lost on them.  That isn’t what they are seeing and hearing (and it isn’t designed to reach them anyway). Better candidates giving better speeches would be . . . better but for many people who would otherwise be persuaded, those better speeches would go unheard and those candidates would be invisible until they could be caricatured. 

Thirty-second ads are too short to build a real connection on either a personal or intellectual level.  Reaching them with a well crafted message that goes on for several minutes and makes an argument relevant to their lives would be a start, but it would also take an investment, and who will do the investing?  There is a shortage of enforceable trust on the center-right when it comes to the effective spending of campaign money. 


Comments are visible to subscribers only. Log in or subscribe to join the conversation.

Tags

Loading...

Filter First Thoughts Posts

Related Articles