The Effectiveness of "Political Technology"
False narratives and disinformation hurt Harris more than sexism or racism
In her post for Nov. 6, Heather Cox Richardson writes,
There is also no doubt that both racism and sexism played an important role in Harris’s defeat.
In fact, exit polls cast ample doubt on this. Once again, white women broke for Trump. For the first time, so did Latino men.
Anatomy of three Trump elections: How Americans shifted in 2024 vs. 2020 and 2016 (CNN — if you don’t like CNN, google “exit polls 2024”).
But I think Heather Cox Richardson is right about “political technology”:
But my own conclusion is that both of those things were amplified by the flood of disinformation that has plagued the U.S. for years now. Russian political theorists called the construction of a virtual political reality through modern media “political technology.” They developed several techniques in this approach to politics, but the key was creating a false narrative in order to control public debate. These techniques perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.
In the U.S., pervasive right-wing media, from the Fox News Channel through right-wing podcasts and YouTube channels run by influencers, have permitted Trump and right-wing influencers to portray the booming economy as “failing” and to run away from the hugely unpopular Project 2025. They allowed MAGA Republicans to portray a dramatically falling crime rate as a crime wave and immigration as an invasion. They also shielded its audience from the many statements of Trump’s former staff that he is unfit for office, and even that his chief of staff General John Kelly considers him a fascist and noted that he admires German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
As actor Walter Masterson posted: “I tried to educate people about tariffs, I tried to explain that undocumented immigrants pay billions in taxes and are the foundation of this country. I explained Project 2025, I interviewed to show that they supported it. I can not compete against the propaganda machines of Twitter, Fox News, [Joe Rogan Experience], and NY Post. These spaces will continue to create reality unless we create a more effective way of reaching people.”
X users noted a dramatic drop in their followers today, likely as bots, no longer necessary, disengaged.
See the end of her post for a link to a Wilson Center report on Russia’s use of political technology. I hope educators in relevant fields are thinking about how to prepare their students to resist this kind of manipulation in the current information environment. Many commentators are talking about how “siloed” voters are.
There may be a strange silver lining here: in their drive to help elect Trump by accentuating and exploiting the divisions of American society, the Russians and the right-wingers who wittingly or unwittingly colluded with them may have inadvertently weakened the most fundamental division in American society, namely race. Exit polls show that Trump made significant gains beyond his white base. He pointedly crowed about the diversity of his supporters in his victory declaration. (I tuned into PBS’s coverage of the election after getting home from working at the polls, so I heard this declaration live.)
A more pessimistic interpretation would be that America’s racial divisions remain in force but America’s racial categories are again in flux, and Latinos are being absorbed into the dominant grouping, much as various other ethnicities became simply “white” in the past after formerly being categorized separately. But that would not account for Trump’s improved numbers with African-American men.
Identity politics has become discredited in the eyes of much of the American populace, and not just those who loudly complain about “woke-ism”. I’ve “Noted” before about the professional-managerial class / center-left’s retreat from identity politics, inferred from opinion pieces in the New York Times. During the PBS coverage mentioned above, Democratic strategist Fahz Shakir interpreted the returns as showing that working people were coming together around class concerns rather than identity, and that his party needed to appeal to them on that basis (I forget exactly how he put it).
Neither Harris nor H. Clinton lost because of sexism, at least not here in Michigan, where we have elected and re-elected Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, Attorney General Dana Nessel, US Senator Debbie Stabenow, and many others. Stabenow is retiring, so this year we elected Elissa Slotkin, who eked out a razor-thin victory while the state went for Trump by less than 2 points (some of which can be attributed to the anger of Arab-Americans over Gaza, which in turn was undoubtedly magnified by by political technology).
I myself was happy to vote for all of those women. I was not happy to vote for H. Clinton. Among other sins, Clinton voted to authorize George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Both of my senators (including Stabenow) and my representative at the time (Bart Stupak, whom I wrote about in this post) voted no. What did they know that Senator Clinton didn’t? Nothing. She had her finger in the wind and her eye on the presidency, and much of the public seemed to be falling for Bush’s bogus rationale for war when the vote came up, so she voted according to her ambition instead of the national interest (as did John Kerry, initially). I have no sympathy for those who cried “sexism” when she lost.
Had Clinton been up against a “normal” Republican like John Kasich, I might have written in Bernie Sanders, or possibly even voted GOP. But she was up against Trump. Even before 2016 he was manifestly unfit for the presidency, so I held my nose and voted for her.
I’m not crazy about Harris, either. She strikes me as similar to Clinton in that she seems to stand for nothing in particular beyond her own ambition and maybe unfettered access to abortion. She was part of the crew that stabbed Al Franken in the back. But I voted for her.
(The saddest thing is, Harris might have been very good in another position. Probably, had Biden chosen Amy Klobuchar as VP and Harris as US Attorney General, Trump would be in jail and we’d be celebrating our first woman president. But such speculation is not conducive to mental health at a time like this.)
Some have tried to claim that there is a very specific kind of sexism that attaches to the presidency. Wrong again. The corpse of the Harris campaign was not even cold before the “Whitmer 2028” posts started appearing on r/Michigan on Reddit. I expect to vote for Whitmer for president in 2028, if she chooses to run and if we still have a functioning democracy in four years. As we say in Michigan, “Inshallah.”
For more about the fabrication and fluctuations of American racial categories, see Jacqueline Johnson’s A Dreadful Deceit, which I reviewed in a previous post.
The Peanuts frame above was taken from a strip published on Oct. 4, 1959. I found it here: Charlie Brown's Greatest Misses: Every 'Peanuts' Football Gag Comic (GoComics). Seems like fair use to me, but Substack isn’t displaying it on my homepage or in the thumbnail. I may have to redo the whole thing by hand (or maybe just drop it since that sort of thing has been done before). In the mean time, here’s a doodle of a donkey dressed as Charlie Brown:
