Two Thoughts on Sloganeering Today: Principles for Activating the Right and the Left at Once
Slogans. People mostly don’t think about them anymore, but they matter quite a lot. If the intermediate goal is more coverage of an issue, here are two principles for activating media attention on either side of the aisle.
- It should be an affront to some sacred conservative value or institution or symbol — an affront to traditional authority.
- It should be empirically ambivalent. In other words, it should be policy-dumb.
There is a third of course: the content matter must be political. It needs to make a demand about “who gets what, when, and how.”
Defund the police accomplishes both of the above at once, and of course is political. The police (who) should get less money (gets what). The temporal dimension is presumably ASAP (when). The how remains ambiguous, which is maybe where there was room for improvement! More importantly, “defund the police!” is successful in that it simultaneously triggers the attention of both right-leaning conservative media and left-leaning progressive media.
It triggers the attention of conservative media by polluting a traditionally-sacred institution, the police, while simultaneously triggering center-to-left-to-progressive media in that it does not follow empirical policy logic to the desired outcome — the best data suggest that less police means more crime and violence. The most profaning claims to media on the left are claims that are factually wrong or scientifically inaccurate. In this sense, a slogan that is, let’s say “policy-dumb,” attracts the attention of media on the left by cutting against the sacredness of science.
Defund the police essentially begs Ezra Klein to show us the evidence, while simultaneously tosses an alley-oop to Tucker Carlson to tell his viewers which sacred line of purity is being crossed. In other words, I think that slogans that simultaneously challenge both traditional and bureaucratic authority are ideal.
The question important in slogan design is not whether it is empirically true or honest or sacred, but instead whether it activates. Importantly, the activation must not be an end in itself. Attention alone is not a political goal, but attention attached to political or cultural processes that are subsequently attached to rooted, clean, constitutive ends is the aim. Slogans are a means to an end. Means oriented thinking alone is horrible, and hugely pervasive today in the professional world — think, “solutions-oriented thinking.”
If you were to invent a slogan, what ends would you be seeking? And in terms of means, which sacred traditional value or institution would it challenge, and how would it be (slightly) empirically wrong?