Cultural fluency and why it matters

Like many of you, I was metaphorically gobbling popcorn last week during the epic Trump/Musk meltdown (this news cycle is so crazy – it is amazing that our interest has now been re-directed – rightly so, I’m sure – to Trump’s attempts to turn California into a military state). While I freely admit to a schadenfreudian enjoyment of the astonishingly bad behaviors on display during the Trump/Musk squabbling, I also couldn’t help wondering: would the break-up in any way help solve the giant problem of prying Trump and his cronies out of our federal government? You know, so we can be governed by leaders who want to support Americans to thrive and be safe and actually care if we live or die?  

I have been reading a tremendous number of think-pieces with theories and suggestions about how Democrats and progressives can win future elections. I’ve also been reading a lot of pieces about how Democrats and progressives will never win future elections unless they get their shit together. It feels like a lot of the armchair diagnosing going on directly touch on my work specialty, which is communications. You hear a lot of opinions/diagnoses like: Democrats got caught up in overly “woke” messaging. Democrats failed to make a case about how their policies would help the average, hard-working Americans. Republicans have successfully promulgated narratives of fear and isolationism, like blaming our country’s problems on overly lax immigration policies and special privileges given to particular groups, like people of color, women, and transgender individual. Republicans have flooded the airwaves with lies and false narratives. Democrats need to adopt more of an activist, opposition-oriented stance.

All of the above diagnoses – or theories, if you will – ring somewhat true to me. I also think that if I were to dig deeper into any one of these diagnoses, I would find a considerable amount of evidence backing up every single one of them – most of it from the realms of opinion research and journalism – because everyone likes to back up their belief that they know best about What Went Wrong and What We Need To Do About It.

But to be my honest, I’ve been feeling a certain amount of frustration and impatience with these theories, and with many of the prognosticators and opinionators out there. I just don’t get how any of these theories, on their own or collectively, add up to a big, positive, and very necessary sea change in the next few years when it comes to our blighted political and social landscape. Listening and reacting to our big, noisy world these days feels like a lot of people running around and alternately shouting at each other or pretending to be best friends. Part of the problem is that there is no singular or dominating discourse anymore, not like there used to be with our three network news channels and our handful of dominant media outlets. But it adds up to the same challenge: I am simply not grasping how the million and one theories we’re putting out there for Democratic and progressive leaders to be better at messaging and communications will help us actually get past the noise and confusion of today, our constant confusion of not knowing what’s real or permanent or simply the spectacle of the day.

Given what I’ve just said, I realize that it’s ironic to advance my own theory, so let me posit it instead as a wish: One thing that I would really, really like to see, from Democrats especially, is a better understanding of culture and how culture works to shape our opinions and identities and beliefs on any given day. Culture is a funny word – it can be as vague and as meaningless of a term as “equity” or “diversity,” for example, but for the purposes of this piece, I will go with Dictionary.com: the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group. From what I can tell, I don’t think that Democrats – particularly the centrist, older Democrats – are savvy enough about the cultural influences that are shaping the feelings, beliefs, opinions – and yes, votes -of the millions of people in America.

Here is just one example of this: last week – Thursday, to be exact – the social media platforms were absolutely flooded with commentary on the Musk-Trump feud. One of the most viral clips shared on every platform showed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), the Congressional representative from New York, being asked a question about the feud and she stopped, smiled, and said, “Yes, the girls are fighting.”

This phrase – “The girls are fighting” – was used multiple times on social media. And as soon as I saw it go viral, I also saw a bunch of people condemn the phrase as misogynist – because historically, women have been unjustly portrayed as lacking the emotional regulation needed for top leadership positions, when in fact the Trump/Musk feud gave us the spectacle of two diaper-men babies with a spectacular LACK of emotional control.

THEN the condemners were condemned: the phrase, “the girls are fighting,” we were told, is a phrase that was popularized by shows such as Ru-Paul’s Drag Race, a long-running reality show in which drag queens compete with one another to be, well, the most fabulous drag queen. Given how long the show has been on the air (17 seasons), anyone who condemned the use of the phrase, the critics sniped, was likely a liberal white person who was not only out of touch, but also had no business policing the language from people who understood the cultural origin of said phrase.

Watching this go down, I a) once again despaired at the tendency of Democrats and progressives to fight with one another, rather than unite to exploit GAPING weaknesses on the other side; and b) marveled at how the incident revealed the different levels of cultural fluency that exist in our society right now. AOC, by making that comment, showed how culturally fluent she is – amongst a sea of dinosaurs in Congress, she stands out as someone who knows the cultural parlance being deployed by young people, people of color, and groups historically marginalized or oppressed, like transgender people. Many other Democrats and some progressives, however, are the opposite of culturally fluent. And without that cultural fluency, you can imagine that their communications and campaign efforts will continue to be informed by carefully targeted message research and testing  – the kind that I have participated in or led for many years throughout my career – where the opinions and beliefs of select groups of Americans will be studied, at the cost of many, many dollars. Message research projects, sad to say, are expensive. It costs a lot to design a poll or survey or a focus group and hire people to run them, search out the target groups to be studied, and then make sense of the findings.

Listen, I have nothing against message research projects. It is always fascinating to me, when I see the results of testing one phrase or concept over another, and one out-performs the other by a mile. But the point I’m making here is, using traditional message research methods to energize your base and win over all of those low-information, independent voters in battleground states feels horrifically insufficient. I think we’ve got to acquire some more cultural fluency about all of those groups of voters – not just how they react to a particular phrase or concept, or whether they rank the economy over healthcare, but what really makes them tick, laugh, act, or cry on any given day – even on a subconscious level.

Several years ago, right about when horrific acts of racial brutality were starting to capture national attention, I decided that I lacked cultural fluency about different racial/ethnic groups in society. I’ve always been a popular culture addict, heavily into reading, movies, and sci-fi and fantasy books. But I knew very little about, for example, Afrofuturism (which featured heavily in the Marvel movie Black Panther), or which art forms Black creators were more invisible in than others (like country music). So I began following a ton of Black content creators and writers on various social media platforms. Since then, I’ve glimpsed a staggeringly diverse array of cultures, experiences, and lifestyles that existed within Black communities.  Then I began following a bunch of Asian content creators which both gave incredibly poignant echoes of my own lived experiences back to me (like when people talked about how Asian parents show their love by slicing fruit) and also gave me glimpses of the many different cultural habits and lifestyles of people who are grouped under the Asian identifier.

(I don’t just follow people because of their racial/ethnic identities; I also follow people who love books, dogs, cats, horses, fashion, and parrots, as well as people who are vegan – even though I’m not. I am an algorithm-frustrator.)

My point (which I know I’ve made in a long-winded way) is that I gained additional knowledge of the cultures of different groups of people. And having gained that cultural fluency, I feel like this cultural knowledge could somehow be very important in trying to connect with these groups of people. Let’s say you wanted to, for example, reach specific groups on specific issues like: employment, climate change, healthcare, housing affordability, etc – the type of outreach that has actually consumed a huge part of my career. Wouldn’t it make sense to actually get to know them first?

Some final points on this topic of cultural fluency, and why this feels important to me right now:

One, I am BY NO MEANS making a claim that MAGA Republicans are more culturally fluent than the Democrats. In fact, everything about their messaging and general demeanor feels out of touch, antiquated, not to mention horribly vulgar and cruel. But what I do think is that MAGA Republicans, and Donald Trump in particular, have successfully exploited their lack of cultural fluency and currency to their advantage. There are literally millions of Americans who have felt awkward, put off, and alienated by current cultural trends. You know these feelings, right? It starts when you’re being made fun of for using the wrong emoji or not knowing what a particular slang word means, and then somewhere down the road, your awkwardness is manipulated so it morphs into fear and anger directed at something unknown and unfamiliar to you – a person with a different skin color or religion or sexual orientation or gender identity, for example. Trump is telling these people, with his horrible hair and his awkward shuffling dances and clumsy hand gestures – look, you belong with ME. You don’t have to understand what makes these other people tick – in fact, they’re just BAD AND EVIL. (In academic parlance, this is called “othering.” Trump is a master at this.)

Two, there are models of how we might get better at cultural fluency. I have probably written about this before on this platform, but decades and decades ago, I was given a glimpse of how Procter & Gamble conducted their consumer research and boy oh boy, I have never seen any other company go into THAT level of detail. When P&G launched a new product, they didn’t just do market research on their target customer. They constructed a whole goddamn profile of the customer, saying things like, “Joanna is white, 55 years old, and lives in a Midwestern suburb. She doesn’t work outside the house, and she drinks Chardonnay and she plays Bunco every other Friday night with the women in her neighborhood housing development.” To this day, I can’t get over that Bunco detail!

I would like to think that each and every Democratic and progressive candidate is trying to get to know and understand their voting constituents at that level of detail. It would be so depressing (and I suspect this might be the case with many Democrats) to think that each one is simply investing in the standard polling/public opinion research that presents a standard menu of questions – do you care more about the economy than immigration? Why or why not? I want them to actually get to know who the people are – their customs, their habits, what they eat and drink, what media they consume, what they spend their time doing.

Three, what about the progressives like AOC? Well, young leaders like AOC and Jasmine Crockett in Congress have demonstrated far more cultural fluency than the older, centrist, white Democrats. But the more established and older Democrats are simply doing too much to hunker down and prevent younger, more progressive leaders from ascending the ranks of power. It is annoying and infuriating as hell, and I honestly wish that gaining cultural fluency could be used as a bridge-building strategy amongst disparate members of the Democratic and Democratic Socialist party, because I am mad as hell about the lack of alliance-building among anyone who’s not a MAGA Republican or a MAGA Republican apologist.

Listen, I get it – the older one gets, the harder it is to learn new things. I’ve worked through many technology shifts, and the groans about websites and social media were really, really loud each time. Colleagues would ask me straight out: Do I have to learn to tweet? And I would always answer: no, no one’s gonna make you tweet, but it might be a good thing for you to, you know, keep up with the current trends and the zeitgeist however best you can. How are you going to develop future generations and engage a diverse array of audiences and supporters if you don’t know the cultural trends and customs they care about?

I’ll end with an anecdote from one of my earliest jobs, when I worked with a bunch of people who were formidably smart about healthcare policy, and in one of my first meetings, they were shocked that I didn’t know a certain such-and-such who was apparently a renowned researcher and leader in healthcare. (I also didn’t know that “providers” was their term for hospitals and healthcare professionals; “consumers” was the term for patients, and “payers” was the term for insurance companies.) One colleague said incredulously, “You REALLY don’t know who such-and-such is?” And I said, “No, but I DO know who Madonna is, and honestly, I think that counts.” People, I really don’t recommend being that snarky in the workplace, especially if you’re early in your career, and thank goodness I was able to manage those snarkier impulses and go on to actually, you know, have a successful and fulfilling career. But all of these years later, I still think I made a good point, then and now, when it comes to cultural fluency and why it matters.