Learning, trying, and doing

One of the things I try to guard against, as I gather more experience and expertise with age, is coming off as a person who believes they’re always right. I have developed an acute allergy to people who are 100% convinced that they know that they’re 100% correct on any particular subject and who believe that if they simply raise their voice or talk over the audience they’re trying to convince, they will somehow prevail. In my experience, shouting at or ignoring someone else’s viewpoint is exactly what NOT to do when it comes to persuading someone to at least consider an alternative viewpoint.

Unfortunately, we’re in a very shout-y, anger-filled, fearful world these days. What do you do when your country’s leaders are role-modeling ignorance and hate and selfishness and seem to be amazingly deaf and blind to the corruption and crimes of those in the (now partially demolished) White House? I get why people feel reduced to shouting and arguing, believe me, but I still don’t think it’s going to be all that helpful.

One of my remedies, during these turbulent and often dispiriting times we’re living in, is to try and educate myself on things I know little about, which is a LOT of things. In recent months, for example, I’ve been spending a lot of time listening to people much smarter than me explain how the different generations (Z and Alpha) respond to political and social engagement. I have gone deep into explanations of red-pilling and black-pilling and nihilism and anarchy. I’ve also watched a tremendous number of young leaders talk knowledgeably about issues related to their present and future – gun violence, affordable housing, employment, and yes, Palestine and the Gaza War.

While I encountered a great deal of hatred and disaffection in my learning – why do people focus their fears on marginalized groups they know nothing of? – I also learned many good things about younger generations. I remember the very first market research read-out I encountered about Gen Z, which I think was somewhere during the 2010s and to this day, the one statistic that sticks in my mind is how they are comfortable toggling back and forth between multiple screens, whereas my generation (X) can really only handle one. (Boy, is that the truth, I think my peak multitasking moment is being able to watch a movie I’ve seen before on television while folding laundry.) I have witnessed this characteristic with my kids, who can be Facetiming me and then suddenly look hyper-focused as they respond to a work request that came out of nowhere, who think nothing of scheduling a haircut in between two work calls while responding to emails and texts throughout. But in the messy aftermath of the Kirk murder, I read some good pieces about how the younger generations don’t necessarily identify with clear-cut ideologies or even political identities or definitions. There was a great piece I already shared on other platforms from The Cut, called How to Talk Kids Through Their Brain-Rotting Hot Takes and one of the central points was that kids these days seem to have a grasp on the concept that two things can be true at the same time. You can, for example, be horrified at the brutal kidnapping and murder of innocent young people from Israel AND you can also be horrified at the bombing of civilians in Gaza. Similarly, you can find the idea of terminating a pregnancy to be morally repugnant, but you can also recognize that women deserve reproductive autonomy, full stop, period. (I am not going to go into medically necessary abortions because I don’t feel I should have to.)

But returning to my learn-versus-lecture orientation these days, I feel compelled to say that one of the things that is making current events particularly hard to bear is not just how insanely incompetent and corrupt Trump and his henchpeople are to me and millions of others, but also how so many Democrats have failed to grasp the moment to respond. I am not talking about legislative or legal actions, because yes, I am well aware that they are not the majority in any of the three branches, including the so-called Supreme Court, may Alito and Thomas and the others go on a ritzy hunting trip and be lost in the woods forever. No, I am talking about how they have failed to grasp the most fundamental communications lessons offered by those who have broken through the noise – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez being a notable, longer-tenured example, but especially and most especially the lessons from the campaign of Zohran Mamdani.

I fundamentally believe that one does not need to be a communications professional to understand why Mamdani’s campaign for the Mayor of New York has been so successful. He talks about things that people care about – rent, transportation, living conditions – and he himself demonstrates relatability on those fronts. But people from all over the world, not just New York City, are feeling inspired by Mamdani, most especially those younger generations who do not subscribe to an particular ideology or identity, at least not yet. What they care about are real things in their real lives. Go figure.

New York Magazine (the parent co of the Cut, I find that they are often the only major media outlets producing open-eyed journalism these days) just published an article by Frank Rich on how the New York liberal elite, including the New York Times, has completely failed to read the room when it comes to Mamdani – that there is no credible evidence that he will unleash another 9/11 on this world, that he supports terrorist organizations, etc.  Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, who shared his not-trifling concerns about Mamdani’s associations with certain Jewish activist groups, also reached the same conclusions. Moreover, Mamdani’s main opponent, Andrew Cuomo, is a parade of horribles all by himself. He is a Trump bedfellow, he has been creditably accused of sexual assault by over a dozen women, and what’s more, he is doing everything possible to silence and harass those women from pursuing any further visibility or action.  

I am with Rich, and Marshall, and countless other New Yorkers, on this one. But I am even more staggered by how establishment Democrats are missing the very central and critical communications lesson from Mamdani’s campaign, which is so simple, I feel like Captain Ridiculously Obvious for even pointing out: Talk about real things that matter to people. Aim for relatability. Don’t assault women. (Sorry, that last lesson was just for Cuomo.)

Now. There is a fair amount of criticism that Mamdani’s proposals are absurdly unrealistic and impractical, like other people have proposed things like free buses and gotten approximately nowhere. So there is a less obvious communications lesson to be learned from Mamdani’s campaign, a lesson that I myself failed to grasp about Bernie Sanders until I had a number of smart young people patiently explain it to me. I don’t like Senator Sanders – never have, never will. I have heard that he is an asshole to deal with in person, and it was mind-boggling to me that so many young people were glomming onto the world’s crankiest, most bloviating old man as their mascot. But his appeal was simple for those younger generations: his central message is, and always has been, that he will not bow down before corrupt billionaires and even though I think his senatorial accomplishments are thin at best, he has actually honored that promise. It didn’t matter to young people that he didn’t actually notch any big Ws against corrupt billionaires, it matters that he was willing to try.

Similarly, it either doesn’t matter to young people, or they haven’t grasped the impracticalities of it yet, that Mamdani may not be able to deliver on free buses and lower rents. The important thing that he is signaling to his now-fervent supporters is that he is willing to try.  

That’s it – the communications lesson from Mamdani that the Democrats are unwilling to grasp. They keep on using phrases like, “Trump is destroying our democracy,” which are true, but it has the rhetorical impact of pointing to a building on fire and saying, “Oh, look at that.”  In fact, it feels to me that people only get confused by that interpretation: Who owns this house? Is this a neighbor’s house that I should care about because I’m a good person? Who is supposed to be fighting this fire? Who caused the fire?”

The Democrats, in their messaging, must must must signal that they are willing to try to do good things – the voters won’t even be that persnickety about the details, as long as they believe, like they do Sanders and AOC and now Mamdani, that their representatives care about what matters to them. But the large majority of Democrats are not doing that – or if they are, it’s not reaching me, and believe me, I’m very online, with respect to both mainstream and alternative media outlets. I saw one suggestion from a TikToker that Democrats should be doing everything possible to address the SNAP benefits that millions of Americans are losing because of the ongoing Republican-engineered shutdown, not simply by screaming about this but also by finding ways to feed food-insecure families. I can think of literally hundreds of ways Democrats could partner with public and private donors to turbo-charge food banks and co-ops and make sure that people don’t go hungry. I simply don’t understand how Chef José Andrés can figure out how to feed families in disaster-stricken areas and we as a country can’t figure out how to get more food and groceries to Americans – is it because of logistics?

A very long time ago, I was on the board of the Communications Network, and we sponsored a research study with foundation leaders on whether they grasped the importance of communications (primarily, strategic communications investments to amplify the importance of their impact), and the answer was overwhelmingly yes, yes, they got it. But that immediately begged the question: why, then, were more foundations not doing communications?

The study did not focus on that question, but we surfaced some possible hypotheses having to do with barriers at different levels – sector, organizational, and individual. So here is a particularly sticky question to think about, when it comes to Democrats not grasping the fundamental communications lesson from candidates who are doing it well: what is behind their unwillingness or reluctance or inability to learn? Are the barriers to effective communications more numerous and complicated than we collectively realize, when it comes to Democratic leaders talking about real things that matter to real people?

Here is where I would like to return to advocating for the thing that I opened this piece with: let’s try to figure out what’s holding us back from being more effective on communications, not just to beat back the horrible crimes and corruption of the Trump Administration, but also to paint a picture of what lies beyond. But unfortunately, people, I think we’re facing a crisis here. I don’t think we can sit around on our collective a**es and learn right now, I think we need thousands of more Mamdanis – I say this from a campaigning and communications perspective, only, I’m not trying to start a fight here – who understand how to communicate well across a diverse spectrum of audiences right now.