The Key to Good Strategy is to Act Like a Four Year Old
Why? WHY WHY WHY
Thanks for reading, friends. I remain touched and grateful for the support y’all have shown for this series.
Let’s talk about how we conduct and communicate our politics, taking an example of a phenomenon that both predates the New Disorder and contributes to it. Let’s talk about The Missing Why.
I’m going to critique an example from British politics for this one - specifically, an attack ad that the Labour Party launched against Prime Minister Rishi Sunak - with an important caveat: the larger problem that this ad represents is not unique to the Labour Party. Very far from it! The Missing Why is endemic and epidemic in progressive politics on both sides of the Atlantic. It just happens that Labour put out a really good illustration of it recently.
Here’s the ad:
It was the first in a run of several ads that all follow this model and graphic design - attack text in the foreground, same picture of Sunak in the background - going after the PM on crime.
I’m not asking you to feel any particular way about attack ads, except to note that a challenger (party or candidate) is obliged to make a case against the incumbent. You can run a largely positive, upbeat campaign against an incumbent, but at some point you must demonstrate why that person deserves to lose their job.
Nor am I asking you to feel any particular way about this attack in particular, the context for which is pretty straightforward. The Conservative Party has been in power for thirteen years and are enormously unpopular for, among other things, cutting state services down to and indeed into the bone. They’ve also inflicted on the British public a cartoonishly absurd sequence of leaders, amongst whom it would be impossible to say who was the least suited to the job of Prime Minister.
The Tories are in a very bad way indeed. Good, fuck em.
The Tories are in a very bad way indeed, with no one but themselves to blame. For what it’s worth, I see the Conservative Party as willing agents of the New Disorder because the central imperative of their party is breaking the expectation that a government elected by the people is there to serve the people in any meaningful way; indeed, there’s a good case to be made that Margaret Thatcher hard-launched the New Disorder with her declaration that “there’s no such thing as society.” It won’t surprise you to learn that my sophisticated strategic analysis of their likely-catastrophic coming defeat is “good, fuck em.”
Speaking of that defeat: it’s pretty clearly happening. The United Kingdom had its local elections a few weeks ago, and those tend to serve as a solid indicator of which way the electorate is leaning. The Conservatives were utterly destroyed. They are going to lose a pile of Parliamentary seats at the next general election.
But! But but but, because they won a landslide victory in 2019, which left them with an absolutely commanding majority in Parliament, they could still end up with a solid parliamentary block after the next general election, which by law must take place by early 2025 but more likely will occur in 2024. They will not go down without a fight.
The Labour Party has a large contingent of members who want to win on policy and ideas alone, an admirable ambition with limited precedent.
One of their chosen battlefields for that fight will likely be the issue of crime, on which they have historically enjoyed a political advantage over Labour in a dynamic similar, though not identical, to the Republican/Democrat split on the issue in the US. It’s not clear if Labour can beat them on the issue, but that’s not necessary. All the Labour Party has to do is not completely cede crime to the Tories, and they’re free to clobber the Conservatives with pretty much everything else this election will be about.
Hence this ad campaign. It’s a smart fight to pick, even if you don’t like attack ads.
And a lot of people don’t! The initial ad, the one above, was greeted with howls of dismay on the right and left. British politics generally speaking hasn’t featured this kind of direct, personalized attack, and the Labour Party has a large contingent of high-minded members whose fervent desire is to knock off the incumbent on the strength of policy and ideas alone, an admirable ambition with limited precedent. So various Conservative public figures feigned fits of the vapors (they’ve done and said worse) over the ad, while a few Labour electeds struggled to figure out how to respond to media inquiries about it.
NB: In a sense, the leadership of the Labour Party got an added bonus with that. There’s a good chance that Labour will form a majority government after the next election, and Leader of the Opposition Sir Keir Starmer will want to think about whom amongst his MPs is capable of handling serious, frontline, public-facing portfolios. The response to this ad is a good test. A Labour MP asked about the attack ad has three choices:
Repudiate it. Say the ad was a mistake and that Labour should never have put it out. That statement becomes its own story, sets up a conflict with the Leader, and furthers the argument that Labour isn’t even confident in its own attacks. I would not advise anyone to do this. But repudiation is, at least, a clear position and an appeal to a notionally-higher standard of politics.
Own it. Starmer made it clear that this was the line, and British politics, even more than American, is a game of Follow the Leader. The soundbite writes itself - “If Sunak doesn’t want to be attacked on crime, he should stop doing a bad job keeping people safe.” This is the loyal option, and politically also the best; in the New Disorder, you’re not going to win government through performative politeness.
Try to have it both ways. Don’t fully embrace the attack, but don’t repudiate it either. Say you don’t endorse it but do have worries about how the Tories have handled crime - that sort of thing. This is the only response that should be absolutely disqualifying for serious roles in a future Starmer government, because it suggests a total absence of political instincts, a refusal to make a decision and commit to it, and a willingness (even desire!) to conduct politics out of a defensive crouch. In short, this response is cowardice. A leader, especially one with a thin majority, cannot rely on such people and should not give them the opportunity to disappoint.
So the way Labour MPs responded to the attack ad is a useful sorting exercise, beyond its political merits. Speaking of which!
The attack ad came out a few weeks before the local elections, and Labour did exceptionally well. I don’t believe those two things are exactly correlated, but it suggests that the general voting public either didn’t see the ad or weren’t especially horrified by it.
It isn’t a perfect piece of work, of course. The picture of Sunak is poorly chosen and discordant; why make him look appealing? The reference to the Labour Party is too prominent; it disqualifies the message by inviting voters to think “of course they’d say that.” Labour legally has to identify itself as having paid for and presented the ad, but that can be done such that it’s not immediately obvious, as it is here. But those are technical problems, and this ad campaign accomplishes the limited but useful goal of muddying the waters on who is tough on crime and who isn’t.
The real weakness, the one that means this ad campaign misses a powerful opportunity to persuade voters, is The Missing Why. In the terms of the ad: why doesn’t Rishi Sunak think adults who commit this particularly monstrous crime should go to prison?
The Tory Party either disdains normal people or doesn’t think about them at all. It’s not clear to me which is worse.
As I have written elsewhere, humans crave context for information. It’s important for us to know why things happen, why people do what they do. If we don’t know, more than often not we will intuit the answer for ourselves; it’s the only way our world makes sense. This is especially true if we are confronted with a confusing piece of information, such as the bald statement that a reigning Prime Minister does not think sexual offenses against children are worthy of a prison sentence.
It’s a bold proposition, and a hard one to believe. Hell, I’ve been largely positive about this attack ad and even I don’t believe its central claim. What the makers of this ad needed to ask themselves is “what are we really trying to say about Rishi Sunak here?” Because I doubt they believe, or expect anyone else to believe, that the Prime Minister said one morning over breakfast, “you know who just doesn’t deserve to go to prison…”
If I had to guess (and unfortunately I do), I’d say the message Labour was going for here is something along the lines of “Rishi Sunak does not care if you and your family are safe from crime because he does not care about you or your family.”
Articulated clearly, this puts the sex offender claim, and everything else in the attack campaign, in context. It also, not for nothing, provides a strategic communications framework that encompasses virtually every other policy-oriented attack Labour might want to make, and also goes straight at the biggest weakness the Tory Party has ever had, which is that it either disdains normal people or doesn’t think about them at all. It’s not clear to me which is worse.
There’s more to it than that, of course; to sustain a claim like that, Labour would need to have a full understanding, in its own words, of why Sunak doesn’t care about normal people, how else that manifests, and so forth. But if it’s good to force the Tories into an argument defending themselves on crime, it’s even better to bait them into a running firefight about whether they give a tinker’s damn about ordinary voters at all. A candidate that must spend their time repeatedly reassuring voters already souring on them that “no, no, we really do know you exist, I promise!” is a candidate heading for absolute oblivion.
The Missing Why bedevils progressive politics, where facts, data, and policy are fetishized to a shocking degree. There’ll be more on that, and its implications, later in this series, but by way of not committing The Missing Why myself, I’ll offer a short possible explanation: the Reagan Political Consensus so thoroughly cast liberals as dumb and incompetent that demonstrating intelligence and capability evolved as a tribal survival mechanism, one that endures beyond its need.
So what are progressives to do? A simple answer and also a hard one: act like four year olds. Which is to say: when you’re working out your message, ask, constantly and to the irritation of everyone nearby including yourself, why? Why why why. Ask it in ways that are absurd and ways that are penetrating: “why is it bad if climate change gets worse?” “why is it bad if the government leaves health care to the private sector entirely?” “why does this conservative leader believe this objectively insane or offensive thing?” why why why.
Good strategy is often born out of chasing down The Missing Way, because the pursuit of Why leads to deep, fundamental messages and truths. In its absence, any messaging, however technically strong, is just tactics without strategy, which Sun Tzu admonishes us is just the noise before defeat.