Political Messaging is Ambient Now

it's time to stop pretending that political parties control the narrative

There are few aspects of contemporary political behavior that I find more tiresome than the too-online urbanite ritual of performative disdain towards fear of crime and violence. This is particularly annoying when it’s used to dismiss the problems of severely mentally ill homeless people, for obvious reasons given my interests, but it’s deeply aggravating no matter what kind of people are committing whatever kinds of crimes. You know what I’m talking about; it’s a Twitter mainstay, even now, transplants to a city who react to any claims about crime problems in that city or in general by declaring that they themselves are not at all concerned about crime, lol crime, lololol.

I find this stupid and ugly on multiple dimensions. For one thing, these people are usually progressives who are ostensibly concerned with the lived experience of poor people and people of color in their communities, and yet poor people and people of color are significantly more likely to express concern about crime as a core political issue. (Which makes sense, given that people who have less property are more threatened by the possibility of losing it and people who are more likely to be the victims of violence are more concerned about suffering it.) For another, this blasé attitude is transparently false, an affectation - I don’t believe that the overeducated liberals who claim to be so unconcerned about crime actually are. These are the kind of people who will cry if someone gets their latte order wrong. I promise they get scared when they walk through bad neighborhoods at night, even though they will insist to you that there is no such thing as a bad neighborhood, as though there are no geographical dimensions to crime.

Many people who live in big cities spend all their time trying to perform the role of I Live In a Big City rather than just living in one, and this is a core part of such performance. I have some sympathy, given that we live in the age of unchosen performativity, but that sympathy has a way of evaporating when the behavior in question is such a self-impressed, peacocking routine, designed to impress one’s social group peers. People who lived through the bad old days love to romanticize the past but never its crime problems. My father lived in New York in the very hairy days of the 1970s, supporting himself in the theater, taking advantage of the city’s much-mourned period of cheap rent and artistic flourishing. He talked about that time lovingly, but as someone who was constantly mugged and almost died in a stabbing he never, ever romanticized the violence. Only people who live among the incredible decline in urban crime could take part in that sort of thing.

There was a time during the brief Covid-related crime surge where the crime that was held up for mocking dismissal was carjacking. Yes, a crime where a group of people come up to you, stick a gun in your face, and steal what may very well be the single most valuable piece of property you own - that became an event to hold up as not a big deal, as something to roll your eyes at as justification for police action of any kind. I’m not joking, here. There was a period when a certain voluble, loud section of Twitter was literally saying that surviving a carjacking is just the price you play for living in a cool place. This is all very, very dumb, and obviously terrible political messaging. (I assure you that you don’t want your political party to be associated with the notion that carjacking is no big deal.) But being stupid was, in the perverse way of in-group dynamics, the whole point; that kind of talk is designed to be alienating, meant to be alienating. The whole point is to demonstrate that you are unlike those normies whose provincial concerns you disdain. If you aren’t alienating people you aren’t distinguishing yourself in the peer group you aspire to impress.

You might be immediately moved to say that it isn’t political messaging at all, and that it’s pointless to complain about this sort of thing. “It’s just Twitter” has been an all-eating, all-excusing cliché for a very long time now. Sure, some of those TikToks are batty, but who cares? They’re just randoms. Etc. But more and more I think that this is simply wrong, that it’s cope, as the kids say. I think that kind of breezy dismissal of the importance of crowd messaging is wishing rather than describing. I think that politics is ambient now. Prominent voices in government and media are ultimately less important than the steady drip of daily observations of how “the other side” comports itself on social media and video platforms. And I think that this more or less breaks politics. It makes message discipline impossible and inevitable leaves everyone’s political strategy vulnerable to the dumbest, most audience-captured and enemy-captured people in our coalition, to say nothing of “false flag” problems. I have no idea how to fix this condition.