A reporter from a mid-tier political outlet calls Chuck Schumer’s office and asks for a comment on what Charlie Kirk said on his show yesterday about Democrats and the border. The comment gets folded into a story that runs the next morning under the headline Schumer responds to conservative critique. The story is aggregated within an hour by NBC, by Politico, by the Times, and by the Post, all of which now have to run their own version because the story is now in the news cycle and in the news cycle means every other outlet has to catch up. By evening drive time, Kirk’s framing of the border is the frame every Democratic senator is being asked about, and the actual thing Democrats wanted to talk about that day — the Medicaid work-requirement rollout, the Epstein files, the crypto extraction on Trump’s disclosure, whatever — is nowhere. The frame won because the frame got answered. The frame got answered because Schumer’s office picked up the phone.
Multiply this by three hundred and sixty-five and you have a decade of American political media. The right does not have better arguments. The right has discipline about not answering the left’s questions, and the left has no discipline whatsoever about not answering the right’s. The asymmetry is the entire story of why we are where we are.
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There is a working manual for how a serious opposition operates in a hostile media environment. The manual is not secret. The right has been running from it for thirty years. Every Democratic operative in Washington knows the manual exists. Almost none of them will run it, because running it would require them to break a set of professional norms whose function is to keep the credentialed class comfortable inside the transmission belt that is delivering the country to authoritarianism. So the manual sits on the shelf and Chuck Schumer’s press secretary picks up the phone.
Here is the manual, in five rules.
One. Repetition. The single most important finding in a century of political communication research is that people believe what is familiar, and familiarity is produced by repetition — the same message across many mouths, at high frequency, for long duration. The right learned this from advertising and from the pulpit. Trump signs the size of buildings on rural highways in Pennsylvania are a signal-processing operation, not an argument, and they work. The credentialed left thinks repetition is intellectually dishonest because a smart person should be persuaded by an argument the first time they hear it. This is a category error about how brains process political information. Brains do not process it as arguments. Brains process it as social signals about what one’s tribe believes, and repetition is the mechanism by which the brain calibrates what one’s tribe believes. Whatever you want people to know, you have to say every day for years. Whatever you say once will be drowned by everything the other side is saying every day for years. The left keeps trying to win a signal-processing question with moral arguments and losing.
Two. Never apologize. When you apologize, three things happen in the audience brain. The audience updates in the direction that the accusation was true, because innocent people don’t usually apologize. The audience is reminded of the accusation, which extends its shelf life. The audience associates you with weakness, because the aesthetic of apology is submission, and submission is legible in the mammalian brain as low status. The correct response to an accusation is a counter-accusation on a larger charge at higher volume, which puts the accuser in the defensive position and forces them to defend against your charge instead of extending theirs. Trump has run this reflex for a decade. His entire political career is proof of concept for the finding that the correct response to you did a bad thing is you did a worse thing, and by the way here is a nickname for you. The credentialed left, when accused, apologizes, clarifies, contextualizes, and provides receipts, all of which is legible to the audience as the accusation must have some merit or they would not be doing this work.
Three. Never justify. Justification is a subtype of apology. When you justify a position you concede the frame that the position needed to be justified, which concedes that the position was on defense, which concedes the initiative. The rule is state, do not defend. If they say your policy would raise taxes on the middle class, the wrong answer is a breakdown of who is affected. The right answer is these are the same people who wrote the tax code so a billionaire pays a lower rate than a nurse, and they are lying to you about middle-class taxes because they need you angry at nurses instead of angry at billionaires. The wrong answer engages the accusation. The right answer puts the accuser on the ground the accusation was meant to defend. The professional-managerial class treats good-faith engagement with substance as a moral duty even when the criticism is being made in bad faith by an interlocutor who does not believe what they are saying and is only saying it to occupy your attention while their side commits a substantive crime somewhere else.
Four. Always be the one pointing the finger. The prosecutor role and the defendant role are structurally asymmetric in the audience brain. The prosecutor is presumed to have information and standing. The defendant is presumed to have something to hide. You want to force the other side to spend their airtime in the defendant chair. If they force you into that chair, you become the prosecutor of them immediately, without ever answering the charge that was made against you. Trump does this reflexively. He is under indictment on many counts and his mode of response is to charge the prosecutors with worse crimes, which turns every court appearance into a media referendum on the DOJ instead of a referendum on him. It works. It continues to work. The left has to develop the same reflex.
Five. If they point at you, point right back. The escalation-dominance rule. If you respond with a smaller counter-attack, you lose. Equal, you draw, which favors the aggressor. Larger, you win, and you also deter the next attack, because the aggressor learns that attacking you has a cost greater than the value of the attack. The right runs this rule constantly. Every Democratic criticism gets three simultaneous Republican counter-attacks within twenty-four hours: personal-character, policy-record, and a whataboutism that pulls a Democratic scandal back into the news cycle. Future Democrats considering criticism have to weigh the retaliation cost. The result: Republican operatives can say anything about Democrats and Democratic operatives cannot say anything comparable about Republicans without becoming a media story about Democratic incivility. The asymmetry is manufactured. Forty years of the left accepting disproportionate response ratios in the media referee’s grading.
The tactical addendum, because it is where the operation actually lives.
You do not respond to the daily topic set by right-wing influencers. You pretend they do not exist. When a journalist calls asking for a response to what Ben Shapiro said this morning, the correct answer is is that your question, or is it Ben Shapiro’s question that you are asking me on his behalf? do you work for the Daily Wire? And then you do not answer, and you do not take a follow-up, and the same journalist does not get a call back for a month. And the journalist’s editor hears about it. And the bureau chief hears about it. And the next reporter from that outlet who calls gets warned that if they bring the same frame, they get the same treatment.
Because the cost is not on Shapiro. Shapiro will keep producing bait objects regardless. The cost is on the transmission belt — the reporters at the Times and CNN and NPR who take the bait object, package it as what’s in the news today, and bring it to Democratic politicians for a response. The transmission belt is composed of specific people who have made specific professional choices about which side’s frame to launder into the daily news cycle. Those choices have consequences. It is the job of the person being interviewed to make the transmission belt feel them.
The Republican side has been running this operation against left-of-center reporters for a decade. When a CNN reporter references a New York Times story to a Republican politician, the politician does not answer. The politician attacks the Times and the reporter for laundering it. The reporter is put on defense. The reporter learns that referencing the Times to a Republican produces attack, not answer, and the reporter’s job is answers. Over time the reporter stops referencing the Times. Republicans have changed the reporter’s question set without ever touching the Times‘s editorial policy. It works. It continues to work.
The equivalent left operation has never been built because the credentialed class in the party cannot bring itself to punish the transmission belt. Most of them came out of it. They went to the same schools as its editors, married its reporters, live in the same neighborhoods as its bureau chiefs. Confronting the transmission belt would mean confronting themselves. So every day the Democratic message of the day is whatever the right-wing influencer produced this morning, plus a Democratic response.
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A worked example, because the pattern is easier to see in a specific artifact.
One of the ambient stories conservatives tell themselves about the last decade of norm collapse is that Mitch McConnell’s escalations trace back to Harry Reid. Reid removed the filibuster for lower-court judicial appointments in 2013. McConnell, therefore, was forced to invent the McConnell Rule holding Scalia’s seat open in 2016, and then forced to break his own rule when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died six weeks before the 2020 election, and then forced to run an extraction operation on the federal judiciary that has ended, so far, in Roe overturned, the Chevron doctrine dead, an immunized presidency, and a Supreme Court whose ethics is a punchline. The story requires that the causal arrow point from Reid to McConnell. Democrats broke the norm first, McConnell only responded, and if Democrats hadn’t started it none of this would have happened. This story is what a conservative uncle sends at Thanksgiving. It is also what David Brooks writes. It is also what Jake Tapper implicitly concedes when he opens a segment with both sides have escalated procedural norms in the Senate over the last decade.
The story is a lie. Not a shading of the record. A lie about the sequence of events. The Federalist Society was founded in 1982 with the explicit goal of capturing the federal judiciary for movement conservatism. The Bork nomination in 1987 was the coming-out party for a judicial project that had already been assembling itself for five years. McConnell blockaded Clinton’s judicial nominees through the second term. McConnell blockaded Obama’s judicial nominees at a rate that produced the highest vacancy backlog in the history of the federal bench by 2013 — which is what forced Reid to change the rule, because the alternative was letting McConnell stall the third branch of government to death. Reid’s 2013 change was a defensive move at the end of a decade of Republican escalation, not the opening move in some hypothetical Democratic overreach. And McConnell was going to hold Scalia’s seat open in 2016 regardless of what Reid did in 2013. He would have found a rationalization. The judicial project is thirty years old. It does not need Reid to happen. It was happening.
The correct response, when the McConnell-Reid frame appears in an interview, is not to explain the actual timeline. Explaining the timeline concedes the frame. The correct response is the person who told you that story is running a laundering operation for a forty-year Federalist Society project to end reproductive rights, gut the administrative state, and immunize a Republican president from prosecution — and you are helping them do it by asking me this question. Do you want to ask me about the Federalist Society’s actual thirty-year plan, or do you want to keep laundering their alibi for having executed it? Then you stop talking. And you do not answer follow-ups. And the reporter learns, over time, that the McConnell-Reid frame is a career-cost frame with Democratic sources.
The general rule visible in the specific case: whenever the right offers a you started it origin story, the origin story exists to hide what they are actually doing right now. The origin story is a rhetorical device for converting an ongoing crime into a legitimate grievance about the past, not a history. The correct move is never to litigate the origin story. The correct move is to make the person delivering the origin story pay a professional cost for being the delivery vehicle.
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The rule, phrased as a rule: these right-wing motherfuckers are not acting in good faith, and you can and should return the favor.
Returning the favor is not becoming them. It is imposing costs. When they lie, you do not correct them. You make them pay for lying. You make the liar the story instead of the lie. You make the liar’s next donor uncomfortable to fund them. You make the liar’s next employer uncomfortable to employ them. You make the liar’s next platform uncomfortable to platform them. You make the liar’s next social invitation uncomfortable to extend. You treat the act of lying as a durable fact about the liar’s character, and you make sure the fact is known wherever the liar goes.
The right responds to costs. Not to appeals, not to shame, not to the discovery of new evidence. Costs — electoral, financial, reputational, legal, cultural. Impose enough cost on a specific bad-faith actor and the actor stops. Impose no cost and the bad faith becomes a permanent feature of the environment. That is the environment we live in. It is the environment because the left refused, for thirty years, to impose the costs. Every uncosted act of bad faith was a lesson to the actor and to every future actor watching. The lessons compounded. We now have a right-wing movement in which bad faith is the default because bad faith has been costless for a generation.
The morally serious position is not do not impose costs. The morally serious position is impose costs on people attempting to end democratic governance, because failing to impose those costs will result in democratic governance ending. The alternative is losing the country to a movement that will not extend to you the courtesy you are extending to them. You have already priced in the costs of losing. You have already lived through ten years of the costs of losing. There is no moral premium in preferring to keep losing.
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Editor’s note: It is not known if Senator Mitch McConnell is alive at the time of publishing.
Go Deeper into the Circus
The Post-Ideological Pose
Earlier this year, in a conversation with the Wall Street Journal‘s editor-in-chief Emma Tucker at Davos, Dario Amodei said this:
Have a Good Life
A friend sent me a message on Signal last night and blocked me. I am writing about it not because my case is unusual but because it is not — because people have been losing friends and family over the past ten years in ways that follow this pattern almost exactly, and because I am one more person sitting with a phone that no longer has a name attached t…
I really like this article. Straight to the heart.
This is how one becomes "a fighter" for liberal democracy.