Now, don't get me wrong—I admire Frank Luntz. He's brilliant, driven, a thorough and meticulous researcher, and his services are highly sought-after for good reason—he works hard, and is very good at what he does. His appearances on television (which I've followed since he was a newly-minted Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, appearing at 3 am on C-SPAN) are always fascinating and informative, and those who heed his counsel are politically successful more often than not. I'm sure he sincerely sees himself as an empowering force in American populist democracy. In effect, however, he's more like Goldman Sachs—the CDO/credit-default-swap packager of politics.
Click on his website, theworddoctors.com, and you are treated to a video barrage of blazing images and pounding drums, boldly announcing that Frank Luntz has given rise to a new voice-- “The People!” We see auditoriums full of voters, reacting in real time (with hand-held “preference dials”) to presidential speeches and debates, giving him precise reactions, in-the-moment, to single words or phrases, or even, as he points out, “facial expressions.” His clients include “Prime Ministers and Presidents, Fortune 100 CEOs and Hollywood creative teams,” and he describes his company as “a powerhouse in the profession of message creation and image management.” He's right. It is. He is. He's THE titan of the industry, no two ways about it. And he's completely honest about it—he doesn't try to hide what he's doing, in fact he spells it out for everyone (most importantly potential clients) to see. He's proud of his work, and has every reason to be. He's the best.
But the very service he sells has been proven, time and time again, to be valuable not to “The People,” but to those whose interests lie in manipulating public perception to their own advantage. When he gathers people together into rooms to hear their opinions, there's no doubt he listens intently and with respect, but what he's really doing is aggregating data—lots of it—and that data isn't used to get the people what they want—it's used to help politicians custom-tailor their words to evoke a Pavlovian response, and get themselves elected. When people twist those little dials, they aren't “making their voices heard.” To the contrary, they're spotting for the enemy. Dr. Luntz tests and re-tests peoples' reactions to specific words and phrases, then sells that data (along with his spot-on advice on how to use it) to powerful interests, giving them precisely the ammunition they need to destroy their competitors, win elections, and stay in office once they're there.
So in effect, Dr. Luntz takes the individual voter (like an individual mortgage) bundles him/her, and others like themselves, into “Opinion-Tranch Securities” (like CDOs), and sells the “investment data” to “sophisticated investors” (major politicians and parties). He then creates “risk management instruments” (like credit-default swaps)--scientifically-engineered words and phrases designed specifically to minimize the risk of loss, and to maximize political gain by targeting the exact emotional responses most likely to result in positive outcomes for his clients (and/or negative outcomes for the opposition). And just like Goldman and their ilk, he, and the politicians who succeed with his help, profit regardless of whether the people win or lose. The people are only voters, after all—Dr. Luntz pays them an honest fee for their opinions (fair enough) but their interests are not what is at stake—they are like a like an index against which the value of a synthetic investment instrument is derived.
If that were the extent of the damage, that would be bad enough—it's hard enough to get politicians to speak honestly about their intentions, and give the voter enough information with which to choose, without the ability to purchase custom-crafted obfuscations, disguised as “positions on the issues,” from Luntz & Company. But the real damage happens after the elections, during actual debates about actual legislation, policy agendas, and specific solutions to real problems America faces.
When the founders of our country gathered in 1787 to hammer out our Constitution, they brought widely varying opinions, convictions, and principles to that debate—a debate which raged on for weeks and months before consensus could be achieved, and that carefully reasoned (though, self-admittedly, imperfect) document could be signed by all the parties involved. They created something great—about that much, no matter how polarized we may be as an electorate, we can agree.
But the difference between then and now was that those disparate, erudite voices came together and debated the issues at hand using their own words. Each convention delegate came to that convention with a different background, different experiences, and a subtly (or even radically) different vocabulary with which to express his point of view. Those subtle differences, phrased and re-phrased over endless hours of intense debate, helped each delegate to evolve and solidify his position, and also to move toward consensus—to compromise intelligently, and recognize those positions which were best softened or even abandoned in order to serve the greater good, “In order to form a more perfect union.”
Today, we have C-SPAN—a wonderful public service which gives every cable-wired American the opportunity to watch, firsthand, the “great debates of our time.” But those debates are now homogenized, tightly-scripted theater, triple-distilled and devoid of creativity or inspired language—or even any real arguments. Instead we hear the same Luntz-tested, safe, trite-and-true phrases, repeated enough times that most of us know the major sound-bite phrases by heart. When congressional leaders step in front of those banks of microphones on television, we already know what they're going to say, word-for-word, before they say it. We can easily identify the party affiliation of elected officials and their surrogates, just by the phrases they reflexively drum into us like a pounding headache. No wonder we're disgusted with political rhetoric—there's no nourishment in it, only empty calories. It's like handing a starving person a stick of chewing gum.
Dr. Luntz's slogan is “It's not what you say—it's what people hear.” And what people hear, by and large, is whatever reinforces their already-galvanized beliefs, unless new and different words can foster new understanding, and highlight areas of agreement. So when the debate, whether in public or within the halls of Congress, consists entirely of micrometer-tested phrases repeated ad infinitum, there is no room for consensus building, no method of building an argument based on open-minded, creative discussion. The entire conversation is reduced to Newspeak. On our plasma-screen HDTVs, capable of faithfully reproducing millions of colors, our politicians give us two—red and blue—and they stubbornly refuse to risk any other hue or tint. They dogmatically “stay on message,” to the point that it's pretty obvious their brains aren't even engaged—like robotic “message-delivery-systems,” they are distinguishable from one another only by their faces and voices—not their minds. And even more unbelievably, they are ridiculed when they slip up and actually say what they're thinking, by a broadcast news industry whose economic interest lies only in the conflict, and not in any constructive solutions to our nation's problems.
Without honest communication, reasoned argument, and thoughtful compromise, there is really only one possible outcome when disagreements persist, and fester to the point of rage: war. And that's what democratic government was, in part, invented to avoid. We need the subtlety, the nuance, the fine gradations—the clumsier-but-more-authentic language that emerges when people say things in their own words instead of mindlessly parroting focus-tested phrases. We need it now, more than ever—but we're moving in the opposite direction, toward greater homogenization, more and more “message” without illumination.
It's not fair to put the blame for all the canned rhetoric we hear from Washington in Dr. Luntz's lap--there are spin doctors in every nook and cranny of that town. But he's made a science of it, devoted years to collecting data on word/phrase preferences, and is probably the most visible and recognized authority on the subject. As such, he's one of the architects-in-chief of the whole "message discipline" movement--and that movement, in an era where there is more air time than ever available for political discourse, is helping to make that discourse more empty and meaningless than it's ever been.
Democracy isn't a joke, and it didn't come into existence easily. Turning it into a fabricated reality-TV show isn't the path we should be taking.
