"One Weird Trick" for effective strategic political communication campaigns

Dear Substack: I coulda told you this would happen last month if you'd just asked.

I’m gonna let you in on a little secret. I’ve been a professor of strategic political communication for over a decade. And there’s really just one rule that you always want to abide by when devising a comms strategy:

Seek to frame your effort as utterly reasonable, and your opponents/the status quo as ridiculous. Once you find that frame, stick to it. Don’t deviate. Pound it relentlessly. That is how you win.

You won’t win every time. If the odds are stacked against you, or your opponents are shameless or situationally invulnerable, effective comms frequently don’t matter. But you maximize your chance of success by finding the zone of reasonability and staying within it.

That (plus timing, pacing, and capacity-building) is really all there is to it.

Of course it follows that not all campaigns lend themselves to the zone of reasonability. You need an opponent who messes up or an unplanned event that provides you with an opportunity you can exploit. And your target needs to be foolish and inflexible enough not to realize that they have taken a position that is vulnerable in its absurdity.

(this also functions as a perfectly good TL;DR version of the Bret Stephens dustup, BTW.)

The reason this works so well is that it allows you to expand the conflict while holding on to the core narrative. It resonates with the audiences you will choose to target. It resonates with journalists and their editors. It aggravates your opponent — who is usually going to be in a position of power, and unaccustomed to facing pushback — leading them to make additional mistakes. If you can stay in the zone of reasonability and keep the issue from falling off the agenda, then the pressure on your target decision-makers will keep increasing.

It’s a neat trick. And it becomes pretty obvious once you know to look for it. I usually assume that all strategic comms professionals are familiar with this trick. But every once in awhile I’m reminded that, haha no some people are just bad at this stuff.

I’m talking about Substack. Substack’s comms professionals are terrible.

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Casey Newton is reporting tonight that Substack has, uh, clarified its position regarding actual-Nazis using the platform. It turns out that actual Naziism is in violation of Substack’s existing content policy after all.

Gee, who ever would have guessed???

Credit where it’s due: this wouldn’t have happened without Jonathan Katz. It wouldn’t have happened without Marisa Kabas. It wouldn’t have happened without several hundred Substack authors making a collective demand, and without dozens of Substack authors decamping for other, less White Nationalist-friendly newsletter platforms. It also wouldn’t have happened without Casey Newton himself taking a principled stand and demanding some answers from Substack management. Good for him.

It also stands out to me that this was a campaign made much easier by Substack being atrocious at comms. The position of Substackers Against Nazis was: “Hey Substack, there are actual Nazis using your platform to monetize and support their violent ideology. It seems like that would violate your terms of service. Doesn’t it violate your terms of service?”

Those are, y’know, utterly reasonable questions to ask. And Substack spent several weeks pointedly not answering them. But that was an untenable stance, because their opponents were a bunch of writers. Of course we were all gonna keep writing about it. That’s what we do anyway!

Substack’s fear was that, once you give in to the demand and kick out the literal Nazis, you’ll then face a constituency that makes additional demands. (Like, “hey, what about Richard Hanania. You know he’s super-racist, right?” and “Chris Rufo is galvanizing hate campaigns that result in torrential death threats. How is that okay?”)

And so Substack’s comms team decided to take the deeply principled stance that “we don’t like Nazis either but the best way to defeat them is to treat their views as legitimate and debate them while we, Substack, take 10% of all revenues.”

Note, by the way, that the outright-Nazi publications aren’t currently big revenue generators for Substack. “We’re going to enforce our Terms-of-Service against sex workers, but not against literal Nazis” is certainly a hill that one could choose to die on, but it is not the hill I would necessarily recommend.

And of course, once Substack has made that statement, what they’ve also done is created another news hook. Because, yeah, the New York Times is gonna cover a statement like this. And all that coverage is going to lead many paying readers to communicate to Substack authors “hey, I enjoy your writing, but I’m not okay with my money going to this platform.” And that, in turn, will piss off even more Substack authors. Because as journalistic institutions have crumbled, Substack’s bold value proposition was supposed to be “we’ll make it easy for you, the writer, to cultivate an audience that can let you make a living at this.” That value proposition crumbles when Substack becomes a net negative for independent writers. (As if writers in the 2020s haven’t had to put up with enough bullshit already.)

All of this was obvious if you took a step back. The demand was too reasonable, Substack’s position to unstable.

The company would have been much better off if it had promised immediately to do a better job managing its mouse-shit-in-cereal-boxes level. I could’ve written this crisis comms strategy for them on a napkin:

“We take the issues that Jonathan Katz raised in his Atlantic article seriously. We are a newsletter service that primarily connects independent writers with engaged readers. Incitement to violence is categorically prohibited on Substack, and we are committed to enforcing our terms of service. A handful of small publications have slipped through the cracks. We have reviewed the publications and are banning them immediately. We are also announcing a commitment to expand our content moderation team so we can better monitor and prevent hate groups from using our service.”

If they said that right away, then they would have denied Substackers against Nazis the zone of reasonability. Because then, when we pointed out that Hanania and Rufo are, in fact, much larger vectors for hate campaigns that inevitably spill over into death threats and violence, Substack could have taken a position like “look, we’re a newsletter service. We take a pretty light touch and, except for Nazism and porn, leave the readers to decide. Hanania and Rufo have been published in the Atlantic and the New York Times. Substack isn’t going to have a stricter content moderation policy than the New York Times Opinion section.”

That would’ve been a much easier position for Substack to defend to begin with, because it sure sounds reasonable.

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Here’s (part of) what I wrote last month:

what is absolutely untenable is for the number of internet Nazis using the platform to get so large that Jonathan Katz can notice it, and write a whole Atlantic piece about it. Once the Atlantic is reaching out to your comms team about the internet-Nazi-mouse-shit, that’s a sign that you are well above the practically acceptable amount of internet Nazis using your site.

Substack can’t stop these assholes from creating new newsletters. But Substack certainly ought to staff their content moderation team well enough that, once those newsletters are monetized, once they’ve been around spreading hate long enough to get some traction, Substack ought to catch and nuke them.

The way to keep Substack effectively internet-Nazi free is to make it clear that, even if the company might not catch them launching a sad angry white nationalist newsletter, the newsletter will surely be vaporized at the first sign of success.

That’s basically where Substack’s policy “clarification” puts them. There will still be conservative extremists and trolls here. But they are going to be less comfortable. They’re going to be worried that their Substack business might get vaporized. That reduces their organizing capacity. It’s far from perfect, and this won’t be the last time Substack has to confront the issue, but it’s a start.

But Substack has now created three more problems for itself:

(1) The company just spent a month dragging its name through the mud. Readers have left, writers have left, and the brand is worse for wear.

(2) Successful zone-of-reasonability comms campaigns help to build organizational capacity. Now there is a whole constituency of Substack writers (and/or recently decamped writers), and we’re going to say things to each other like “holy shit Chris Rufo relies on Substack. Chris Rufo?!? That’s messed up. We oughta make some good trouble.”

(3) Dozens of Substack writers also went out on a limb and organized their own "actual Nazis welcome here” open letter. They organized as well. And they’re going to be upset because they’ll read this as Substack crumbling to the forces of wokeness or something.

All of this trouble could have been avoided if the company wasn’t terrible at comms. It’s like they are ideologically allergic to recognizing when they are about to make matters worse.

It’s really very simple. Notice when you’re in a ridiculous/indefensible position. Especially take notice when people launch a campaign with reasonable-sounding demands that leave you defending a ridiculous position. You will do far less damage to the company by beating a hasty retreat.

Strategic political communication really isn’t all that hard. It all comes down to one weird trick. You just have to develop an eye for these things… or hire a few competent professionals at least.