The American Message
Foundation
How the Extreme Right Captured the Message-sphere
Fifty years ago, the far right created and transformed well-funded organizations, from the Heritage Foundation to the American Enterprise and Cato Institutes. Their goals have been to move the political center far to the right; to get government to do the bidding of the few and of big
corporations and call that “smaller” government; and to transfer wealth to the rich from the rest of us with trillions in tax breaks for the rich while decrying the debts and deficits they create whenever they are in power.
What The Extreme Right Got Extremely Right
They recognized that achieving long-term goals requires long-term strategy, not just pouring billions into an election and then folding up their tents until the next one. As importantly, right-wing donors and their leading foundations recognized years ago how much of the legislation that affects ordinary people’s lives happens at the state level - from blocking common-sense gun laws to legislating draconian abortion bans. And they realized decades before we did the importance of elected state appellate courts.
For half a century, their actions have closely reflected their goals. They regularly develop and disseminate carefully crafted, market-tested messages, with a general indifference to their truth or falsehood. They pounce on our contradictions, poorly-chosen language, or delays in rejecting language that does not get a point across well and is an obvious target for attack and stoking racial division (e.g., “defund the police”). Most importantly, they ensure that no one on the right running for office, from city council to President, is without messaging on any major issue – or any issue they can elevate to the top of the public’s agenda by inflaming voters about something that has nothing to do with their lives (e.g., trans swimmers).
They “scout” for talent from the College Republicans, the Federalist Society, and state and local governments and provide extensive message and media training to promising politicians, judges, and commentators they prepare for higher office or the media. (Both Heritage and American Enterprise have training programs.) They develop template bills and ballot propositions for use across the country. And they keep their eyes out for points of entry at lower and lower levels of government to politicize previously non-partisan roles (e.g., turning school board races and meetings into battlegrounds).
Unlike the policy-focused think tanks on the left, their think tanks are also feel tanks and fuel tanks, designed to engage and energize the public. We know how to govern well because we have the public interest in mind and an institutional infrastructure for analyzing problems and generating policy. But we lack any infrastructure for developing, testing, and disseminating messages - or for developing leaders through message and media training.
With an infrastructure that does what our doesn’t, they have succeeded.
Beyond their wildest dreams.
How the Far Right Found its Heritage
Ironically, the impetus for action on the right came from a humiliating defeat. After running a Presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, who was so far outside the mainstream that he lost in a landslide to Lyndon Johnson in 1964, they vowed that would never happen again. For the next 15 years, they developed the institutional
infrastructure to create a conservative ideology and the messages to make it compelling to ordinary Americans. And they groomed a charismatic leader who could pull the political center far to the right: Ronald Reagan.
With Reagan at the helm and conservatives all on the same page, singing from the same hymnal, the right ended the 50-year dominance of the New Deal and replaced it for 30 years with the Reagan Revolution. Then came Newt Gingrich and the "politics of personal destruction," the Tea Party, and "Make American Great Again" (a campaign slogan plagiarized from Reagan), Their attack on democratic values and institutions would render the party they now control unrecognizable Reagan, who saw the Soviet empire as the "evil empire," not as a model for the U.S. to emulate.
Then came Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for Trump 2.0.
For 50 years, we have known about Heritage and the ideological and marketing infrastructure of the far right. And we have done nothing. We have often inadvertently donated to their cause, using words they developed and tested as if they were neutral. Illegal aliens. Obamacare. Right-to-work states. Too often, we have helped solidify the far-right’s brand.
Year after year, instead of asking what the right has that we lack, we gear up for the next electoral battle, while they capture more and more territory and mine the ballot boxes behind them. Their goal is to remain in power with a permanent minority. Between elections, we pack up and go home, and anything we learned about messaging an issue – such as whether what we tried was effective or not – is gone. We have no institutionalized memory or think tank to figure out how to talk with the public because we have never invested in one. In contrast, the work of Heritage, American Enterprise, and Cato continues.
We have an advantage over the right: We can tell the truth. But throwing facts and figures at a strong but wrong emotional appeal is an ineffective strategy. It does not show the public that you understand and care about people like them. It does not convey that you share their values. It does not show that you have the strength to lead and the empathy to feel their pain and anger, their hopes and aspirations. And the lack of an institutional messaging infrastructure creates a dangerous asymmetry between the right and left - and a vacuum that can be filled by a huckster bearing false promises.
CanWe Catch Up a Half a Century Later?
At the American Message Foundation, we develop, test, and disseminate messages and train the leaders of the future so they can compete against politicians armed with well-crafted, disingenuous messages from the far right. The time for finger-pointing (“It was the left!” “No, it was the centrists!”) is over, as is the whining (“We don’t have a message!”).
We need to do what the right did fifty years ago—but with integrity: build an institution with the expertise and continuity to shape how Americans think and feel about what really matters and to educate our future leaders about message and media from the beginning of their careers as public servants.
The incantation, “We need a message,” itself demonstrates the extent to which we fail to understand the complexities of messaging in everyday practice. Sure, we need a master narrative or "brand" that defines who we are and what we stand for. But we also need effective messaging on every perennial issue, such as immigration, abortion, race and ethnicity, sex and gender, taxes and economics, guns and crime, energy and climate, and national security. And we need the rapid response capability to respond quickly to new variants of old viruses - or to inoculate against them when we see them coming.
Messaging is and must be dynamic, as problems change, and as the right finds darker dangers every two years (“CRT” yesterday, and “DEI” today; drag brunches two years ago, and trans teens today; and crime and immigrants typically alternating every two years - and today, serving togetether as the Trojan Horses to bring a standing army onto American streets.
We are also our own worst enemies, not asking ourselves, before we roll out new language that unnecessarily offends even significant parts of our own base, whether we should test and refine it first, whether we should avoid the abstruse language of the academy, and whether we need to inoculate against what we know will be the barrage of attacks from the far right, which are predictable. We can expect those attacks to reinforce some part of the brand it has created for us - elite, condescending, out of touch, and so caught up in our identity politics that we can't say that women get pregnant, or that the ancestors of the Jewish students taunted at elite universities lived in the area "between the [Jordan] River and the [Mediterranean] Sea," ancient Israel, so its native inhabitants can be many things, but "colonizers" is not one of them.
More than anything, we need an enduring institution to craft, test, and deliver clear, emotionally resonant messages, on an ongoing basis. An institution our leaders trust will never recommend a message it hasn’t tested against the most difficult, disinforming, dog-whistling messages from the other side and soundly beaten it.