2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 407–413

COLLOQUIUM

Message, myopia, dystopia

Michael Silverstein, University of Chicago

The workings of “message”—a coherent, brand-like biographical chronotope—as it has

long-circulated in the specifically American system of fifty-state presidential electoral
politics helps to explain the outcome of the 2016 vote. The agōn of positive and negative
messaging about the respective candidates, Secretary Clinton and Mr. Trump, seems to have
worked, at the regional margins of an otherwise remarkably stable system, to the ultimate
disadvantage of the former and the ultimate advantage of the latter.
Keywords: US electoral politics, political message, Hillary Clinton, Donald J. Trump

Despite the claims of the recently installed Trump Administration, it certainly was
not millions of votes of “illegal aliens” that won Secretary Clinton a commanding
lead in the nationally aggregated popular vote. But a slight shift at the margins of
polling expectation principally in several Rust Belt states won Mr. Trump the deci-
sive lead in the Electoral College. The structural fact many people forget is that an
American presidential election is actually fifty simultaneous state-level elections,
however national the mediatized lens on them, and hence that the distribution
of the popular votes in respect of state boundaries is what ultimately matters, and
ought to matter to those who run presidential campaigns. Many presidential elec-
tions have hinged on a small number of state outcomes, even the results in a single
state—Tilden vs. Hayes, Cleveland vs. Harrison in the nineteenth century; Nixon
vs. Kennedy, Gore vs. Bush the Younger in more recent times. But what, I suppose,
is gnawingly irksome for Secretary Clinton’s supporters in 2016 is the consistent
direction of tilt in the Electoral College toward the Republican Party candidate in
both twenty-first-century instances, the matter in the year 2000 decided not, as the
Constitution prescribes, in the House of Representatives (as was the Tilden–Hayes
contest in 1876) but by the US Supreme Court in a one-vote cliffhanger, and in
the 2016 election notwithstanding a Democratic popular vote plurality of nearly
3,000,000 votes of some 128,825,223 certified overall.

 his work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © Michael Silverstein.

T
ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau7.1.027
 Michael Silverstein 408

The media, lulled by the proba-ballistics launched by pollsters, have professed

astonishment at Mr. Trump’s “upset victory” over Mrs. Clinton. But I think that if
we retrace matters in the frame of political “message,” we can understand why all
along they should have been—and some of us in fact were—preparing for it. “Mes-
sage,” as I introduced in a little 2003 book, Talking Politics (Silverstein 2003), and
as Michael Lempert and I developed further in Creatures of Politics (Lempert and
Silverstein 2012), has nothing inherently to do with positions on issues of public
policy; such issues become, at best, useful ingredients for or components of creat-
ing a message, and need not even be communicated in denotationally explicit lan-
guage of committing to a certain position. That is what the metaphorical metaprag-
matic caption “dog whistle” describes, a political figure’s interdiscursive citation
as an act of Bakhtinian voicing of a well-known word or phrase (“America first!”)
articulated by stereotypic others so as to align the politician with a particular inter-
est group who are, thereby, interpellated, called out by this verbal gesture to target
them as like-minded addressees. Message need not even be communicated in lan-
guage. Older Americans recall that Ronald Reagan’s 1980 anti–federal government
campaign started with a speech announcing his candidacy for the presidency that
was carefully located in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a famous, quasi-sacralized site of
the politics of segregationist “state’s rights” deep in the heart of Dixie. Not a “dog
whistle” so much as a tableau vivant of the candidate’s message. And more recently
even in the primary run-ups to the 2008 Democratic Party presidential nomina-
tion, Barack Obama was repeatedly assailed—especially by Clintonistas, let alone
Republicans—for not wearing an American flag pin on the left lapel of his beauti-
fully cut Hart Schaffner & Marx [Marx!!!] suits. (He capitulated, though only after
a speech about true vs. faux patriotism.)
Message in politics, like brand in the more obviously commercial marketplace,
is thus a semiotic composite, a projectable distinctive (and thus differential) narra-
tive or biography—of a political figure no less than of a product or service—that,
whatever the facts of the matter, situates the imaginary of use-value or functionality
in a chronotope, a space-time of relationship to the individuals in the voting pub-
lic or consumer market. In marketing circles, brand is spoken of as “value added”
by all the differential semiotic additives of packaging, placement, and promotion,
and it must always be contingently curated, sometimes, as circumstances dictate,
in fact requiring agile rebranding. Similarly the realm of electoral politics in con-
temporary times has been ever more conceptualized by professionals as political
marketing designed, as positive message for one’s client, to keep the biographical
imaginary fresh and relevant to key electoral constituencies with a trajectory of
emplotment not only of a past and present, but most critically of a trustable fu-
ture. (Mr. Trump as president keeps reminding his base that his every Executive
Order and Cabinet, agency, or court appointment is making good on his campaign
promises, note.) At the same time, since message is relational above all else, critical
to the agonistic universe of electoral politics is the promotion of negative message
for one’s political opponent(s), always being sufficiently agile to track the changing
fortunes of an opponent’s positive message. (Note the example of the flag lapel pin
above that, once dispatched, led to further insinuendo involving Mr. Obama’s as-
sociation with Rev. Jeremiah Wright.)

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409 Message, myopia, dystopia

In the recent presidential cycle, then, we must start with the basic facts of
(1) long-term stability of a great core of each political party’s electoral base, en-
suring a “default” vote in the absence of message-driven reasons to do otherwise
(reliably Democratic urban cores vs. reliably Republican suburbs and exurbs; stably
reliable ethnic, class, etc. bases); (2) the persistent regional stability of dominance
of one or the other major party, from the beginning of the nation’s history a pattern
of electoral sectionalism stable, for one or another reason, over lengthy intervals
of time though affected by patterns of migration (Federalist Atlantic Northeast vs.
emerging [Democratic-]Republican South and noncoastal Midlands; Civil War–
era Democratic Southeast transformed only by civil rights legislation in 1964 as
“southern strategy” turf of the 1968 Humphrey vs. Nixon race); (3) the deplorable
(or agreeable, depending on partisan strategy) and reliably consistent low turn-
out among eligible voters even in presidential years, but especially in default years
(51.2 percent in 2000 [Gore v. Bush] with a popular vote difference of >0.5 mil-
lion, compared to 58.2 percent in 2008 [McCain v. Obama] with a popular vote
difference of <10 million; 2016 [Clinton v. Trump] is in the middle of the range at
55.3 percent with a popular vote difference of <3 million).
Hence, in most campaigns a politician’s message really operates at the margins.
In a relatively default race—absent a definitive groundswell toward one candidate’s
positive message or away from a candidate’s negative message—the idea is to tilt
the popular tally ever so slightly in one or the other direction. This is, of course, the
basic story of the electoral outcome in favor of Mr. Trump in Wisconsin, Michigan,
Ohio, and Pennsylvania (74 electoral votes), as well as in Florida (29 electoral
votes). He seems to understand this at least retrospectively, whether he was fully
convinced of the strategy formulated by his insightful team earlier or not. Note that
in his January 25 interview with David Muir (CBS News 2017), all the while insist-
ing on the fantasy of millions of bogus votes for his opponent, he reveals that
I focused on those four or five states that I had to win. Maybe she didn’t.
She should’ve gone to Michigan. She thought she had it in the bag. She
should’ve gone to Wisconsin; she thought she had it because you’re
talking about 38 years of, you know, Democrat wins. But they didn’t. I
went to Michigan, I went to Wisconsin. I went to Pennsylvania all the
time. I went to all of the states that are—Florida and North Carolina.
That’s all I focused on.
Mr. Trump’s aggregated margin over Mrs. Clinton in the Rust Belt states was ap-
proximately 77,000 votes—every state a squeaker, to be sure (though in several of
these states, given the closeness of Democratic and Republican tallies, once more,
as in 1992 and 2000, third and fourth party votes—not those of “illegal aliens!”—
clearly played a role as did, crucially, unforeseen low urban voter turnout for Mrs.
Clinton).
But such was the power of message, both positive and negative, targeted to
voters traditionally of both major parties, that was in the instance sufficient to
drop these states into Mr. Trump’s electoral cart. To be sure, both Mr. Trump and
Mrs. Clinton came to the presidential campaign with long-established messages;
they were so familiar as celebrities in public life that their campaigns could rely on
rich biographical detail and vast quantities of media material and stereotypes long

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 407–413

 Michael Silverstein 410

in the public sphere about which the public could simply be reminded (by their
own or by the opposing campaign, of course). This condition of familiarity cuts
both ways insofar any accumulated negatives require the candidate’s positive-mes-
sage machine to direct people’s attention elsewhere—more easily accomplished in
some circumstances than in others, as we will note. Who were these candidates
who made it through the primary process?
As Kira Hall, Donna Goldstein, and Matthew Ingram (2016) note, Mr. Trump’s
performances of a persona in his stage-time in debates with others and in his solo
appearances were richly interdiscursive with the figure he created over several sea-
sons of his “reality” show, The Apprentice, an almost theatrically gruff and blus-
tery, aggressive and borderline rude, domineering boss. The performances, in the
details surveyed by these authors, are also richly interdiscursive with the stand-
up comedy of Don Rickles and the engagingly multivoiced monologues of Rush
Limbaugh, as detailed by Robin Shoaps (1999) some years back. Not only insults
of targets picked out and held up to ridicule before an entertained audience, but
as well a constant moving back-and-forth between animating others in stereotype
and then metapragmatically animating an evaluation of these stereotypes and what
they represent in a Bakhtinian voicing that presumes upon and presumably aligns
with the outlook and interests of the live or broadcast audience. (We can note,
by contrast, the exceedingly flat and unconvincing inaugural address delivery on
January 20, 2017, in which only those few slogans many times shouted at campaign
rallies had any zing. As a performer, Mr. Trump was otherwise completely hobbled
by the ex cathedra single-voiced rhetorical format usual to the speechifying genre
of the occasion that his writers had composed for him so as to sound, as best he
could, presidential—though the speech did still contain many insults, even several,
as shocked the commentariat, directed at the large number of dignitaries seated on
the platform behind him!)
Notwithstanding the agonistic nastiness of negative messaging almost required
of so-called debates, Trump dominated as the domineering figure who pays no
heed to what Goffman would term the ritual requirements of facework particularly
important in events of state, such as multicandidate appearances, in which one’s de-
meanor and deference are part of normative expectations. (So ingrained are these
in people who live among professional elites, that they—we—really have no way of
countering such offensiveness; by the time, in the latter encounters, that a couple
of Mr. Trump’s rivals tried to give as good as they got, he was far ahead of them in
practiced, WWF-worthy bullying.) In Mr. Trump’s case, the unreconstructed non-
elite, relatively noneducated language and the hokey iconic and deictic gestures are
essential to enhancing the nonpolished—hence, “how-could-it-be-rehearsed?”—
image of rough-and-tumble genuineness; while not quite Archie Bunkeresque (all
the while delivering himself of un- or ill-informed Archie Bunker–like opinions of
the “There oughta be a law. . .!” type), the borough of white working- and lower
middle-class Queens clings winningly to his delivery notwithstanding Trump Tow-
er is near Bergdorf ’s and Tiffany’s.
This is a proletarian billionaire, America’s Silvio Berlusconi (another padrone
with uncontrollable hands around young women), uncorrupted by politics to be
sure but, note, as well uncorrupted for his supporters in an “I’m-giving-it-to-you-
straight” manner by presumptive oodles of cash and branded properties (whoever

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411 Message, myopia, dystopia

turns out actually to own them). To be sure, the Republican Party establishment,
who have long played the game of dog whistling to their base indignant about so-
called social issues of concern to the progressive Democratic elites, was mighty
nervous about this true vulgarian, even past the time of his electoral victory, in
fact, wondering how to take the alarming, shot-from-the-hip populist politico-
economic proposals Trump spewed forth and incessantly Tweeted. (One is re-
minded faintly of the coastal Democratic elites making jokes about the “Beverly
Hillbillies” in the White House when Bill Clinton was elected in 1992 as a fiscal
centrist.)
So whatever vulgarity after vulgarity was revealed about Mr. Trump’s past, how-
ever many iconoclastic middle fingers he raised to established electoral custom and
decorum, a certain, ultimately decisive fraction of the voters responded with the
hope that maybe this time, unlike earlier times, this forceful, determined outsider
will, as it were, “make [their] America great again.”
That Secretary Clinton’s people ran an unbelievably incompetent campaign, in
the instance, is astonishing. It is almost as if they paid no attention to actually de-
veloping conditions, and certainly the campaign, more or less a rerun of the disas-
ter of the 2008 Democratic primaries, proved incapable of countering the massive
negative message with which she had to deal; they just seemed to think that by ig-
noring it, it would, by comparison to Mr. Trump’s juicy negatives, go away and they
would slide through. Since leaving the White House as First Lady in 2001, where
she had served for the eight years of her husband’s presidency, Mrs. Clinton had put
in essentially a lifetime’s worth of public service: junior Senator from the state of
New York, Secretary of State throughout Mr. Obama’s first term. These were both
tough, hands-on positions marked by both successes and failures.
In the strategic agonism that became the norm of the Republicans in Congress,
from the outset in the early 1990s the party had early on gone after both Clintons
about “Whitewater” in their Arkansas past, but eventually had failed, almost comi-
cally, at removing Bill Clinton from office after they impeached him. The shenani-
gans of special prosecutors, committee hearings, floor speeches, votes are useful
nevertheless for maximizing embarrassment and, as in the McCarthy era, whatever
the legal outcome, leaving a taint of “where-there’s-smoke-there’s-fire” suspicion in
respect of the target among a broad swath of the public.
When it was clear to the Republican leadership that then Secretary Clinton
would, indeed, run again in 2016, the machinery geared up again, first with a
“j’accuse!” on a tragic embassy breach during the civil unrest in Libya in which
the American ambassador and others were targeted, and then on Mrs. Clinton’s
use of nongovernment e-mail servers for State Department business. Caught in a
position where to admit guilt or even error makes one look incompetent—hence
not fit for even higher office—and to deny guilt or even error makes one seem to
be “covering up” the reality, Mrs. Clinton seemed—certainly to the press—to be
stonewalling, and had to be coerced by public opinion, little by little, incrementally
to admit and take some responsibility for failings under her watch. She never dealt
with such issues as huge speaking fees from financial interests, or her relationship
to the Clinton Foundation’s funding, which, with elaborate media coverage, were
added negative message material. And if Mr. Trump was a sexual predator, whom
was Mrs. Clinton proposing to bring along to the White House once more, anyway?

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 407–413

 Michael Silverstein 412

So the point is that there was a long—no interminable and incessant—campaign

of negative messaging that in her early years in public life affected Mrs. Clinton as
a collateral and more recently has targeted her personally in every possible way.
Almost to the exclusion of anything else about her campaign, this is what day after
day was successfully spread through a neutral and objective press, no matter that
partisan accusations about then-Secretary Clinton’s private e-mail server flowed
seamlessly into Russian hacking of DNC e-mails and into former Congressman
Wiener’s laptop cache (the dramatic, public FBI revelation to queer the deal at the
last minute). Politicians do not fare well when there is the noise, noise, noise of bad
tidings surrounding them, no matter the truth of the matter; one need only think
of poor Hubert Humphrey in 1968, whose convention and campaign appearanc-
es were incessantly disrupted by angry crowds on the political left creating noise,
noise, noise that turned off a Vietnam War–era public yearning for a little peace [!]
and quiet and caused them to turn for it to Richard Nixon.
So if, message-wise, Mrs. Clinton was a seriously damaged candidate from the
get-go, what did the Clinton campaign offer in the way of countervailing positive
message? Policy smarts, experience, professionalism, public service, strength of
survival, to be sure, and—oh!—I’m a woman; but did it play well in the primaries
let alone the final campaign?
In the primaries, recall, Senator Bernie Sanders, the kick-ass Brooklyn demo-
cratic socialist grandfather representing the idyllic state of Vermont (remember
Dr. Howard Dean?) was whipping up crowds of resentful white-collar millenni-
als and others feeling a progressive Bern about getting no respect the same way
Mr. Trump was whipping up the folks whom Mrs. Clinton unfortunately ap-
peared to term the “basket of deplorables.” (Recall Mr. Obama’s “clinging to guns
and religion” moment, or Mr. Romney’s “forty-seven percent” gaffe.) Not only did
Mrs. Clinton never recover from this—at Mr. Trump’s inauguration, his supporters
in Washington were still referring to themselves this way—her campaign doubled
down on trying to neutralize these forces by ever-so-slight policy moves—never
adequately promoted and advertised—that through a haze of technical language
focused attention on the issues that energized them. And that marshmallow cam-
paign slogan, “Stronger together!”
In the most critical toss-up places, then, counties in the Rust Belt where both
Sanders and Trump trounced their primary opponents (a critical, apparently ig-
nored index of an emerging reality), the relatively absent Clinton campaign offered
ultimately nothing beyond denigration of Trump (negative message) and first-
woman-after-first-black (glass-ceiling positive message) in the way of motivation
for voters seeking some sign of concern. As news organizations breathlessly tracked
the energizing hoopla of his campaign, Mr. Trump continued to induce that “fired-
up-and-ready-to-go” feeling, as had both then-Senator Obama in 2008 and Senator
Sanders in the primaries. And that made all the difference: it broke the imagined
dotted blue line of victory that would otherwise run with some few interruptions
from Florida up the Atlantic Coast across the northeastern and north central rim
and down the Pacific Coast.

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413 Message, myopia, dystopia

References
CBS News. 2017. “TRANSCRIPT: ABC News anchor David Muir interviews President
Trump.” January 25.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/transcript-abc-news-anchor-david-muir-interviews-
president/story?id=45047602.
Hall, Kira, Donna M. Goldstein, and Matthew Bruce Ingram. 2016. “The hands of Donald
Trump: Entertainment, gesture, spectacle.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6 (2):
71–100.
Lempert, Michael, and Michael Silverstein. 2012. Creatures of politics: Media, message, and
the American Presidency. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Shoaps, Robin. 1999. “The many voices of Rush Limbaugh: The use of transposition in
constructing a rhetoric of common sense.” Text 19 (3): 399–437.
Silverstein, Michael. 2003. Talking politics: The substance of style from Abe to “W.” Chicago:
Prickly Paradigm Press.

Michael Silverstein, Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor of Anthro-

pology, Linguistics, and Psychology at the University of Chicago, has focused on
the poetics of politics, coauthoring (with Michael Lempert), among other works,
Creatures of politics: Media, message, and the American presidency (Indiana Univer-
sity Press).
 Michael Silverstein
 Department of Anthropology
 University of Chicago
 1126 E. 59th Street
 Chicago, IL 60637-1580
USA
m-silverstein@uchicago.edu

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 407–413