How do material forces shape the discourse?
Part I of a multipart series on a Marxist theory of contemporary discourse.
This is the first of a multipart series covering the role of political economy in contemporary media.
To look at contemporary political discourse you would think we are in the midst of a great debate about political persuasion – how it works and how to carry it out. Proponents of emotional persuasion, for example, insists that “the fuel that drives our actions, including moral actions, is emotional, not cognitive”;’ proponents of reason, meanwhile, argue that “there is something about us, our intelligence, which entails that we’re capable of acting in ways that are rational”. Some rhetoricians say that our political reasoning is “radically constrained by the frames and metaphors shaping your brain and limiting how you see the world” and thus fixate on both; others tell us that
the claim that people are locked into a single frame [is not] anywhere to be found in cognitive linguistics, which emphasizes that people can nimbly switch among the many framings made available by their language.
In popular discourse these debates are usually more specific, though still loaded with various theoretical and ideological assumptions. In 2024, for example, a major debate emerged in the media over the campaign messaging of US presidential candidate Kamala Harris. On one side, pundits like Zach Beauchamp held that Harris “could make inroads among persuadable Republicans by focusing on democracy,” specifically the threat that Donald Trump posed to it. This was a rehearsal of an argument he has made since Trump’s previous election: that attempts to “speak to the material interests of voters, particularly in the working class” are not persuasive. Beauchamp’s messaging advice emerges from his belief that economic forces only play “a relatively marginal role” in “the rise of authoritarian politics…compared with the core conflicts over hierarchy and identity.”
On the other side, meanwhile, The Center for Working Class Politics argued that surveyed voters “responded most favorably to populist messages and messages that emphasized progressive economic policies.” They also found that “Messaging around Trump as a threat to democracy underperformed all other Harris messages among virtually every group” they surveyed. While the CWCP did not theorize its finding, a standard argument for this position among aligned socialists has been that voters find populist messages more compelling because they speak directly to fundamental physiological needs: food, shelter, health, and so on. Though this theory is compatible with some Marxist thought on the material basis of human psychology, it is more explicitly in line with the Maslowian position that “physiological needs are the most pre-potent of all needs.”
These are all legitimate and interesting questions, though I will not attempt to litigate them here. Instead I would like to begin by noting that they are all controversies over messaging and technique. The shared premise is that these messaging choices are, in mass political persuasion efforts, decisive. That premise can be found in papers like the CWCP’s that are aimed at large-platform communicators like Kamala Harris, but they can also be found in popular debates among activists and the political rank-and-file as guidelines for all persuasive communication. Disagreements over messaging have particularly in recent years become a major point of controversy on social media and message boards, often accompanied by heated attempts to impose message discipline.
Message design controversies certainly matter on the margins, but design is not the only factor that determines the impact of mass persuasion. In May 2025, the New York Times reported that
Voters who had not heard much about some of the many major news events from the first 100 days of Mr. [Donald] Trump’s second term have a higher opinion of the job he is doing, according to the latest New York Times / Siena College poll.
The survey did not distinguish between messages about Trump that were tailored one way or another. For example, after the unlawful deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, liberal outlet The People’s Media Project offered a whole list of “essential” messaging recommendations “to change the narrative” that they declared “essential for content creators and journalists”. This included for example instructions to avoid mentioning whether or not detained immigrants are “criminals” since this is “dehumanization.” The Times survey did not distinguish between articles that accepted their guidelines and articles that did not.
Nevertheless, the implication of the poll is straightforward: exposure to any messaging about the Garcia case tended to make respondents less approving of Trump. This might not be true or as true for any particular message or in the case of any particular person, but the aggregate trend is clear. Armed with this knowledge as a communications strategist who opposes Trump, you would only see message design as a secondary concern; your primary concern would be to expose the population to any criticism at all.
And yet in contemporary discourse, it is messaging exposure that is too often treated like a secondary concern, while messaging design remains a primary focus. This is a mistake, albeit one with understandable explanations. In the age of mass media exposure has been the most important factor shaping political persuasion. And the implications of this fact pose a direct challenge to antiquated liberal notions about interpersonal persuasion.
The marketplace of ideas
Barack Obama, in The Audacity of Hope, calls for “a genuine marketplace of ideas…in which, through debate and competition, we can change our minds”. His ideal for this marketplace is the Constitutional Convention. He quotes James Madison’s description:
No man felt himself obliged to retain his opinions any longer than he was satisfied of their propriety and truth, and was open to the force of argument.
Few today would accept this as an accurate of our marketplace’s clientele – but here, I would like to draw attention to the individualism of their analysis. Obama, when he says that “we can change our mind,” is specifically referring to himself and the reader; when he routinely called on Americans to “disagree without being disagreeable,” he had in mind civility as an individual virtue. Madison, in his praise of the Constitutional Convention, is really praising individuals – how concerned they are with “propriety and truth” and how “open” they are “to the force of argument.” Similarly, when Louis Menand argues that “Individual voters are not rational calculators of self-interest,” he is thinking about political discourse in the same way as Obama and Madison – even if his conclusion is different.
In common, their shared premise is that mass discourse can be understood as just a simple extrapolation of how individuals think. If people are generally rational, our discourse will be generally rational. If people are generally biased then our discourse will be, too.
This reasoning may seem intuitive, but it deserves scrutiny. In There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, Stanley Fish correctly recognizes the marketplace of ideas as a legacy of The Enlightenment, singling out in particular its faith in “Reason…[the] center of liberal thought.” I would add to this that it also inherited from the 17th century its deeply mechanistic perspective. The marketplace of ideas, in this analysis, is a whole that simply reflects its individual parts.
But the discourse is not a mechanistic system. Just like the economic marketplace, the marketplace of ideas is a complex system – and is thus amenable to some of the basic insights of complex systems theory. To appreciate them, however, we must first turn to the psychology of repetition.
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