How Thatcher brought mass marketing techniques to politics

[ this post was originally published on a weblog called What Is Liberalism ]

This excerpt is from Doris Lessing’s book “Prisons we choose to live inside,” published in 1987. Her point is that the left seems (or seemed at the time) unwilling to use mass marketing techniques to sell its message, but conservatives have (or had) no such trouble. I suppose one of the major changes of the 1990s was the moderate center-left politicians (Blair and Clinton) who adopted the mass marketing techniques that Thatcher and Reagan had brought to politics.

When Mrs. Thatcher was elected to her second term of office, she employed Saatchi and Saatchi, a big advertising firm, to handle her campaign. These people used every trick in the book, from turns of phrase calculated to arouse easy emotions, to the colours of her dresses and the curtains she stood in front of, to calculated entrances and exits and the use of the media. Meanwhile, her high-minded Socialist opposition despised these tricks, and the media. We were able to watch exactly how Mrs. Thatcher’s campaign was stage managed, in a very witty, clever television programme. When I say “we” I mean a minority of the nation who watched it. But I would have been in favor of making it compulsory viewing.

We have now reached the stage where a poltical leader not only uses, skilfully, time-honoured rabble rousing tricks – see Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar – but employs experts to make it all more effective. But the antidote is that, in an open society, we may also examine these tricks being used on us. If, that is, we choose to examine them; if we don’t switch off to see “Dallas” or whatever instead.

The point I am making is that information we have been given about ourselves, as individuals, as groups, as crowds, as mobs, is being used conciously and deliberately by experts, which almost every government in the world now employs to manipulate its subjects. More and more we will be able to observe governments using the results of the research into brain-washing but only if we wish to observe, only if we are determined not to fall victim to them.

Meanwhile, it is interesting that those people who like to regard themselves as the armies of the good, the well-intentioned, disdain such means. I am not saying they should use them, but they will often refuse even to study them, thus leaving themselves open to being manipulated by them. As an experiment I tried talking about this subject to a series of my friends who are part of the well-intentioned movements of our time, such as Greenpeace, varioius types of Socialism, people against nuclear war, campaigners for civil liberties, for the rights of prisoners, the abolition of torture, and so on. Every one reacted identically – emotionally, with dislike and distrust, as if it were in some way reactionary or anti-libertarian or anti-democratic to look at the behaviour of human beings, at our behaviour, dispassionately, as something that one may learn to predict.

Our opponents have no such inhibitions.

Or course, if you are a member of a group that by its own definition is right, good and true, with all the complacent attitudes that go with this – such as that one’s opponents are evil – then of course it is hard to stand aside, hard to take that necessary step upwards on the ladder into objectivity.

But it does seem to me sometimes that Thatcher’s last election exactly summed it up: there she was, her every gesture, exit, entrance, smile, remark, stage managed according to very sophisticated social prescription; while Michael Foot was grumpily and high-mindedly slamming a train window in the faces of some enquiring reporters.

At the risk of sounding insanely radical, I really do think progressive politicians should be advocates of total openness. That seems to me the appropriate response of progressives to the manipulations of advertising. “Total openness” may be an unreachable ideal, but our current system involves many layers of secrecy, each an opportunity for unscrupulous information manipulation. Let’s not be afraid to put forward radical ideas in this area. Put a video camera in every politician’s office, or at least every progressive politician’s office. Our slogan should be “In a totalitarian society, the government spies on the people. In a democracy, the camera gets turned around.