There was a time when political communication felt… clever.
Not correct. Not loud. Not dripping in moral certainty.
Clever.
If you go back and watch seasons 1 and 2 of The West Wing, it’s almost unsettling how good it is. The writing assumes the audience is intelligent. The characters argue. They doubt themselves. They change their minds. Occasionally they even lose.
It’s basically a show about people thinking.
Then something happens.
Season 3 arrives and, while still good, you start to notice a shift. The dialogue gets a little shinier. The arguments get a little tidier. The characters become slightly less curious and slightly more… right.
Not right as in correct. Right as in obviously morally superior and here to explain it to you in a tone normally reserved for disappointed schoolteachers.
And if you squint a bit, you can draw a straight line from that shift to what we now call modern political communication on the left.
Which is, to put it mildly, not going well.
The Death of Curiosity
Early West Wing worked because it was observational. It explored power, trade-offs, compromise, unintended consequences. It treated politics like a messy human system.
Later West Wing increasingly treated politics like a lecture.
And once you move from curiosity to certainty, something very important breaks.
Because persuasion is not about being right. It’s about bringing people with you.
And people, annoyingly, do not enjoy being spoken to like they’ve just eaten glue.
The Brexit Masterclass in What Not To Do
Take the Brexit debate.
The Remain side had, broadly speaking, a stronger case. Economically, institutionally, structurally, there were serious arguments to be made.
So naturally, they decided to market it in the worst possible way.
They leaned heavily into:
calling large chunks of the electorate misinformed
implying that leaving was something only racists or idiots would support
wheeling out wealthy celebrities shouting from yachts at people whose jobs were on the line
At one point, Bob Geldof was literally on a multi-million-pound boat shouting at commercial fishers.
If you were trying to design a moment that would alienate voters, you would struggle to improve on that.
Then there was the bus.
You know the one.
A big red bus with a number on the side. A number that was, let’s say, not entirely straightforward.
The Leave campaign drove it around.
And instead of ignoring it, the Remain campaign did something fascinating.
They talked about it. Constantly.
“This number is wrong.”
“This number is misleading.”
“This number is a lie.”
Which had the unintended side effect of turning the entire country into unpaid advertising interns for a bus.
If they had ignored it, it might have faded away.
Instead, they gave it oxygen, amplification, and a national tour.
This is not a political failure.
This is a marketing failure.
The American Version of the Same Film
You see the same pattern in the US.
Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” comment is one of those moments that future historians will study the way we study people who thought putting pineapple on pizza was a good idea.
Even if you believe it’s accurate, saying it out loud about people you are trying to persuade is… bold.
And by bold, I mean catastrophically unhelpful.
Campaigns became less about understanding voters and more about categorising them.
Less about persuasion and more about signalling.
Less about curiosity and more about certainty.
Which, again, is very satisfying if your goal is to win an argument on Twitter.
Slightly less effective if your goal is to win an election.
What Actually Changed
Somewhere along the line, political communication on the left stopped trying to understand people and started trying to correct them.
It became:
more preachy
more moralised
less interested in trade-offs
less tolerant of disagreement
In other words, it stopped behaving like early West Wing and started behaving like late West Wing.
Still intelligent. Still well-meaning.
But missing the thing that made it work.
Humility.
This Isn’t About Right or Wrong
It’s tempting to turn this into a debate about who’s correct.
That’s not the point.
You can be entirely correct and still lose.
Because politics is not a philosophy seminar.
It’s communication.
And right now, a lot of that communication is just… bad.
Not evil. Not malicious.
Just bad.
Like turning up to a job interview and opening with, “Before we begin, I’d just like to say I’m much smarter than all of you.”
A Modest Proposal
Maybe the solution is not more messaging.
Maybe it’s better messaging.
Less telling people what to think.
More trying to understand why they think it.
Less shouting.
More curiosity.
Basically, seasons 1 and 2 again.
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