Since last week’s missive on DOGE vs. Democrats, it does feel like there’s an encouraging shift in narrative dynamics.
Elon’s drug-addled chainsaw massacre at CPAC (villian) is a stronger contrast against the stories of sympathetic victims of DOGE - like forest fire safety crews, and veteran suicide prevention counselors (victims). This contrast is helpful, and better than the working class guy on the ladder (hero) dismantling USAID vs. stammering explanations and high level arguments about Article II. But some progressives went so far as to declare that the “Coup has failed,” citing polling showing Trump and Elon with low favorability.
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Sadly, this isn’t going to be as easy as “letting them hang themselves with their own rope,” at least not in their first 30 days.
“DOGE Stimulus Check” is in the organic top 10 most searched terms in the last week in the United States, and the only one related to politics. To me, this is an indicator of where we are truly at today.Much of the working class audience we need to win back is still seeing Elon as a hero, chainsawing his was through a villainous system of bureaucratic corruption.
Dear readers, I know you don’t want to hear it, but it’s crucial to understand that the narrative that Trump signed the checks during Covid still has a lot of traction. It’s part of what helped him win in November, and DOGE is doing a masterful job of recalling and reinforcing that core belief that he’s good at money things, and he will send you money.
They are “doing” DOGE. Actions speak louder than words. Messaging isn’t just what you say, it’s very much about what you do, and the cumulative effect of both doing and saying that imprints an audience’s understanding of who you are.
Trump’s approvals today are still higher than at his low-water mark in 2020. Importantly: Trump’s approval is much higher today than Joe Biden’s was for the last two years. We’re climbing out of a massive hole. We’re still in it. We need to refocus on what “We” are DOING to make people’s lives better.
Of course, there’s plenty of rope for them to use, and it will get longer. We know that the tariffs will increase consumer prices, and the budget plan is to cut tax for billionaires and big corporations - and raise tax on working people. It’s not going to get better, and that will backfire for Trump at some point.
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Anyone who has come across a real possum knows, they don’t just play dead. They fight like hell with their sharp teeth and claws.
This is why one James Carville is advocating “playing possum,” writing in his NYT column today:
With no clear leader to voice our opposition and no control in any branch of government, it’s time for Democrats to embark on the most daring political maneuver in the history of our party: roll over and play dead. Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us. Only until the Trump administration has spiraled into the low 40s or high 30s in public approval polling percentages should we make like a pack of hyenas and go for the jugular. Until then, I’m calling for a strategic political retreat.
The notion of “Rolling Over and Playing Dead” is dangerous and stupid, especially at a moment when your own voters are turning on you for not doing anything, and your donors are not donating. We can’t act like we’re dead while our democracy actually dies. We need to fight back every step of the way, because we need momentum, moral clarity, and god damned energy. A Good Story needs rising action - and those on the sidelines need to see the ones in the ring actually throwing punches against the bad guys, and trying to knock them out. This poll from DFP reflects back the pent up energy we’re all feeling.
This poll from Data for Progress of last week tells the story of a Democratic base that wants to see more fighting energy.
Mr. Carville and I don’t see eye-to-eye on much, and I generally agree with the folks at the Philadelphia Gay News who wrote an entire piece called James Carville Needs to Shut The Fuck Up.
However, there is also a kernel of wisdom to what Carville says with his “Rope a Dope” bit: We should absolutely help them wear themselves out and stoke internal strife in the Republican coalition. They will overreach and fumble. And when they do, we punch hard as hell, and land the KO.
Carville isn’t wrong about that, and I agree that the way to do that is together, as a pack. Our forces can’t be disparate as they are today. We have a lot of work to do internally on our own coalition and cohesion, and finding focus. But the way we start to coalesce is by rebuilding momentum. By doing stuff.
You build muscle by actually lifting weights, not talking about it. We need to show-not-tell. We need to get out and do it. As Anat Shenker-Osorio said in her livestream on The Ink last week, "Messaging is about the doing more than it is about the saying."
I couldn’t agree more.
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With packed town hall meetings and pop up protests, the uptick in energy at the grassroots level is good. These events, images, and actions provide “social proof” that not everyone is going along with Trump’s plans. This week saw Senator Sanders’ stump tour to Omaha, Congressional town halls packed with angry constituents demanding more disobedience from Democrats and outright attacking Republicans, and more pop-up protests at Tesla dealerships focused on Elon Musk’s dangerous DOGE.
This is the way forward: Focus on Medicaid, and unleash the energy, especially in places like Erie, Des Moines, and Madison.
But, in general, they are still doing Flood the Zone, and it’s mostly working. Today I am going to break down what Flood The Zone means, and especially Bannon’s concept of Muzzle Velocity. I don’t enjoy writing about this, but I feel we have fundamentally failed to understand what these strategies are, and why they are so effective. We can’t win by “fixing our messaging” if we don’t understand the underlying strategies we are up against.
Welcome back to Good Story! Special thanks to my old friend Jonathan and his Substack Domestic Left for the recommendation!
Republican strategist Steve Bannon has been very open about his strategy of “Flooding the Zone” to overwhelm Democrats, and the media itself–who he understands has his “real opposition.” Typically, Flood the Zone has been frustrating for progressives on the receiving end of Bannon’s firehose, who unfortunately have taken the lesson that the way to deal with this is simply going on TV more, and pushing out more content online, and having “better messaging.”
This is a superficial understanding of what Flood the Zone is, and why it’s working so well.
Generally speaking, more visibility for your POV is a net good. But Flooding the Zone is not just getting more exposure. It’s about strategically dominating the discourse. Not just by what you say, but with what you do to create momentum and keep it on your side. While rapid response and reframing by our side is essential, building power means more often than not, we want to be the one acting - not reacting.
Flooding the Zone is about setting the tempo to make the other side dance to your music, and dominating the conversation using images, narrative strategies, and storytelling - saturated across channels so that the audience can’t help but pick up a whiff of what you’re selling.
Flooding the Zone is the sum total of creating a situation where the opposition barely has time to comprehend what’s happening, and breathlessly react to the top stories you’ve served up, before you move the cycle on and into the next round – always keeping them reactive and overwhelmed.
These ancient axioms still rule the day:
Actions speak louder than words.
An image is worth 1,000 words.
Every action creates a reaction.
To be clear, when Bannon talks about Flood the Zone, he’s not thinking about one news cycle. He is thinking structurally, about how to exert power over the available political space and discourse in general, and how to generate the momentum and keep it (just like a good football team doesn’t let the drive stop).
The strategy is bigger than any one message, slogan, or action. As Ezra Klein insightfully said, “The message isn’t in one executive order, it is in the cumulative effect of all of them; the sense that this is Trump’s country now.”
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How to Flood the Zone
First, let’s step back for a moment and ask, what is the Zone? Like a general looking over the battlefield, your job as a strategist is to understand the zone that you are working within, and where the choke points or boundaries are, so you can then use them to your advantage. A good football team forces their opponent out of bounds, using the line to their tactical advantage. A general would roll out a map, survey the landscape, and then station his troops where he knows the other side will need to cross the river to advance. In strategy, you need to figure out how to identify the features of the zone, and then how to use them to gain advantages.
From Topos Magazine: The Strait of Hormuz at the entrance to the Persian Gulf, receives 20% of the world’s oil traffic. In military strategy and global trade, the chokepoint is one of the most interesting ways in which geography can be used to mess with the powers that be.
For Bannon, the Zone is the media itself, and by extension, audience attention. He sees journalists and Democrats alike as his opponents on this battlefield, who must be occupied, thwarted, destroyed.
What are the features and chokepoints of the Media as a zone? Even in our 24-hour breaking news cycle and bottomless feeds and endless content, there is still a finite number of stories that will run each day. All stories will not see the light of day. Any PR pro knows this, and every PR pro has had their story “bumped” for something else at the last minute. It’s just how it works. You want to be the one doing the bumping.
Newsmaking also has conventions, and there are rules that you have to play by: The story has to be new and fresh, and every story needs to have at least “two sides” to create a plot we want to follow. You want to be the one setting the plot in motion.
Importantly, our media system has a herd mentality, where everyone will glom onto the top few stories of the day that define the cycle. You want to define the cycle.
Audience attention is a finite resource. You want it all for your side.
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Use one hand to drop draconian orders that make opponents constantly scramble to react and provide “our side” of the story.
With the other hand, feed the hand-picked press corps the sticky, memorable stories that are easier to digest: the Super Bowl, the Kennedy Center, the Gulf of America, DOGE checks. Those easy soundbite stories occupy the zone at the top of the feed, while the rest of the zone is flooded “with shit” that makes our heads spin as we can barely process it.
Then there’s plenty of stuff that isn’t covered at all, intentionally lost in the chaos of the flood.
Muzzle Velocity: Focus on Momentum Towards the Target
The first Flood the Zone concept of blitzkrieg is pretty easy to understand: overwhelm your opposition with raw volume.
The second prong of the two handed tactics are also well understood in PR: Define what rises to the top of the chaos with the sticky stories you want to tell, using those shiny objects to distract attention from your less popular deeds.
But there is a third strategic dimension of Bannon’s Flood the Zone strategy that has had less discussion on the left: What he calls “Muzzle Velocity.”
For those readers who don’t use firearms, “muzzle velocity” is the measurement of how fast the bullet is going when it comes out of the barrel of the gun. This velocity determines how far, how straight, and how deadly the shot will be. As Brandon explains to the lay reader on the website “Ammo to Go”:
The velocity of a projectile is always fastest when it leaves the barrel…Think of throwing a baseball: when you throw the ball with a light, slow lob, it will drop quickly and its trajectory will look more like an arch. But if you hurl the ball as fast as you can, like a fastball pitch, it will have a trajectory that is closer to a straight line…Faster bullets are generally more reliable for downrange shooting because they don’t drop nearly as much. Faster bullets are also better for terminal performance. One of the important aspects of terminal performance is the transfer of energy. If a bullet is traveling at a faster speed, it will either penetrate deeper, expand better, or both. Energy at the target, which is considered critical to terminal performance, is enhanced when a bullet is traveling at a higher speed.
Right now, Democrats are essentially lobbing balls into the air. To the extent we have any muzzle velocity, it’s pretty damn low, and it’s not aimed anywhere specific other than in their general direction.
As Bannon explained in his 2019 Frontline interview, Flooding the Zone is all about muzzle velocity at its core: “just hammering, hammering…bang bang bang,” Muzzle velocity is key to owning the momentum with a torrent of not just messages - but actions - that drive the narrative for your side.
Clearly, we need some clear targets to aim at. And we need to build rising action, momentum, and muzzle velocity aimed at those targets.
Turning the Tide
The first weeks of flooding the zone have been brutal. And nothing pains me more than to uplift the strategic execution people whose political views and actions I despise and abhor. But we cannot understand how to fight back if we do not understand what’s happening - what the underlying strategies really are, how they work, why they are effective.
So we’re getting flooded. But, what do we do in a flood?
We protect the vulnerable and get them to higher ground, and we sandbag like hell to stop the waters from rising higher.
That’s essentially what progressives need to do right now. There is a groundswell of grassroots energy focused on protecting abortion access, trans kids, migrants, and other targeted communities. There is also rising action inside our side, with grassroots protests and flood of calls to Congress showing real energy. And while some Democrats in Congress are “pissed” about it, others are pushing for strategies to push back on federal contracts for SpaceX and Tesla. The emerging fight over Medicare cuts does provide a focal point with some real leverage on some swing GOP members. These are the kinds of focal points and targets that we need to find and aim at together.
Ultimately, to find our way out of this wilderness, we need to understand that the torrent must flow from us - with muzzle velocity. We must create actions that demand reactions. We must find the choke points and occupy that zone such that we shift dynamics. We must create the story of the future that can be embodied in a simple image and imprint meaning in the minds of the American people.
To truly stop the flood, we have to reverse the tide.
The Black Community is in motion opposing the rollbacks of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion by companies like Target and Walmart with extremely organic calls for boycott this Friday. Have you heard about this?
There are also simultaneous calls to Buy In at those retailers like Costco that have rejected bids to roll back Civil Rights protections, showing the solution and the solidarity way forward together. This is Good Story in Action!
Take Action: FLORIDA!! – It’s one hell of a Voter Registration Drive
Lock in folks: can you get your self to Florida? Can you donate so someone in Florida can walk those blocks for you registering voters? We have to fight to win the three special elections where Trump appointees have vacated seats. These are deep red districts where there are more Republicans than Democrats. It’s not easy. We MUST register 10,000 more Democrats, and we have until March 1 to do it. You can also Postcard from home. You can text or phone bank (after March 1). You can help put up a fight in the race for Congress. Don’t sleep on this!
