Conservatism: The Amway Model

I was sick earlier this week and I had a weird fever dream in which I met Rush Limbaugh, a childhood hero of mine, and he spent most of his time trying to sell me Snapple... but, he wasn't just trying to sell me Snapple. Rather, he was selling himself as a guy who can sell just about anything, sugar water or whatever, by putting the Rush stamp of approval on it and hustling the heck out of it. (No, I am not making this up. I really dreamed this about Rush... hey, I had a fever.)

Oddly enough, Matt Stoller's very smart, very engaging essay [1] on how conservatives manipulate crisis moments to push through specific policy goals brought this dream back to my mind.

As I read Stoller's essay I began to wonder: is Stoller making the common progressive mistake, so often made with respect to the machinations of Karl Rove, of attributing way too much cleverness to conservative strategists? Could it be that what looks to Stoller like an adaptive, opportunistic, conservative strategy that uses crisis points to set up positive feedback loops is actually just a combination of modern brand marketing and old-fashioned hustle? Let me explain.

The true genius of the conservative establishment is that it's adept at taking very specific, quite disparate policy requests from businesses and narrowly focused interest groups (just as narrow as NARAL) and fitting them into a larger, coherent brand framework in a way that makes buying, owning, wearing, and word-of-mouth promoting this or that policy goal an essential part of what it means to be a true-blue (or, true-red, rather), conservative supporter of Team America. The end result is that a war with Iran, the Iraq war, dismantling social security, protecting Big Pharma, tax cuts for the wealthy, etc. are all narrow and relatively disconnected policy goals that have come from self-interested minority groups and have now been adopted wholesale by the base as part of this season's must-have GOP line of gadgets, books, children's toys, baked goods... everything the conservative family needs to be a complete American home.

How do they do it? And what about these positive feedback loops that Stoller describes? Honestly, I think these apparent feedback loops are just the fortunate side-effect of the salesman's best friend: hustle. Hustling the brand is what makes the whole system work.

Conservative activists are always out hustling--looking for any opportunity to bust out the Amway catalog and offer that guy in front of them in line at the cafe an Amway product that will meet his need. And once he has him hooked with the idea of Amway's exclusive Double X vitamins, he sells him on the Amway brand, and on network marketing as a business model and a lifestyle. It doesn't really matter what the problem is, because someone can always find a way to make Amway the solution, even when the problem is Amway-generated.

If you substitute "tax cuts" for vitamins, you can see how this works in 'wingerdom. When a specific constituent's policy goal, having been properly laundered and packaged by a network of think-tanks and bloggers, is included in this season's catalog, everyone in the whole network (bloggers, think tanks, talk radio, and Fox News) all get their hustle on by looking for opportunities to pull that goal out and offer it as a solution. You'll see them pull two or three or four out and try them all out, before they eventually settle on a combination of a policy and a pitch that will sell to this group of people who are suddenly concerned about X, Y, or Z problem (real or manufactured).

It doesn't matter if you're part of the "Family Research Council" and your issues are gays and abortion. If war with Iran is in this month's catalog, then you're out hustling war with Iran, the same way that the White House is out hustling gays and abortion when someone in the network can make those issues relevant to a political moment.

So you don't need to spot particular levers or crisis points that you can use to set up synergies and positive feedback loops for this army of Amway hustlers to get the exact same effect that Stoller describes. All you need to do is have everybody out there hustling a specific suite of wares all the time--all those eyes and brains are constantly looking the right moment to pitch a policy product, and every new development in our collective life is a potential sales opportunity if you're clever enough to make the connection that makes the sale.

The rise of Rush wasn't part of some master plan that involved media consolidation and the spread of right-wing radio. Rush was out there hustling, and he hustled himself into a hot market (talk radio) at the ground floor when it was poised to really take off on the back of the coming wave of media consolidation. In return, Rush hustles media consolidation because that's in the GOP catalog, right between "talk radio" and "drilling in ANWR." Only in hindsight does any of it look rigged.

Progressives can't really do this, at least not all the way, because they don't have a specific catalog of narrow, constituent-generated, blindly self-interested policy wares that they're willing to offer up as the answer to anything and everything. To use Stoller's example of terrorism not being NARAL's issue, if NARAL were a right-wing organization, they'd have found some way to make war with Iraq the centerpiece of a few mailers on women's rights. Eventually, the AEI would have reciprocated by making women's rights the centerpiece of a mailer on telecom deregulation.

So yeah, conservatives take advantage of crisis moments to push specific policies, but they're just salesmen trying to use an opening to pitch a product and, ultimately, a brand.