The Left’s Dean Scream Strategy
(As promised, I’m back with more posts, more often. In this short take I discuss the Dean Scream strategy, which you may be thinking is about melting down to get what you want, but it’s not that at all. I don’t want to give too much away, but there will be talk of hitting yourself in the face, fancy salad greens, and the profound irrelevance of Aleppo.)
If you were around and paying attention to politics during the 2004 primary campaign, you will no doubt recall this moment from Howard Dean’s campaign when he let out a primal yell. That one singular release of animal spirits was so bad it torpedoed Dean’s entire campaign.
Except it didn’t. When it comes to politics, it’s rarely the flub that does you in, it’s the press reaction that can kill you.
Dean wasn’t done in by that scream, which in context really was just a moment of excessive exuberance. Dean was done in because the establishment media had turned on him, because they only like outsider politicians from Vermont when they have no chance of winning, or when they drop out and endorse their more mainstream opponents. Dean’s scream gave the press a moment, and most importantly a phrase, they could use to characterize, and then dismiss, his entire candidacy.
Once you go looking for Dean Screams, you’ll notice how common this tactic is.
Perhaps you’ll recall how in 2016 Libertarian Candidate Gary Johnson became immediately dismissible after failing to recognize a reference to Aleppo, in Syria. The reaction to his mistake gave the impression that if only he’d passed that all important “knows what Aleppo is” test, the mainstream media would have taken his candidacy much more seriously. Counterfactual alert: They wouldn’t have.
Dean Screams need not even depend on some underlying mistake or transgression. They can take the form of a single weaponized phrase that by itself is bland or meaningless, but sounds ominous, especially when said in a particular way. Do you remember how Kyle Rittenhouse was accused by those who hated him not only of murder, but of “crossing state lines!”, and that phrase was used over and over as if, by itself, as if proved of his utter depravity? What kind of a monster crosses state lines!?
Or maybe you can recall all the way back in 2021 when Joe Rogan mentioned that, among other treatments for Covid, he was using an anti-viral drug that had a livestock version, and everyone in the corporate press accused him of eating hose paste, an accusation that could be brought back up to instantly discredit him. You might even remember the previous Dean Scream smear attempt against Rogan, that he “platforms bigots” by having conversations with bad people.
My favorite Dean Scream from the recent mid-terms was so good it helped the Democrat’s brain dead socialist candidate limp over the finish line against the Republican’s overeducated interloper. Perhaps you’ll remember this gem, as immortalized here by my own shitty attempt to make it a meme:
In terms of brilliance and effectiveness, though, the clear winner in recent times is the accusation that a candidate is an “election denier”, which occasionally gets expand out to the equally banal yet menacing-sounding claim that someone “questioned the legitimacy of an election”. This is boss-level language weaponization, in that the shadier an election looks, the more it will provoke those election deniers, and the louder the Left can criticize them as election denialists. The very best Dean Screams, like this one, are grown up versions of telling your younger brother to “stop hitting yourself” as you pummel him with his own fist. And as an aside, if you never did that to someone else as a kid, you missed out on one of childhood’s great pleasures.
Fighting back against the Dean Scream
For most people, including myself, the immediate reaction when presented with a Dean Scream is to want to explain it, to rationalize it, to provide context: “That phrase makes no sense because Rittenhouse lived just across the border and he had family in Kenosha and blah blah blah.” Resist that temptation! Triggering you into defending against red herrings is a happy side effect of the Left’s Dean Scream strategy, should you fall for it.
Note though that the primary purpose of the Dean Scream is to dish up talking points that “taste” just enough like actual arguments to be swallowed and regurgitated by an army of NPCs in order to front-run any attempt at real discussion. Like the label Conspiracy Theory, a well crafted and oft-repeated Dean Scream serves both as intellect retardant, and as red meat for a zombie army. A catchy Dean Scream will worm its way into zombie ears and take up residence in their empty heads and they will dutifully puke it back up anytime the related person or thing is mentioned.
Just try mentioning a conversation on the Joe Rogan podcast to one of these zombies and see how quickly they bring up “horse paste”.
Is there an effective strategy to combat a Dean Scream? Mocking can work, sometimes, which is why meme warfare has become so important to the Right. But you can’t use memes to argue with people who only seek shallow justifications for their priors, or who use language strictly as a weapon. Perhaps the most effective strategy is to “embrace and extend”, and accuse the NPCs of failing to sufficiently embrace their own vapid directives, as in my reply to someone who, at that point, had the ubiquitous Ukrainian icon as their profile pic:
But I’m not sure what that achieved. Trolling the NPCs feels good, but I wonder if it’s just an equally futile version of what I accused Rush Limbaugh of doing for all those years on air.
The most effective approach I’ve seen so far is to smear back, as James Lindsay does with his “ok, groomer” schtick. Is this stooping to their level? Yes. Are there better ways to fight back against an army of Dean Scream fed NPCs? Maybe. I’m not sure.
At the very least, though, we can recognize when an argument is really just a Dean Scream, call it out as such, and not get triggered into responding with “acktually…”