Aldo Matteucci Former Deputy Secretary-General of the European Free Trade Association
A tale of influencers First published on DiploFoundation Blog, 22 July Influencers are as old as Adam and Eve – the snake and Eve took on this role in turn. Shamans and priests were influencers or, as in China, a Confucian bureaucracy. Next to the top-down influencers, each community had its local influencers as well, often emergent personalities. Then, the process was verbal, relying on speech, rituals, or images. With the Renaissance, secular influencers took center stage, reaching a first high in the age of Enlightenment. The Penny Press and newspapers spread political ideas to an expanding, literate readership. Industrialisation spawned economic influencers – marketing. Since then, the influencing techniques in both areas have commingled. For the first time, the process could be documented – print, photo, and recording allowed the historian or social scientist to trace the overt and covert ways of the influencers and the outcome in the people’s actions. At the same time, we began to understand the link between the message and the surrounding social and economic context. One could begin to guess the reasons for success and failure of an idea – but also the essential role of happenstance. The influencers’ message yields meaning for each listener. The addressees link it to their experience and, in so doing, alter or transform the meaning to suit them. Across people, the message’s words become a useful shorthand – a cliché, a rhetorical device - for a complex set of underlying meanings – pars pro toto. The message is thus and always highly fluid, both across listeners and time. ‘Language is collective, and protean.’ A message’s spread and success depend on the degree of fuzziness. As we agree on the words while intending different meanings, influencers use the fuzziness to create coalitions for common action. The author has charted the ever-changing content of two messages that have dominated political discourse of the USA in the first half of the twentieth century – and now suddenly again. They are AMERICAN DREAM and AMERICA FIRST. Here a personal synopsis. 1. American Dream The ‘American Dream’ is not dead, we just have no idea what it means anymore. The ‘American Dream’ emerged as a progressive shorthand in the heydays of the Gilded Age. It aspired to rein in rampant and unregulated capitalism. (A spokesman for this view was Walter Lippman.) It meant grappling with inequality, sharing benefits and abilities, and restraining monopoly power. Antitrust laws were meant to protect the small producer, not the
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