There was a great deal of shock and pearl-clutching after a Facebook whistleblower announced that the company had pursued a business model of “conflict driven engagement”. With a stunning lack of self-awareness, pundits in the 24 hour cable news landscape demonstrated shock and disgust that anyone would even consider using such a business model. Media observers like this author found all the self-righteous hyperventilating and remonstrations to be quite tiresome, as it’s clear that damned near all American commercial media have moved on to a “conflict driven engagement” model, and have spent the last three months bashing Biden because they’re angry that they no longer have the ad revenues that came from the former guy’s daily shit-flinging.

Fortunately, it appears that Democrats on the January 6th Committee are finally figuring out that you can’t win elections by sitting around talking about the media environment you wish you had. You win elections by learning to game the system that you have. The Democratic Party has an opportunity to absolutely dominate the 2022 mid-terms. There are three keys to making this approach work:

1. Let the media fret and moan over prospects of a Democratic drubbing in 2022. If Democrats want to win then they need Democratic voters to be scared of a complete Republican takeover of the United States and ready to wait in line for ten hours if they have to for the chance to vote. The Democratic Party needs to ride a fine line between avoiding too much pushback that might make Democratic supporters over-confident so they think they don’t need to bother going to vote, and becoming so hopeless that they figure there’s no point anyways. Let the media create the same kind of anxiety that led SNL to create this skit back in 2018:

2. Stop ignoring the fact that the Republican Party have devolved into a bunch of fascists. The news from the January 6th proceedings is making it increasingly clear that Republicans had every intention of installing Trump as a Putin style dictator, and manipulating US election laws to create a place of permanent political power for the GOP. That’s not just a difference of political perspectives. It’s one step away from having a rubber-stamp Congress declare that Trump has authority to disband the Congress and assume lawmaking authority.

3. Put something about the January 6th proceedings into the news cycle almost every single day. Keep Republicans on the defensive. The combination of the new Omicron variant and action from Central Banks will likely wipe out the inflation issue in a few months. There’s already talk of how GOP leaders in the Senate basically ignored Trump’s call to oust Mitch McConnell. There’s very clearly a power struggle in the GOP and Democrats need to use every opportunity to push the “Republicans in disarray” narrative and describe the schism within the party between supporters of Trump’s Fascist Populism, and McConnell’s traditional role as a servant of wealthy private interests.

Sitting around talking about journalistic ideals and the kind of media landscape people might wish for does no good in election cycles. Democrats need to become more aggressive at leveraging the conflict driven engagement model that’s been adopted by for-profit media outlets. The party should allow the media to fret and fuss over prevailing patterns and how the President’s party usually loses seats in the first mid-term following an election. That will keep Democratic voters anxious and thinking they need to show up on election day. There also needs to be a very strong focus on the fact that the Republican Party of today consists of members who do not support Democracy, and who conspired to basically declare Trump dictator, and destroy our great Democratic experiment in the process. Finally, Democrats need to leverage the January 6th Committee’s findings at every opportunity. There appears to be a growing schism in the GOP as party elders question whether some younger members are really assets, or dangerous liabilities, and Democrats need to address that issue publicly, thereby “planting the seed” that leads to a conflict driven engagement feeding frenzy.