David Samuels of Tablet Mag wrote a good article last year on "permission structures" and the development of the concept under Barack Obama.
Its originator, David Axelrod, was born to be a great American advertising man—his father was a psychologist, and his mother was a top executive at the legendary Mad Men-era New York City ad agency of Young & Rubicam.
Permission structures, a term taken from advertising, was Axelrod’s secret sauce, the organizing concept by which he strategized campaigns for his clients.
While the academic social science and psychology literature on permission structures is surprisingly thin, given the real-world significance of Axelrod’s success and everything that has followed, it is most commonly defined as a means of providing “scaffolding for someone to embrace change they might otherwise reject.” This “scaffolding” is said to consist of providing “social proof” (“most people in your situation are now deciding to”) “new information,” “changed circumstances,” “compromise.” As one author put it, “with many applications to politics, one could argue that effective Permission Structures will shift the Overton Window, introducing new conversations into the mainstream that might previously have been considered marginal or fringe.”
When Axelrod finally agreed to come onboard, he found that Obama was the perfect candidate to validate his theories of political salesmanship on a national scale. First, he engineered Obama’s successful 2004 Senate campaign—a victory made possible by the old-school maneuver of unsealing Republican candidate Jack Ryan’s divorce papers, on the request of Axelrod’s former colleagues at the Chicago Tribune—and then, very soon afterward, Obama’s campaigns for the presidency, which formally commenced in 2007.
It worked. Once in office, though, Axelrod and Obama found that the institutions of public opinion—namely the press, on which Axelrod’s permission structure framework depended—were decaying quickly in the face of the internet.
With Obama’s reelection campaign on the horizon in 2012, the White House’s attention turned to selling Obamacare, which would become the signature initiative of the president’s first term in office. Without a healthy, well-functioning press corps that could command the attention and allegiance of voters, the White House would have to manufacture its own world of validators to sell the president’s plan on social media—which it successfully did.
As a meeting of Axelrod’s theories with the mechanics of social media, though, the selling of Obamacare—which continued seamlessly into Obama’s reelection campaign against Mitt Romney—was a match made in heaven. So much so, that by 2013 it had become the Obama White House’s reigning theory of governance. A Reuters article from 2013 helpfully explained how the system worked: “In Obama’s jargon, getting to yes requires a permission structure.” Asked about the phrase, White House spokesman Jay Carney explained that it was “common usage” around the White House, dating back to Obama’s 2008 campaign.
What the White House understood, and which I came to understand through my reporting on the Iran deal, was that social media—which was now the larger context in which former prestige “legacy” outlets like The New York Times and NBC News now operated—could now be understood and also made to function as a gigantic automated permission structure machine. Which is to say that, with enough money, operatives could create and operationalize mutually reinforcing networks of activists and experts to validate a messaging arc that would short-circuit traditional methods of validation and analysis, and lead unwary actors and audience members alike to believe that things that had never believed or even heard of before were in fact not only plausible, but already widely accepted within their specific peer groups.
The article continue in much more depth. The short version is that Barack Obama was able to enlist an incredibly talented ad man in David Axelrod. Initially applied to campaigns, "permission structures" eventually became the admin's reigning theory of how to get the public to want what the admin wanted, especially on social media and especially as legacy media declined. In effect, the combination of social media and "permission structure" logic enabled the admin to create peer pressure and alter perceptions of consensus and what is considered acceptable as needed. No wonder 88% of students at Northwestern and Michigan pretend to hold more progressive views than they have - they grew up under a system the perceived consensus was systematically manipulated to appear more progressive. However, this mass engineering of consensus directly affects the operators too, who may believe that the consensus they push is the actual consensus. That may explain why some are so surprised when contra narrative messages remain popular in the voting booth.
Now, I can't say for sure whether this permission structure tactic was responsible for the rise and fall of woke. But the timeline seems to match. In particular, Musk's purchase of Twitter seems to play a large role in the downfall of "wokeness" / progressive permission structures. One of the first things Musk did was to change Twitter's ban policies. This made dissent to progressive views easier to see, and consensus harder to create. The layoffs and community notes also probably played a role, as tweets remained with context added instead of being removed by Twitter. Altogether, a key component in creating consensus was no longer available to progressives. Social media and permission structures could create preference cascades in one direction, but they could also be reversed.
That said, I do have a few questions. First, I wonder to what extent Musk was clued in on some of this. Did he try to pull out of the Twitter deal in order to play dumb? Second, is the right doing the same thing now, and will that create the same vulnerabilities going forward?
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David Samuels of Tablet Mag wrote a good article last year on "permission structures" and the development of the concept under Barack Obama.
The article continue in much more depth. The short version is that Barack Obama was able to enlist an incredibly talented ad man in David Axelrod. Initially applied to campaigns, "permission structures" eventually became the admin's reigning theory of how to get the public to want what the admin wanted, especially on social media and especially as legacy media declined. In effect, the combination of social media and "permission structure" logic enabled the admin to create peer pressure and alter perceptions of consensus and what is considered acceptable as needed. No wonder 88% of students at Northwestern and Michigan pretend to hold more progressive views than they have - they grew up under a system the perceived consensus was systematically manipulated to appear more progressive. However, this mass engineering of consensus directly affects the operators too, who may believe that the consensus they push is the actual consensus. That may explain why some are so surprised when contra narrative messages remain popular in the voting booth.
Now, I can't say for sure whether this permission structure tactic was responsible for the rise and fall of woke. But the timeline seems to match. In particular, Musk's purchase of Twitter seems to play a large role in the downfall of "wokeness" / progressive permission structures. One of the first things Musk did was to change Twitter's ban policies. This made dissent to progressive views easier to see, and consensus harder to create. The layoffs and community notes also probably played a role, as tweets remained with context added instead of being removed by Twitter. Altogether, a key component in creating consensus was no longer available to progressives. Social media and permission structures could create preference cascades in one direction, but they could also be reversed.
That said, I do have a few questions. First, I wonder to what extent Musk was clued in on some of this. Did he try to pull out of the Twitter deal in order to play dumb? Second, is the right doing the same thing now, and will that create the same vulnerabilities going forward?
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