We all want the Sydney Sweeney saga to end, but if it’s going to cost political points for Democrats — not to mention our intelligence — we’d better understand what all the fuss was about. So, let’s power through this.
For those blissfully uninitiated, Sydney Sweeney, the actress, was the face of a new advertisement for American Eagle, where they claimed “she has good jeans.” This is a play of the phrase “good genes,” which, to Sweeney, was a “compliment” and to a small group of extremist left-wingers and media outlets obsessed with a nod to Nazi eugenics.
Out of this, the right spun a whole narrative accusing Democrats of being out-of-touch scolds. Somehow, Democrats have ended up being the ones on the defensive. The whole episode shows confusion, consternation, and a wave of Democrats performatively stating that yes, they, too, think Sydney Sweeney is beautiful. Welcome to 2025.
You may wonder why anyone would be interested in this. But consider this: The very reason this moment exists in the first place — that a simple pun could blow up into a moment in history — highlights something true about the ecosystem of the media we are all part of.
It adds some more to the understanding of the reasons why the Democrats keep losing the culture narrative battle, which, in turn, dictates the winner in elections.
As of late, many of us Democrats, distressed after witnessing the Harris campaign’s collapse (one I supported), have engaged in some soul-searching relating to our loss. I would point out several reasons why it happened, some of which the campaign was able to manage and some outside of their control.
However, a significant portion, perhaps the majority, of the latter category was the national information environment. That’s where the cultural undercurrent began to move against Democrats, and to this day, it has been the reason we’re struggling to find coherent ground.
The left and right information ecosystems are fundamentally asymmetric. Some have chosen to ignore the effort to rectify this and label it “finding a liberal Joe Rogan”, which, to thick-headed folks, is as absurd as it is desperate.
However, the Sydney Sweeney affair highlights the political ramifications of leaving such a chasm unaddressed. No one is going to vote based on what Democrats think about Sydney Sweeney. However, they may likely vote based on whether the left is out of touch with them culturally.
To the right, the media-to-politics pipeline is a straightforward one. In this case, it began with a handful of random right-wing social media accounts noticing the conversation about the American Eagle ad hosted by a handful of ‘hyper-online lefty’ TikTok users, and they began discussing it.
Now, right-wing media figures like Megyn Kelly were discussing it, too. With right-wing media talk comes the spread of the concern to non-political content creators and even more mainstream media like the Washington Post and New York Magazine. It was not long before right-wing politicians, including President Donald Trump, noticed and decided to criticize Democrats.
It became a self-contained loop of complaints with Republicans appearing to score easy points against Democrats, even though no elected Democrat had actually, or planned to, respond to this and, frankly, shouldn’t.
More than just media caused this chain of events. Online messaging is about narratives and their implications, and this invokes the cliché idea that the left is a ‘buzz kill.’ It allows the average person to marvel and utter, ‘Isn’t this absurd?’
And, of course, it is connected to Sydney Sweeney, who is herself a viral lightning rod. But the right had the tools to take this from “a weird thing that happened” to “a thing that for some reason we’re all talking about.”
In a different part of the internet, some conservative women seemed to be performing what looks like actual Nazi salutes on Instagram (though some deny it). In a lot of ways, it showed how dumb the “good genes” controversy was; as we saw during Medhi Hasan’s Jubilee episode, right-wing influencers who want to exclaim they’re Nazi sympathizers don’t exactly use invisible ink.
But it equally served as a reminder that here were people doing an egregious thing, and Democrats did not have the tools to make it stick. Indeed, Democrats have tried for years to tie the genuinely extreme, not just annoying views of the far right to the rest of the Republican Party, and most of the time, it fails.
What is lacking here? In my opinion, there are two critical gaps. The first is that there is a clear lack of investment in existing and future communications technologies among Democrats. The second is that the party fails to appreciate that delivery systems have two critical components: resonance and persuasive value.
Persuasion starts and ends with one’s home. An online constituency is necessary, in this case, a warm and devoted follower base, and share your values and worldview. Partisan media is valuable, and this becomes abundantly clear when observed from the leftist perspective.
The right-leaning “cultural” shifts that have taken place online are a direct result of a self-sustaining, right-wing ecosystem. This ecosystem is self-sustaining and profitable, and is profitable because there is a consumer base that is willing to spend in growing it.
In mid- to left-wing philanthropy, this two-year deadline is far too frequent. Instead of attempting to influence focused elections, there ought to be an overarching cultural environment shifting implantation strategy that is sustained and long-term. It is inevitable that Democrats, in a bid to outsmart Republicans, devolve to merely election-motivated media spending passes as an influencer strategy line.
This is regarding the process of funding, underwriting, and offering stability to profitable media outlets that promote our perspectives to the world. Ben Shapiro, Megyn Kelly, and Charlie Kirk all had the backing of media entities that profited from pushing particular sociopolitical views.
This brings me to the other roadblock on the way to something nice. We have been conditioned to view politics from a “Television” angle, not a digital one. As it is, the “Television” angle often overshadows digital decision-making.
From this angle, we start with a fixed set of beliefs we would like people to adopt. We then test, and I mean we test to a ridiculous degree, messages for persuasion. We deploy paid media to project those messages, at which point we meet public perception for the first time and fight against it. We frame politics as the auctioning off of issues as opposed to the forging of perception.
What is fundamental is that the opposing side grasps the concept of virality as equally important as the question of whether something is labelled as persuasive, and so the right loses all means of logical reasoning. It is the same conservative side that treated the internet as a testing ground for what has heat, and they advanced it up the ladder.
Organic forms of media dictate attention-grabbing form as people consume content. Campaigns only fan the flames of what they already identify is engaging. Especially in a voters-don’t-trust-institutions world, communication that integrates itself to feel as if it is a part of the voter’s reality will always work much better than what is force-fed through advertisements.
This is not to say that campaigns don’t have a role to fulfill, or that advertisements cannot work at all, as the lessons learned from 2024 suggest otherwise. They serve as the final touch. Heavily advertised products face an uphill struggle if there is neglect behind the scenes in story building.
Our industry wrecks itself in only being optimized in return on advertising spending, as opposed to shaping the narrative landscape on which they are fought. Republicans have an always-on machine that SHOWS (never tells) people the story of culture. And that is the only genuine political resonance.
Hope is not all lost. The left-of-center gap is too hungry to ignore, and so is the excess supply that is instantly springing from nowhere. The Bulwark, Mutuals, Heather Cox Richardson, MeidasTouch are just some names growing by the minute on platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, and Substack.
However, startups do take investments, and if funders intend to start their work closer to the election date, it will be too late to make an impact both for this election and the next one.
We know that this kind of reasoning works, and it’s not exclusive to one party. The Democratic presidential campaign and the entire progressive infrastructure turned Project 2025 from a viral oddity into one of the worst negatives of the Trump campaign.
Now, the party is effectively capitalizing on the Jeffrey Epstein saga, after some initial hesitation. Until quite recently, I encountered plenty of people in Washington who argued that Democrats should abandon Epstein and focus on “economic issues” — failing to grasp that Epstein is an economic issue.
He represents and embodies the depredations of elites who do awful things while shielding themselves, and that explanation resonates with many Americans. Social media peddling is a form of marketing that relies on implication as much as on stating facts.
The Sydney Sweeney Show illustrates how generating controversy from harmful societal stereotypes has the potential to produce constructive political results.
As Democrats, we can’t get there until there is political will and the political structures to let people do stuff that gets viral engagement. It will take some different political thinking than ‘we’re used to: the reliance on television-and-press strategies of yesteryear does not work. And when things don’t fit, maybe it is time to get better jeans.’ source
