Good Ideas don't Speak for Themselves

Conservatives need to build more PR firms to compete with the Left's narrative dominance

Dammit, Jake.  

Another writing assignment. You know that I’m not Claremont’s in-house talent, right? I run our communications shop. Back-slapping, merry-making, liberal-baiting, idea-transmitting. That’s my line of work. Not scribbling. And certainly not scribbling at a high level. For that, we have Spencer, James, Peachy, and more. 

But my inadequacy got me thinking. Public relations professionals are, perhaps now more than ever, much-needed in the conservative movement. After all, without an ability to communicate what we create, all the white papers at, say, [Redacted] won’t really be worth very much, will they?  

And yet, the right does not seem to invest much in the professional class of public relations professionals. Not like the left, who are adept at packaging every policy proposal with feel-good aesthetics and accompanying verbiage. The right, in contradistinction, is under the impression that good ideas simply speak for themselves. That the public takes account of what’s written at [Redacted] and moves on the suggestions. Good one. 

This is never the case. Ideas need to be midwifed, and that’s what public relations professionals are hired to do. Today, the left owns our entertainment and educational spheres. They own, with the exception of one channel, the cable news. They dominate what’s left of the written universe. And when the right does try and convey some notion of nation-wide importance, the left just as easily shuts down their mode of communication. Bye-bye Twitter handle; so long web page.  

Combatting the machinations of the left takes, to paraphrase the Liberal Oracle, a village. Without public relations professionals, the right will never be successful in communicating its ideas. We need more people who think day and night about how to get around liberal bulwarks and consequential ideas to the American people. We need world-class firms through which these young men and women can train. Edelman and FleishmanHillard ain’t exactly conservative bastions. The time to build these organizations was yesterday. But now will do.

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David Bahr is senior communications director for the Claremont Institute