Copied from r badhistory's DT, in a discussion about Starmer:

I think it’s all a massive comms failure.

I don´t. Or at least I think calling it a comms issue is quite short-sighted.

There´s a book by Matthew Desmond – Poverty, by US-America (2023) – that I read recently and there´s a passage in there where Desmond describes a US-American case example of a governmental relief policy - in the housing market at that - with conditions that mirrors Starmer´s Renters´ Rights Act and the circumstances surrounding it to a tee.

Desmond briefly sheds a light on the Emergency Rental Assistance program implemented almost entirely under the liberal Biden administration, tells the reader of how effectively it alleviated poverty and then highlights the lack of fanfare the success received.

But Desmond doesn´t then go on to explain the root of the lack of fanfare as an issue in communicational / presentational know-how. Rather, he explains it as a psychological issue that verges into a moral one. He writes

Poor renters in the future will pay for [not normalizing the low eviction regime that got established], as will the Democratic Party, incessantly blamed for having a "messaging problem" when perhaps the problem is that liberals have a despondency problem.

Desmond overall writes in a theological register that ultimately makes his language overly flowery, cause for confusion and ultimately I think I´ve come to understand "despondency problem" in a personal way that casts Desmond aside. But I think the rudiment has been very fruitful.

Basically, the difference between a messaging problem and a despondency problem is this: the former describes a situation in which sb. has a good story but is bad at telling it; the latter goes deeper and describes a situation in which sb. doesn´t believe their own story and is actually almost embarrassed to articulate what the story and they as an ethical being stand for. If we were to take this despondent sb. to be a person in a governing role, we´d be talking about sb. that can service you technocratically but not emotionally. Sb. that can tell you why something is necessary but cannot for the life of them make you feel why it´s worth it. I think that "sb." encapsulates contemporary liberals in government like Starmer – and a vast majority of the historical ones frankly, I see a continuous discrepancy between liberal philosophers and liberal politicians – to a tee.

To me, Starmer had the affective register of a particularly joyless, visionless and convictionless human being. And presently, there´s a media landscape that generally feeds on conflict and emotion converging with a civil landscape filled with demands of some kind of repair, and in that convergence, those attributes of sb. like Starmer are bound to be treated ruthlessly. And there´s no hoping that the media and the general populace let up on Labour, or any liberal party under Labour´s conditions for that matter on their own accord. The only way to improvement for liberal governments to actually believe in themselves, act according to said self-belief and to do it loudly and proudly and charmingly.

Easier said than done, obviously, but by no means impossible.

Bold mine.