How Lessons From Charles Darwin’s Evolutionary Theories Are Being Played Out On The Political Stage
For decades, I have been writing about and instructing PR practitioners who reported to me to pay attention to political happenings.
That’s because my first job in our business was with a political agency, where I worked on local, statewide and U.S. presidential campaigns before joining Burson-Marsteller, where as a senior VP/senior counselor I restructured, managed and played key roles in some of the most significant national and international sports and non-sports programs and traveled the world with high-ranking foreign government officials as a media advisor.
Over the years, I have seen how the solutions to many thorny political situations can be applied to non-political client situations and how working at a non-political agency is often similar to working at a political one.
Because I assume that all of you paid attention in your advanced biology or philosophy courses you know that Charles Darwin, the British naturalist and biologist, is best known for his theory of evolution through natural selection, which is that every species is connected to a previous one. Thus he coined the phase that most people know him for: “The survival of the Fittest.” Right? Wrong. The famous saying was originated by Herbert Spencer, the English biologist and philosopher, who originated the saying after reading Darwin’s writings.
Former President Donald Trump is a prime example of Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Even though polls have always shown that most voters would rather he led a life of playing golf, and that voters would rather have a different Republican run for president, he survives, not because of his popularity with most voters, he lost the popular vote by almost 7 million votes when he was defeated by President Biden in 2020 and by almost 3 million votes when he defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016. But none of his GOP rivals could match his political savvy. He is what Spencer and Darwin might point to as a prime example of “The survival of the Fittest.”
Conversely, President Biden, whose popularity has been on a downward trend even before his disastrous debate with Mr. Trump, could be used as an example of how a once strong species, through evolutionary progress, has been overtaken by a stronger and younger species --Mr. Trump, even though their age differences are not that great. (This is also true in other businesses, notably in baseball; where a player, whose reflexes slow just a bit from one year to the next, can no longer hit a fastball and eventually is replaced by a younger player.) Another example of “The survival of the Fittest.”
But many agency PR practitioners can attest that agency life refutes the “The Survival of the Fittest” theory.” In many situations that I have seen over the years, the motto of PR agencies should be “The Survival of the Unfittest” for the following reasons.
Many careers are shortchanged because of agency rules that require staffers to report to their supervisors and going over a supervisors head will result in a poor evaluation report or even the termination of an employee. The reason for this is because top management really does not know who is doing what and depends on supervisors reports.
Supervisors frequently take credit for the brilliant ideas of people who they supervise.
Office politics often are the reason that a person is promoted to a supervisor’s position while many more proficient staffers remain at the bottom of the ladder.
Because there are so many graduates of communications schools who want a job at an agency, management often replaces experienced pros with newer people who are willing to work for a lower wage. Thus, proficiency is replaced by inexperience at the client’s expense.
When things turn sour supervisors are asked to send in a firing list. In the perfect world the most proficient practitioners would be the last to be terminated. That is not always the case. Often friendship with supervisors will keep a person off the list.
The most frequent complaints from staffer I heard were:
People are getting promoted who don’t know what they’re doing and I have to fix the situation.
My supervisor steals my ideas and takes credit for them with management.
People who come to me for help ate getting promoted and I’m always told your turn will come; it never does.
Top management doesn’t know what’s going on.
For many practitioners in our business, agency life is the inimical of “The survival of the Fittest” theory. It’s “The survival of the Unfittest.”
I can truthfully say, that I’ve witnessed more politics during my non-political agency days than I saw when I worked at a political agency.
