Political Power of Stories

Get Me Rewrite!
Stories make the world go around. So how come liberals can’t tell one?
Joshua Wolf Shenk
Mother Jones

George W. Bush has stationed 135,000 troops in harm’s way for a cause that seems increasingly hopeless and he’s presided over one of the worst economies of the century. He ran promising to be a centrist, lost the popular vote, and went on to govern from the radical right. He used a terrorist attack he might have stopped to justify a war that he already wanted to start.

So how come Kerry is running no better than even with Bush--this after a month of battering news from Iraq, from the 9/11 comission, and from Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack? Why is it that even the sickening revelations of abuse in the Abu Ghraib prison, while certainly hurting Bush’s numbers, have not translated into a decisive gain for Kerry?

The answer is that Bush and his party know how to tell a good story and their opponents do not.

The right wing has an elemental and appealing narrative--the ideological equivalent of a Jerry Bruckheimer film or a Tom Clancy novel, the sort that’s hard to turn away from, even if you suspect you’re being suckered. Stories operate on our primitive, reptilian brains. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion wrote. This isn’t just a pretty line but an artful statement of neuropsychological reality.

According to Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh, & Co., the president of the United States of America is a great gentle warrior, the scion of a noble line: He’s a Texas cowboy descended from George Washington descended from the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. He’s a man of God and family. Truly, the story goes, he’s a simple man--wanting only to care for his own, tend to his plot of land, and go to church on Sunday.

But this man is besieged--on all sides--by the rabid armies of the Godless and the cowardly. By terrorists and evil-doers. By bureaucrats who want to run his life. By liberals who want to tax him. By drug dealers, welfare mothers, and atheists.

What is he to do? He would dearly love not to fight. But his enemies are climbing the walls of his castle. The killer has got a knife to his little girl’s throat. Not fight? Fight he must.

It’s plain why this story works as well as it does. It presents a classic hero and a journey that reaches down through the brain into the gut. And Republicans can translate it into simple, clear lines of action: Wage war and don’t stop. Cut taxes. Put bad guys in jail, or to death.

Many on the left harbor the delusion that Republicans can be dislodged by criticism of this story. There are two main styles of critique. The first is ironic and humorous (see Al Franken). The second style is serious and raging, bordering on caustic (see Tim Robbins' “Embedded.”)

But, by definition, critics are at the margins. However loud they shout from the sidelines, they’ll never get in the game. The game is for those who can tell a story.

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