THE NARRATIVE CONSTRUCTION OF POLITICS

From the Daily Kos:

Debating Political Philosophy

I commented yesterday on the mounting discussion among Democrats about the need for a political philosophy for our party. Primarily, the discussion has centered on distinguishing between policy and ideas. Democrats have sound and popular policies--such as raising the minimum wage--but as a party, we lack a fundamental and agreed-upon philosophy to support those policies (and, in practical terms, to sell them to the American people).

Frank Rich, in the (subscription-restricted) New York Times, touches on the need for a party narrative:

What's most impressive about Mr. Rove, however, is not his ruthlessness, it's his unshakable faith in the power of a story. The story he's stuck with, Iraq, is a loser, but he knows it won't lose at the polls if there's no story to counter it. And so he tells it over and over, confident that the Democrats won't tell their own. And they don't - whether about Iraq or much else. The question for the Democrats is less whether they tilt left, right or center, than whether they can find a stirring narrative that defines their views, not just the Republicans'.

Click here for the rest.

This is the intersection of the two major interests that drive my life: politics, obviously, is one, and film, television, and theater make up the other--storytelling, in short. The Times' cultural critic, Frank Rich, once known as the "Butcher of Broadway" when he was that paper's main theater critic, clearly sees the connection himself. Politics, in many ways, is a story, an ongoing serial telling the tale of what it means to be an American. Political battles, then, are waged in terms of manipulating that story in a preferred direction. And the stakes are high. Power and billions of dollars are on the line, and whoever's story manages to capture the media and electorate's collective imaginations wins big. The Republicans are currently extraordinarily good storytellers. The Democrats, who, with their New Deals and New Frontiers, were once masters of political storytelling themselves, are now awful at it. That is, they're not even trying, and no attempts appear to be in the works, which is why, when coupled with the effect of years of gerrymandering which have created countless "safe seats" in Congress, there is great potential for the GOP to retain Congress this fall in spite of their abysmal approval ratings. The Democrats desperately need to craft an inspiring narrative about what it means to be an American, right now, or they will continue to languish in a cesspool of political irrelevancy.

This notion, the political narrative, cannot be undersold. I know that the idea seems intuitively obvious, but there is some hardcore psychological research to support the notion that people literally think in terms of stories.

From Wikipedia:

The Narrative Construction of Reality

In 1991, Bruner published an article in Critical Inquiry entitled "The Narrative Construction of Reality." In this article, he argued that the mind structures its sense of reality through mediation through "cultural products, like language and other symbolic systems" (3). He specifically focuses on the idea of narrative as one of these cultural products. He defines narrative in terms of ten things:

1. Narrative diachronicity: The notion that narratives take place over some sense of time

2. Particularity: The idea that narratives deal with particular events, although some events may be left vague and general.

3. Intentional state entailment: The concept that characters within a narrative have "beliefs, desires, theories, values, and so on" (7).

4. Hermeneutic composability: The theory that narratives are that which can be interpreted in terms of their role as a selected series of events that constitute a "story." See also Hermeneutics

5. Canonicity and breach: The claim that stories are about something unusual happening that "breaches" the canonical (i.e. normal) state.

6. Referentiality: The principle that a story in some way references reality, although not in a direct way that offers verisimilitude.

7. Genericness: The flipside particularity, this is the characteristic of narrative whereby the story can be classified as a genre.

8. Normativeness: The observation that narrative in some way supposes a claim about how one ought to act. This follows from canonicity and breach.

9. Context sensitivity and negotiability: Related hermeneutic composability, this is the characteristic whereby narrative requires a negotiated role between author or text and reader, including the assigning of a context to the narrative, and ideas like suspension of disbelief.

10. Narrative accrual: Finally, the idea that stories are cumulative, that is, that new stories follow from older ones.

Bruner observes that these ten characteristics at once describe narrative and the reality constructed and posited by narrative, which in turn teaches us about the nature of reality as constructed by the human mind via narrative.

Click here to read more about psychologist Jerome Bruner.

In other words, stories are one of the two or three significant ways that human beings make sense out of reality. Sure, everybody knows that stories are either fictional or about other people, but they have inestimable influence over us despite such knowledge--that's why corporations spend billions on advertising even though we all know what they're trying to do; ads, especially the mini-narratives of television commercials, work. We now live in an era where the mainstream news media and much of the electorate have constructed reality for themselves in terms of conservative narrative. Consequently, it is wildly difficult to for liberals to find any opening for advancement of policy. It's like suggesting that the prince simply use a ladder to get to Rapunzel instead of climbing up her hair--the idea just doesn't fit the story. What they desperately need is a good counter-narrative, a storyline that puts people above profits, that makes such an idea far more American than cutthroat capitalism appears to be now.

This is probably a pretty easy thing to do. If only the Democrats would do it.

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