Strategy
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Not only were there an “infinite number of narratives,” they could be considered from many vantage points, including history, psychology, sociology, ethnology, and aesthetics. Barthes believed it possible to identify common structures through deductive theory.31 The next year another member of this group, Tzvetan Todorov, introduced “narratology,” which involved distinguishing the component parts of a narrative and considering the relationships between them. What was narrated was the story, a sequence of events with characters, held together by a plot line that gave it structure and explained causation—why the events occurred when they did. Discourse described the presentation of the story, what determined its eventual appearance to an audience.
By the late 1970s, there was talk of a “narrative turn” in social theory. A recollection of a conference at the University of Chicago in 1979 spoke of an “aura of intellectual excitement and discovery, the common feeling that the study of narrative, like the study of other significant human creations, has taken a quantum leap in the modern era.” It was “no longer the province of literary specialists or folklorists borrowing their terms from psychology and linguistics but has now become a positive source of insight for all the branches of human and natural science.”32 It was later reported how during the 1980s the social sciences became caught up in a “wave of theorizing about narratives,” inspired by the belief that analyzing the stories people told would provide vital insights into how they lived their lives.33
Narratives were often described as being interchangeable with stories, and stories could be extremely simple. The argument that anything could count as a story reflected their importance in basic human communication. Mark Turner argued that life would be chaotic without simple stories turning pieces of information into a coherent pattern. Even babies developed links between containers, liquid flows, mouths, and taste in a story that eventually became entitled “drinking.” With only partial information, these simple stories facilitated imagining the next step or what happened before. Narrative imagining, argued Turner, was fundamental both to our ability to explain and our ability to predict.34 William Calvin suggested a close relationship between our ability to plan and our construction of narratives. “To some extent, we do this by talking silently to ourselves, making narratives out of what might happen next and then applying syntax-like rules of combination to rate a scenario as unlikely, possible or likely.”35
Here was a concept that could explain how meaning was given to lives and relationships and how the world was understood. It fit in with theories of cognition and accounts of culture. The narrative turn therefore captured the uncertain confidence about what was actually known, the fascination with the variety of interpretations that could be attached to the same event, and the awareness of the choices made when constructing identity. It highlighted the importance of human imagination and empathy while challenging the idea of a perfect knowledge of an external reality.
Soon the academic interest in narrative found its way into the public domain. Psychologists used narratives as forms of therapy, lawyers employed them in their efforts to move juries, and claimants needed them when seeking redress. Over time, the self-conscious use of narratives extended to all types of political actors. Initially the major interest appears to have been among radical groups and others who were seeking to compensate for a lack of material resources. It was another way the weak could take on the strong: less muscle but better stories. A battle of narratives was to be preferred to a real battle. Eventually any political project, from whatever part of the spectrum, demanded its very own narrative.
The narratives could have a number of functions: means by which support could be mobilized and directed, solidarity sustained and dissidents kept in line, strategies formulated and disseminated. Their role, not always particularly deliberate, could be detected in the movements coming out of the counterculture, such as those demanding rights for women and gays and other marginalized groups. Their use gained credence from Foucauldian type analysis, using stories of victimhood, humiliation, and resistance to let people in similar situations gain strength from being part of a wider movement, linking their private frustrations with a public cause.
They would challenge stories firmly embedded in the culture, casting doubt on their veracity and fairness. As early as the 1950s, for example, Native Americans began to object to the classic westerns, which pitched brave cowboys against savage Indians. Italian Americans complained about their image being dominated by mobster movies. The civil rights movement depended on the contrast between the comfortable presentations of the American dream and the black experience. The black singer Paul Robeson deliberately changed the lyrics of “Ol’ Man River” from “I gets weary and sick of trying, I’m tired of living and scared of dying” to “I keep trying instead of crying, I must keep fighting or else I’m dying.”36 In this case there was an established sense of oppression, and the question was whether much could be done about it. Many of the movements of the late 1960s began with far less clarity about whether personal feelings of frustration could be translated into political action. Here autobiographical stories could help otherwise disparate individuals find common cause through their shared experiences. In 1972 in the first issue of Ms., a magazine for the women’s movement, an article by Jane O’Reilly described the immediate understanding a group of women had to another’s story. This was the “click,” a moment of recognition, “that parenthesis of truth around a little thing that completes the puzzle of reality in women’s minds—the moment that brings a gleam our eyes and means the revolution has begun.” Soon “click” had become a “feminist term of art,” a way of referring to a shared understanding of the deeper meaning of an apparently banal comment.37
Narratives describing social situations from the perspectives of those who in the past might have been belittled or marginalized found their way into more established literary forms, such as novels, movies, and even situation comedies. Black and gay characters were shown in positive lights, women were expected to be more assertive, and male assertiveness and insensitivity was often derided. Especially on TV, the story-telling might be controlled, with the progressive themes sanitized so as to render the new characters safe and unthreatening. There was no single, approved narrative of what it meant to be a “liberated” woman or a gay man operating among “straights.” It was easier to confront white prejudice when the victims epitomized goodness, for example, a figure such as Sidney Poitier as the idealistic physician in the 1967 movie Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. It took some time before the full complexity of black experience and its encounters with white society could be portrayed. Change of this sort was only barely politically directed or controlled, although political leaders were obliged to give their views on where it all might be leading. So the process was nothing so simple as one paradigm or narrative being changed for another. The diversity of the contributions and their cumulative effects altered the terms of the debate, but this was not the result of any deliberate strategy.
According to David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla, who were at the fore in exploring the new forms of politics made possible in the information age, stories could express “a sense of identity and belonging” and communicate “a sense of cause, purpose, and mission.” This would help a dispersed group cohere and guide their strategy. They knew the sort of action expected of them and the message to be conveyed.38 Within a movement, inspirational stories might be told to enthuse activists, exemplary ones to reinforce approved norms, and cautionary tales to warn of the danger of rash moves or deviations from the agreed line. In developing support, stories could be told to illustrate the core message and to undermine the claims of opponents. This also meant that internal arguments about strategy could take the form of debates over narratives. Those nervous about strategic departures might offer warnings based on reminiscences about how campaigns were waged in the past and how well they fared.
The greatest challenges came with attempts to influence those who were not natural su
pporters. As the concept moved into the political mainstream, there was talk of grand narratives as setting the basic terms in which a political group would wish to be identified, its aims and values, and its relationship to the issues of the day. Once this narrative was set, then individual episodes might be “spun” by specialist communicators known as “spin doctors,” who understood the media and made it their business to influence the daily news agenda and frame events.39 Convincing the public that the economy was really doing well when the latest data suggested the opposite, or that the murky past of a candidate for high office was irrelevant, required a keen sense of media methods and schedules, including how to time news announcements and brief key journalists. Such narratives were not necessarily analytical and, when not grounded in evidence or experience, could rely on appeals to emotion or suspect metaphors and dubious historical analogies. A successful narrative would link certain events while disentangling others, distinguish good news from bid tidings, and explain who was winning and losing.
The impact of these ideas, whether framing paradigms or discourses—or propaganda, consciousness, hegemony, belief-systems, images, constructs, and mind-sets for that matter—was to encourage the view that a struggle for power was at root a struggle to shape widely accepted views of the world. In the past, a similar understanding had led socialists to prepare for long campaigns of political education, conducted by means of pamphlets and lectures. This was now a media age and the opportunities to shape and disseminate opinions and presentations of the truth were now many and various. The techniques pioneered by Bernays, with his intuitive grasp of the importance of framing, now promised an even greater impact. The struggle over images and ideas did not become one between radicals and resisters but between mainstream political activists, with the beneficiaries in the first instance turning out to be the Right rather than the Left.
CHAPTER 27 Race, Religion, and Elections
Don’t you see that the whole aim of newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?
—George Orwell, 1984
IN THE AFTERMATH of President Bush’s victory over Senator John Kerry in November 2004, an election Democrats thought they could and should have won, early postmortems stressed the lack of a narrative. Kerry’s pollster, Stanley Greenberg, observed that the Republicans had “a narrative that motivated their voters.” Robert Shrum, another member of Kerry’s team regretted: “We had a narrative, but in the end, I don’t think it came through.” Top Democrat consultant, James Carville, was harsher. “They say, ‘I’m going to protect you from the terrorists in Tehran and the homos in Hollywood.’ We say, ‘We’re for clean air, better schools, more health care.’ And so there’s a Republican narrative, a story, and there’s a Democratic litany.” William Safire, a columnist with a keen eye for shifts in political language, reported the views of Jim Phelan, editor of a journal on narrative studies, that all this sounded like the development of a new Democrat narrative. “That is, they are selecting events from the campaign and abstracting from them in order to supply a coherent narrative of why Kerry lost. Their coherent narrative is that he had no coherent narrative.” He suggested that if Kerry had won he would be being congratulated for the coherence of his narrative.1
It was the case that Republicans had been paying attention for some time to the use of language to sharpen their political message. In this the key event had been the collaboration between Representative Newt Gingrich and consultant Frank Lutz to take Congress for the Republicans in the 1994 midterm elections. The centerpiece of the campaign was the “Contract with America.” According to Lutz, the word contract was chosen because plan sounded insufficiently binding, promises were made to be broken, pledges went unfulfilled, platforms were too political, oaths too legal, and covenants too religious. The adjective “Republican” was left off to encourage independents to keep an open mind.2 In the actual document, a lot of effort went into talking about personal responsibility, family reinforcement, and tax cuts (“American Dream Reinforcement”). In 1995, the two men combined on a memo for the new Republican Congressmen entitled “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” which urged that they talk of themselves using such words as “opportunity, truth, moral, courage, reform, prosperity” and portray their opponents in term of such words as “crisis, destructive, sick, pathetic, lie, liberal, betray.”3
Even before the 2004 presidential election, anxious Democrats who specialized in language, notably the linguist George Lakoff, had been urging that attention be paid to the clever way that issues were being framed to put Democrats on the defensive (for example, talking about the “inheritance tax” as the “death tax”). Once the conflict was being fought in the enemy’s language, too much had been conceded. To Lakoff the great challenge was to turn these frames around so that Americans came to see the issues with new ideas. “Reframing is social change.”4 After the election, he pressed home his point, insisting that big philosophical debates were arguments over metaphors, and that impact of facts depended on the frames with which they were understood.5 Drew Westen, a clinical psychologist and active Democrat, expressed his frustration by writing a book urging his party to learn to appeal to voters’ emotions. It was enthusiastically endorsed by Bill Clinton and Westen appears to have been read carefully and consulted by the Democratic field during the 2008 campaign.
The problem, Westen suggested, was that Democrats wanted to believe that campaigns were about issues and that it would be possible to appeal to the rationality and better nature of voters. Unfortunately, human beings are barely rational creatures. Instead, they respond to messages which tug on their emotions and are prone to feel as much as see the world. “Most of the time, this battle for control of our minds occurs outside of awareness, leaving us as blind spectators to our own psychodrama, prisoners of the images cast on the wall of our skulls.” Republicans understood this and developed a narrative of themselves as on the side of patriotism and God. Democrats were soft and fuzzy, inattentive on crime and limp in facing the nation’s enemies, stuck with rhetoric about fighting for the working people of America as if the country was still facing the challenges of the 1930s. When persuading voters to back them, Republicans had no compunction about resorting to negativity, while Democrats continued to act as if they could rise above such aggression, dismissing the negativity as irrelevant and a turn-off for voters.
To remedy the situation, Democrats had to learn to frame issues to their advantage and go on the attack, finding ways of convincing voters that their candidate was in tune with voters’ interests and values, defining the party and its principles in ways that were emotionally compelling. This involved developing a grand narrative that was coherent, using policy positions to illustrate principles and not the other way around. Such a narrative would be simple, coherent, and accessible, not depend on too many leaps of inference or imagination. It could be understood and then told and retold. “It should have a moral, be vivid and memorable, and be moving. Its central elements should be easy to visualize, to maximize its memorability and emotional impact.” It was best to act first, before views had been fully formed, when there might be opportunities to “inoculate” against the opponent’s negativity by acknowledging minor weaknesses. Westen’s basic claim was that elections were “won and lost not primarily on the issues but on the values and emotions of the electorate including the gut feelings that summarize much of what voters think and feel about a candidate and a party.”6
Westen’s proposals, and those of Lakoff, indicated a considerable faith in the power of words and images, encouraging a belief that even the most liberal platform could be embraced by a majority of the electorate if only it was put together with sufficient emotional intelligence and professional media skills. It reflected in its own way a rather dismal view of public opinion as malleable and manipulable, tugged in one direction or another by the quality of rival narratives. The psychologist Stephen Pinker warned that this approach exaggerated the importance of metaphors, which were often used without much
sense of the origins or implications, and of the role of frames. The idea that better metaphors and frames could be pounded into voters’ brains risked turning into a retreat from reason, caricaturing opposing beliefs and underestimating opponents.7 Lutz’s own guide to the use of language acknowledged the importance of framing issues, but his stress was on more basic rules of communication. He aimed for simplicity and brevity; short words and short sentences; attention to consistency, imagery, sound, and texture; and language that was aspirational and offered novelty. Only toward the end of his list did he point to the need to “provide context and explain relevance.” Credibility, he noted, was as important as philosophy. Explicitly addressing Lakoff, he observed that “language alone cannot achieve miracles. Actual policy counts at least as much as how something is framed.”8
Studies of the influence of mass communications gave little encouragement to suggestions that it was easy to shift public opinion in a direction it was not prepared to go. Partisans might be engaged, but the bulk of the target audience tended to be inattentive and distracted, so key messages did not reach many people. People could remain indifferent to issues in which they had little interest and resistant to views which contradicted those already held. Either they deliberately avoided such views or saw them as weak and riddled with error when they did confront them. One account of the relevant research recorded as a core finding that personal influence was more important than mass communication: “Political persuasion is contingent on circumstance. Persuasion grows more likely when campaigns face little opposition, when resistance is diminished, when well-placed sources provide simple and decisive cues, and when history intrudes on attentive citizens.”9