“Give me the making of the songs of a nation and I care not who makes its laws.” – Andrew Fletcher, 1703.
Communicators on the Left have mastered and now continually deploy narrative – a strategic weapon far more potent than the World Wide Web (which, however, is proving an extremely efficient delivery vehicle).
Wikipedia describes narrative as, “along with exposition, argumentation and description, narration, broadly defined,…one of four rhetorical modes of discourse.”
Typically, conservatives present our case in exposition, argumentation and description. By empirical observation, these are much less potent persuaders than narrative. Consider, for example, “global warming” (note, though, that, since it has become clear that global warming is unsubstantiated by the data, proponents now call it the vaguer “climate change.”)
The global warming narrative is based entirely on junk science, with the phenomenon, its cause (if it exists) and the corrective steps unsubstantiated by data. And yet we recently saw Secretary of State Hillary Clinton apologizing to the government of India for America being the bad guy in this drama.
This apology came even though the government of India – and China – refuses to adopt the anti-growth and prosperity-throttling policies called for by proponents of this (ultimately preposterous) story.
Why is this happening? The power of narrative. A compelling narrative, artfully deployed, captures the imagination of the people and, to a degree, elitists like Clinton, who unreflectively take a role in a social-consensus driven drama.
Vice President Al Gore, with his powerful use of narrative in his polemic, “An Inconvenient Truth,” successfully elevated the global warming narrative to “songs of a nation” status. At least temporarily.
It is respectfully submitted that narrative is the most powerful force in the creation of policy and in successful political campaigns. When 1980 presidential candidate Ronald Reagan stood dramatically for confidence in the American people, values, and political system – in opposition to statists foreign and domestic – he defeated pessimistic elitist narratives exemplified by President Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech.
Conservatives have many policy prescriptions, yet they often lack a coherent and compelling narrative, and so find themselves at a strategic, losing disadvantage across the board. We must learn the two most prevalent political narrative forms.
One is situational: “Catastrophe looms unless we immediately take heroic measures to save ourselves, our children, and our most cherished values.”
The other is dramatic: Good guy faces bad guy in a moral conflict with survival at stake in a contest yet to be decided, and which requires the listener to join, rather than remaining as a passive observer.
Too often, rehashing the “free market vs. big government” narrative no longer resonates doesn’t work, not because it is wrong, it’s just lacking freshness and novelty, and seems irrelevant to many in a prosperous era.
The Right must learn to create compelling narrative, beginning with the “populism vs. elitism” approach suggested by public intellectual Jeff Bell to remind us that elitism, taken too far, becomes despotism.
Such a resonant and effective organizing tool can bring together the Right’s many tribes who, as Frank Meyer taught, can be an irresistible force when they come together.
Ralph Benko is a Washington, DC public and government affairs consultant and principal of Capital City Partners, LLC. He is the author of The Websters’ Dictionary: How to Use the Web to Transform the World (The Websters’ Press, 2008, www.thewebstersdictionary.com.
