We All Need to Tell Stories that Strengthen Democracy

Nat Kendall-Taylor in the ABJ today argues that Americans think government is the problem. While not mentioned in the article, that phrase should remind us all of Ronald Reagan, because he saturated communication channels with it. As have scores of far-right conservatives and libertarians for decades.

We should also be reminded of Tocqueville and Hofstadter because this sentiment did not begin with Reagan, though he and his followers have stoked this flame religiously.

As we watch another shutdown play out it is difficult not to conclude that one of their goals is to make democratic governance impossible at least in terms of government capacity to regulate in the public interest (since that means constraining their private sector autonomy).

Kendal-Taylor noted that: “With increasing frequency and on a growing number of issues, Americans are simply throwing up their hands. As a result, they are also unwilling to spend any resource — psychological or financial — to move toward solutions.

In this context, a government shutdown serves as powerful proof of the views many Americans already hold and further evidence that change is impossible.”

When a consistent message from powerful elites encourages average Americans to throw up their hands in frustration…this empowers elites because they are left in a much less crowded version of TR’s ‘arena’ by design.

Our struggle with Trumpism and the shutdown, and how to cover these without empowering Trumpists and anti-democracy forces, is the topic Frank Bruni takes up this week.

Bruni in the NYT took on the complicated challenges facing reporters and mass media outlets as we approach 2020. Citing Dan Rather, he notes…

“When you cover this as spectacle,” Rather said, “what’s lost is context, perspective and depth. And when you cover this as spectacle, he is the star.” Spectacle is his métier. He’s indisputably spectacular. And even if it’s a ghastly spectacle and presented that way, it still lets him control the narrative. As the writer Steve Almond observed in a recently published essay, “He appears powerful to his followers, which is central to his strongman mystique.”

“…even if it’s a ghastly spectacle and presented that way, it still lets him control the narrative.”

Now that is a disturbing fact. But it is a fact nonetheless. In our rush to highlight all the ways Trump tries to rule in a fact-free universe, we need to stop and take a breath and figure out how we can productively address this fact, rather than pretend it does not exits. Because enjoying the trashing of all things Trump as stupid and laughable and juvenile and dangerous…is our version of trying to live in a fact-free universe.

Bruni notes that reporter and talking heads in 2016 “interpreted fairness as a similarly apportioned mix of complimentary and derogatory stories about each contender, no matter how different one contender’s qualifications, accomplishments and liabilities were from another’s.”

Sadly, he does not offer an alternative here to the false equivalency embedded in the common refrain that ‘both sides are doing it’ and ‘a pox on both your houses.’ I do not blame him, because this is a tough one. One so tough I still admire Mann & Ornstein for putting their careers at risk in 2012 in order to take it on for the country.

Bruni observes, “We can’t privilege the incremental over what should be the enduring. It lets Trump off the hook.” We need to ensure that Trump (no elected official or candidate) can alter the rules of the game to ensure that he is let off the hook. Episodic & fragmented, personalized & dramatized news coverage (and readers who appear to prefer it) is an obstacle to accomplishing this. Again, and again it is not his fault because it is a daunting challenge, but Bruni does not offer an alternative here.

On this question Bruni quotes Benenson, the pollster for Clinton’s campaign: “Cable networks have figured out that the most interesting television of the week is the National Football League pregame show, and that if you put enough experts on arguing about something that hasn’t happened yet, people will watch. And that’s what we’re doing with our politics. The media is not using their strength, their franchise, to elevate and illuminate the conversation. They’re just getting you all jazzed up about the game.”

How do we encourage news coverage and analysis that is about the actual game (politics & policy) rather than about a spectacle that privileges distraction and soundbites and drama?

I am sports fan and sometimes I do watch the ‘get them jazzed up for the game’ stuff. But I prefer watching (actually I prefer playing) the actual game. How can we get our citizens to feel the same about the shiny object approach to politics versus observing and participating in the actual game?

According to Bruni reporters need to “quit staging “likability” sweepstakes — a prize more often withheld from female politicians than from male ones. We should buck commercial considerations to the extent that we can and give the candidates’ competing visions of government as much scrutiny as their competing talents for quips or proneness to gaffes.”

But to what extent is this possible, since commercial bias is the most powerful (and least complained about or even noticed) media bias today? I agree, but like Bruni I remain flummoxed on how to get there.

One sign of hope is the rise of leaders who are not white heterosexual Christian men. As one of those men, I say this without hostility toward that group; I say this to express hope that new ideas and new perspectives will help us come up with better and more inclusive and more just solutions…including solutions to the communicative challenges Bruni outlines here.

The persistent 35-40% of Americans (and 85% or more Republicans) who say even now that they support this president is what troubles me most.

“The real story of Trump isn’t his amorality and outrageousness. It’s Americans’ receptiveness to that. It’s the fact that, according to polls, most voters in November 2016 deemed him dishonest and indecent, yet plenty of them cast their ballots for him anyway.”

I continue to believe that this number is (1) disturbing and important and (2) divisible. I believe there are many in that group who have lost faith (as noted above, perhaps for reasons that have to do with far-right conservative messaging) and given up and, for this reason see a disruptor as worth a shot. Some of these might be persuaded back from the edge. Some also only support him because now he is president and they want to get what they can (judges, tax cuts) and some of these might be persuaded back. But I might be wrong or overly optimistic.

“Trump basically ran on blowing the whole thing up,” said Nancy Gibbs, who was the top editor at Time magazine from 2013 to 2017. “So what was it that the country wanted? It’s critically important that we find ways to get at what it is people imagine government should be doing and that we really look at what kind of leadership we need.”

Which brings us back to Kendall-Taylor.

“To distrust and deride government has become part of what it means to be an American.”

Deep suspicion about centralized political authority has been part of being American from before 1776 and it was a core belief driving those who fought to create the US. But even that generation believed democratic governance was possible and we now must take up their challenge in our era: to make democracy both possible and desirable again, even as we remain suspicious of centralized and unaccountable power, public or private.

“What will it take,” Kendall-Taylor asks, “to embed a different narrative in the minds of Americans — one that recognizes the potential of government to support the well-being of its citizens? That’s a story worth telling.”

All of us, journalists and teachers, carpenters and plumbers, lawyers and doctors, farmers and bankers need to both learn to appreciate the importance of telling this story and how to tell it in ways that captures the attentions of others.