Telling Stories

I agree completely with the conclusion Lance Morrow draws in his Wall Street Journal op-ed. The political stories being told by both of our major political parties, their “narratives”, are sadly in need of refurbishment. Here’s his peroration:

Update the archetypes. Ditch the sanctimony. A country may be destroyed by indulging its archaic premises and the smug, self-righteous stories it tells itself.

For my taste he dwells too long on the Democratic narrative, glossing over the Republican narrative to some degree. Here’s the closest he get to a side-by-side comparison:

A master theme of the left (stated approximately): The Orange Man is the Red Queen of White Supremacy. A favorite on the right: In regions of the left’s many weirdnesses, men are women, and women men—whatever their hearts desire. Men have babies, and women probably don’t exist at all.

I would analyze it this way. Each side has both a positive and a negative narrative.

The Democrats’ positive narrative is the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, expanded to include not just gender but preference. He does a pretty good job of synosizing both here:

That civil-rights morality play, unambiguous and righteous in its story lines, succeeded almost too well in its effects. It offered a titanic clash of archetypes. A consensus of the storytellers ordained that the Good Guys were of one type—the pure of heart, the selfless elites, saints and martyrs, all of them virtuously leftist in their politics and soon, in the Vietnam time, to make up the armies of dissent against that misbegotten war. The Bad Guys represented another type: They were rednecks, bigots and white supremacists. They became, in the fullness of time and in the eyes of the left, the followers of Mr. Trump. The storytellers’ crude but powerful version said that the villains of that earlier time morphed, over generations, into the deplorables of MAGAland.

He doesn’t offer a comparable synopsis of the Republicans’ narrative. Let me try. The positive narrative is that government should deal with the needs of ordinary people—safety, security, prosperity—and much of that can be accomplished by reducing the scope of government. The negative narrative is that Democrats are dishonest, elitist, self-serving, and out of touch, not just with the needs of ordinary people but with reality itself.

I detect a kernel of truth in each of those narratives. For my own part I would find the Democrats’ narrative more compelling if gender dysphoria were removed from the DSM. I would find the Republicans’ narrative more compelling if they were offering solutions other than tax reduction for an array of problems not being addressed by the private sector. Please take note: those two narratives are remarkably close to Megan McArdle’s assessment: “the party out of power is crazy; the party in power is smug and out of touch”.