Humans are hungry for a story.  I’m not saying anything you don’t know.  A speaker who does not incorporate a few stories is a very dry speaker indeed.  When we hear even a lying politician say “let me tell you a story…” we are momentarily attentive.  Every ad we see tells a little story.  Stories are how we learn about life.

No less an expert than Adolf Hitler (no matter how we may hate the success he had, none can doubt the magnitude of that success) emphasized the importance of story in creating a community of believers.  He was constantly creating the myth, constantly reinforcing the worldview founded on that myth, a worldview that was the foundation for his actions.   That’s why he loved the work the unscrupulous fellows in the British, French and American War Departments did during the World War.  Give the folks at home, and the soldiers in the trenches, a vivid and horrible story they can sink their teeth into, digest, take to heart!  That the story is a lie makes no difference.  In fact, Hitler noted, a lie is often more powerful than the truth.

During a brief stint in a doctoral program in history I was determined to write the definitive study of how propaganda and marketing have shaped our world more than any other single force.  The professor I pitched the idea to, that the Nazis were the innovative pioneers of the modern marketing-driven use of a party controlled mass media to influence the citizenry, shook his head skeptically, scaled my project way back.  The hubris of my intended task seems obvious to me now too, as I think of it, but I believe as firmly now as I did back then that the Nazis showed how it was done, developed many of the techniques now standard for influencing public perceptions.   Events are increasingly supporting my thesis.  

The Big Lie, endlessly repeating useful untruths in the mass media, is now a familiar idea that doesn’t raise too many eyebrows.  It’s old hat.  “Yeah, yeah, Saddam bought aluminum tubes in Africa for his nuclear centrifuge.  Yeah, he had WMD.  Yeah, we don’t want ‘the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud’.  Yeah, Saddam was a big supporter of Bin Laden, even though Bin Laden wanted him dead.  Yeah, Muhammad Atta met with agents of Saddam in Prague before the September 11 attacks.  Yeah, Saddam was behind 9/11.  Yeah, we’ll fight them over there so we don’t have to fight ’em here.  Yeah, freedom’s on the march, combat operations are over, we have prevailed over Evil.  Yeah, so what’s your point?”

At the risk of seeming partisan I will make an observation others before me have made.  The Republican party is much more successful in telling (and selling) a coherent and moving story than the Democrats are.  The Republican story goes like this:

 Once upon a time this great, innovative country was greater still.   We had values that were a light unto the world, not least of them democracy, fairness, freedom.  We are now in a crisis, caused by Americans who take freedom for granted (0r outright hate our freedom), do not want to work, want to blame others, especially successful people, for their troubles.  And Big Government, and we all know how corrupt that is, is right in the middle of the problem.

The problem is all those illegal aliens getting free medical care and free college educations, old people expecting the rest of us to subsidize their rent and heating bills, pay for their fantastically expensive health care, young lazy people who feel entitled to take our money so they don’t have to work.  (We’ll leave aside the politically explosive, nagging, unspoken question of what those people we used to call niggers actually want.  Let’s stay on the high road and focus on getting America back to greatness.)  

We need to give complete freedom to the free market.  The free market is great because it’s free.  The leaders of the free market must be free to innovate, to take great risks for potentially enormous, unregulated rewards.  To regulate these rewards would hamper job-creating entrepreneurs in their enthusiasm to take the risks that have made this country the world’s leading innovator for more than two centuries.  Besides, Big Government, who would decide on and enforce regulation, is bad, part of the problem, not part of any solution.

Democrats have no counter-narrative, none.  At best they will quibblingly point out that big government is bad, except when it enforces the rights of former slaves not to be lynched, except when it gives women the right to vote, rescues flood victims, frees hostages, builds highways, bridges, tunnels, schools, firehouses, police stations, avoids foreign wars through diplomacy, guarantees that old people who’ve worked their whole lives don’t have to eat dog food too many times a week, that people who’ve lost their jobs in a trashed economy do not also automatically have to lose their homes.  It’s no story, it’s a yawn, however true it all might be.

Democrats, if they’re feeling brave, will point out that the terms used, like “free market”, are problematic, misleading.  If the free market is free to employ the cheapest laborers to be found in a global marketplace, to pollute air, water and earth as much as needed to make maximum profit, to pay the lowest possible taxes and exercise the greatest possible political influence by buying unlimited political advertising, maybe the price for that “free” market is a bit more than the rest of us can afford.

Or the “Death Tax.”  Shoot, everyone is against death and tax.  The Republicans control that debate right there, having coined the phrase that frames and decides the debate.  I don’t recall the amount of millions that trigger the “Death Tax”, I think it’s up to eight million, but it’s many more millions than 98% of Americans will see in their lifetimes, let alone have the chance to leave tax-free to their daughter, Paris Hilton.

Paris, there’s a story.  We can all picture her face, feel the emotions this rich girl inspires, be they the envy of those who call her a “celebutard” or the love of those, like me, who observed the true tenderness she displayed giving pleasure to her lover in that short video.  But, anyway, you see how much more interesting a story is than talking about “politics”?  A story speaks for itself, politics is an unbearable swirl of depressingly complicated detail that can best be understood by oversimplifying its complexities into a good story.

I love you, Paris.