This Election Year’s Tournament of Narratives What matters when making our choice in November. by Bruce Thornton
https://www.frontpagemag.com/this-election-years-tournament-of-narratives/
Every presidential election season, the media publicize explanatory tales that profile each candidate’s character, virtues, and vices, and identify and promote the critical issues, polices, and goals at stake in our choice. In the postwar period, new technologies of communication––especially the internet with its hordes of commentators and podcasters, cataracts of information, non-stop serial polling, and instant photos and videos available 24/7––have multiplied and intensified the narratives that shape the political parties’ platforms, and the voters’ opinions.
This November will be Donald Trump’s third presidential election, and it comes laden with narratives that Democrats and establishment Republicans, both stunned by Trump’s 2016 upset of consummate insider Hillary Clinton, have employed to demonize the president and salve the wounds to their arrogant self-regard and insider hauteur.
We all know the “narremes,” the basic, repeated verbal units, that comprise the story: Russian election interference, the Steele dossier, and threats to “our democracy” from the January 6 “insurrectionist,” to name a few. Trump himself is the villain of the tale: a semi-fascist admirer of autocrats, a warmonger, and plotter of coups; a rapist, racist, sexist, Islamophobic Hispanophobic heartless Scroogian capitalist, and an uneducated boor, crass philistine, and crude jingoist.
These are just a sample of the favorite slurs endlessly recycled by the corporate media PR firm and their clients–– the progressive, leftist “woke” Democrats and their NeverTrump Republican fellow travelers.
Joe Biden’s narremes, of course, have been starkly different. For one obvious thing, the postwar partisan politicization of the media today has reached a critical level not just of partisanship, but blatant lies and denials of patent facts, a carry-over of the media’s “slobbering love affair,” as Bernie Goldberg put it, that they had carried on with Barack Obama.
Abetted by social media and C-suite colluders, in 2020, the media marketed Biden as the anti-Trump: a stabilizing unifier, a steady, experienced “centrist” hand familiar with both our domestic “democratic norms,” and the globalist, technocratic political order.
After Trump’s vulgar chaotic tantrums, the narrative went, Ol’ Joe will be the “grownup” in the room, the “tolerant” empath who can restore manners, decorum, and regular order at home, and abroad mend our alliances and international relationships that Trump had besmirched with his “mean tweets,” America First jingoism, crude insults, and belittling nicknames.
Most important, Biden came to the election graced with the Obama halo that reflected onto him righteousness when it came to matters of race. He overturned Trump’s “racist” policies of closing the southern border to “newcomers,” Biden’s Orwellian synonym for illegal aliens. He undid Trump’s cruel policies that separated families, and put children in cages, policies that were products of his endemic white supremacist predilections. The photographs accompanying this canard, by the way, were actually from the Obama administration.
The globalist, we-are-the-world “rules-based international order” would also be restored after Trump’s “Make America Great Again” narrow-minded parochialism. Trump had scolded Nato for its chintzy defense spending; he withdrew from the Paris accords that claimed to reverse “catastrophic global warming” with “clean renewable” energy; and he risked global peace by rejecting Barack Obama’s legacy triumph of “diplomatic engagement,” the Iran “nuclear deal.” In short, Biden reversed all of Trump’s policies and reforms, most of which had been successful.
The Dems haven’t had to adjust much their Trumpophobic 2020 narrative for this election. The current criminalizing of Trump using the corrupted FBI and DOJ that began during Obama’s lame-duck months, has been expanded to multiple indictments by federal prosecutors and judges, who have invented laws and procedures redolent of one-party autocratic states. These show-trials are getting 24/7 Pravda levels of coverage and spin from social media and establishment newspapers and television news-readers.
But a new narrative has developed among some Dems. Biden’s obvious physical and cognitive decline has repeatedly been caught on viral videos––stumbling, falling, wandering around stages with a thousand-yard stare; memory lapses, slurring his speech, and translating his sentences into surreal gibberish.
And don’t forget the depredations of the Biden family criminal enterprise, and the failures of his administration that concern ordinary voters––an epidemic of violent crime, rising costs of food and energy, and the chaotic southern border pouring fentanyl, criminals, and possible terrorists into the country.
Then there’s the “woke” assaults on families, for example, by transgenderist curricula, and consistent polling––Trump now leads Biden by five points in a head-to-head match-up–– that confirm the anger and anxieties of voters, including increasing numbers of black and Latinos who are swinging their support to Trump. Given all those portents of disaster, a new narreme has arisen: Biden must be shuffled aside and replaced.
But time is running out for such a move, and there are no viable Democrat candidates on whom the centrist remnants of the party, and the new Jacobins of its left, can agree. Moreover, Israel’s defensive war against the genocidal murderers of Hamas has created a new young constituency and its preposterous, mendacious narrative: Israel is the genocidal, racist occupier of a “stolen” Arab homeland, and is waging a vicious eliminationist war against the “innocent Palestinians,” three-quarters of whom, by the way, support Hamas’s ghoulish mayhem.
This development puts the party in a bind. American Jews for many years have been a loyal constituency for Democrats. But Biden has been wooing Muslim-Americans in Michigan, large numbers of whom support Hamas and the destruction of Israel. They are angered by Biden’s lack of zeal for an Israeli cease-fire, and even his despicable betrayal of Israel by not vetoing an objectively antisemitic UN Security Council Resolution hasn’t stopped the angry protests by the Hamas lobby.
Indeed, last week pro-Palestinian protestors staged a noisy demonstration near where Biden, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton were holding a fund-raiser. Screamed chants, shrill whistles, and serial disruptions of the three presidents’ panel discussion suggest that more such displays will be a regular feature of this election going forward. And the Dems’ pandering to these supporters of heinous terrorists will likely peel more voters away from Biden, given that Americans in general have consistently supported Israel in its conflicts with Palestinian Arabs.
Finally, a persistent narreme is the “pox on both your houses” attitude of some voters who dislike both candidates. This sentiment is giving traction to third-party candidates like Robert F. Kennedy. Most likely, his voters will be Democrats. The Mercutio choice also caters to those political guildsmen who idealize a past when ordinary voters knew their place, and bipartisan “solving problems” was the rule, politicians had politesse, gravitas, and principle, and selflessly worked for the public weal rather their own or their faction’s power.
Wall Street Journal columnist Joseph Epstein wrote about this disaffection with our partisan presidential election duels:
The sad fact seems to be that we haven’t had an American president that the country has been able to feel good about for more than half a century. What would such a president be like? He would in his person convey honor, courage, generosity of spirit. He wouldn’t try to unite the extreme factions of both parties—the Bernie Sanderses and AOCs, the Chip Roys and Matt Gaetzes—but through his own example and regular demonstration of what is best for the country he would show the absurdity of both left- and right-wing extremes. A member of one of our two major political parties though he would be, he would somehow make clear that as president, he was hostage to no political party but president of all the people.
But such Rodney King wishful “Why can’t we all get along?” thinking misunderstands human nature, which in the main is driven mostly by “passions and interests” rather than lofty principles and noble intentions. Political factions are formed around the former, not so much the latter, and seek power to realize those aims. Moreover, history shows us that humans can’t be engineered by science to be virtuous and possess “honor, courage, generosity of spirit,” as Epstein’s ideal president would.
For as James Madison said, faction, passions, and interests are “sown into the nature of man.” We can’t rely on those virtues appearing consistently, for every human is flawed and corruptible.
That belief is the foundation of our constitutional political order, which divides, checks, and balances the powers of governing. Thus the “ambition” to acquire and increase power, Madison wrote, “must be made to counter ambition.” Only thus can power be limited before it can expand enough to compromise our freedoms and turn tyrannical.
Condemning both sides as equally flawed, then, in the end turns into a specious moral equivalence, which frequently is dishonest and incoherent. In our political world, one party––not always consistently or coherently enough––is the party of honoring and nurturing the Constitutional order of citizen rule and the Bill of Rights, which is to say the party of freedom.
The other party is the progressive technocracy and is ruled not by the people, but by the centralized, concentrated power of big government and its ever-expanding bureaus and agencies whose “experts” invade our civil society of businesses, families, churches, schools, and personal lives, which is to say the party of tyranny.
Whatever the narratives, only the contrast and conflict of freedom and tyranny count when making our choice in November.
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