U.S. VOTES
The triumph of ‘post-truth’ politics
SUCCESSFUL POLITICIANS WIN OVER VOTERS BY SELLING AN ATTRACTIVE NARRATIVE
Pop quiz: Without Googling, what is Hillary Clinton’s campaign slogan? Odds are you haven’t a clue. And that is why heading into Monday’s presidential debate Clinton found herself in a dead heat with the worst candidate in the history of the republic, Donald Trump.
By consensus, the current U.S. election cycle marks the triumph of “post-truth politics.” Farewell forever to the notion that telling the truth — about your policies and opinions, those of your opponent, even the colour of the sky — is in any way necessary, sufficient, or even desirable for electoral success.
The catalyst for this lament for truth is the high levels of support that Trump continues to enjoy, although he breathes, coughs, yawns and belches lies. By one estimate, 91 per cent of what he says is false. Nevertheless, many media outlets continue to deploy their truth squads, dutifully holding Trump’s (and with less relish, Clinton’s) claims to the tempering fires of reason and fact.
Not that it matters, much. While this dogged journalistic commitment to truth is to be cheered, we should probably park any grand hopes that it will have a discernible effect on elections. We’ve been living in a posttruth political ecosystem for almost 40 years now, and Trump is a highly evolved predator in a species of politician that is almost perfectly adapted to the environment.
It all started with Ronald Reagan. During his campaign for president in 1976, he toured the U.S. telling the story of the Chicago welfare queen who allegedly had 80 aliases, 30 addresses and 12 Social Security cards. When you add Medicaid and food stamps, he claimed that her annual tax-free income was more than $150,000. The story wasn’t remotely true, but no matter how often it was debunked by the media, Reagan just kept telling it.
This caused a great deal of consternation among reporters. What were they supposed to do? Keep calling out the lie every time it was told? It seemed impossible to do so without being seen as partisan. And yet how were the media supposed to perform their traditional role of holding power to account if those in power simply smiled, nodded and carried on with business as usual?
Reagan foghorned the emergence of “truthiness” as the defining characteristic of American political culture. And the same concerns reporters had about calling out Reagan are back with Trump, except they are drenched in the accelerants of social media, money and Trump’s incendiary rhetoric. Calling Trump out on his lies seems about as useful as spitting on a forest fire.
But a bigger problem with the desire to truth-squad our way back to reality-based politics is that it misunderstands how political persuasion works. Successful politicians don’t win over voters by giving them a set of plausible facts that, in turn, motivates a set of policies. They sell them on an attractive narrative.
The best politicians, from Reagan to Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, are storytellers. Think back to Reagan’s nose-stretcher about the Chicago welfare queen.
She didn’t exist. But the reason the story had such traction was that it fed into growing anxieties over the expansion of the U.S. welfare state and the loss of a sense of personal responsibility. So maybe it wasn’t true. But it was certainly the sort of thing that could be true in Jimmy Carter’s U.S.
Or remember when Obama said Mitt Romney “backed a bill that outlaws all abortions, even in cases of rape and incest.” It wasn’t true. Yet is it not the case that Republicans continue to wage a relentless campaign against a woman’s right to choose?
In both cases, these claims may be false, strictly speaking. But they are effective because they speak to broader narratives about how each side of the great American partisan divide sees the other.
Political leadership is a form of storytelling. No amount of mere factchecking will ever serve to counteract a narrative that a significant mass of people feels to be true.
This is why some polls now have Trump in a statistical dead heat with Clinton. Sure, his campaign is a pack of lies. But his overarching story — that the U.S. is a nation in decline, that it is being shamed by its trading partners and taken advantage of by its allies, that it is under siege from foreigners — rings true to a substantial proportion of the electorate. For them, the promise to make America great again is an enormously appealing sales pitch.
And again, it does no good to respond by pointing out that the U.S. is still the strongest economy on Earth, the greatest military power, that U.S. Muslims are among the most highly integrated immigrant community in the country. The only effective response to Trump is to tell a better story.
This is where the depths of Hillary Clinton’s failure become obvious. What is her sales pitch to voters? OK, go ahead and Google it — it’s “Stronger Together.”
What does that even mean? What’s the story about the U.S. and the implied promise? No one can say. Clinton herself probably doesn’t know, which speaks to the broader problem — it doesn’t look like she even knows why she wants to be president.
She still may win, despite all this. But it’s her own inability to tell a good story that explains why it’s still an open question.
THE ONLY EFFECTIVE RESPONSE TO TRUMP IS TO TELL A BETTER STORY.