1
OBAMA HAS NO NARRATIVE:
Notes on Why Liberals
Don't Tell Stories
Professor David Ricci
Political Science Department
The Hebrew University
Jerusalem
Prepared for the IDC conference
"The Presidential Election of 2012"
January 6-7, 2013
DR: this manuscript consists of notes which were extracted for
this conference from an outline designed to monitor progress in a
larger research project about political storytelling
Please do not cite this manuscript
without permission of the author
2
OBAMA HAS NO NARRATIVE: Notes on
Why Liberals Don't Tell Stories
by David Ricci
-- scholarly analysis of what happened in the November election has just started -but we can already say that Barack Obama's win in 20121 was modest compared to those
of most recent, re-elected incumbents2 -- furthermore, the margin of victory, which was
smaller than in 2008,3 probably came more from the president's get-out-the-vote
organization than from his liberal platform -- and that platform would have been more
effective if it had projected an attractive "narrative"4
-- at the same time, the Romney candidacy was weak -- the former governor went
too far Right during the Spring primaries, and later, with gaffes such as the 47% slur, he
offended many independent voters in the Fall -- consequently, it is likely that Romney
would have done even worse than he did if his campaign had not resonated with the usual
conservative "narrative" about traditions and markets -- in other words, if Romney had
1
The numbers were 332-206 electoral votes, and 62-59 million popular votes.
2
The re-elected incumbents were FDR in 1936, Eisenhower in 1956, Nixon in 1972, Reagan in 1984,
Clinton in 1996, and Bush in 2004. Of these, only Bush II in 2004 won by less than Obama in 2012, and
that happened only in the Electoral College. The electoral votes were: 1936 (523-8), 1956 (457-73), 1972
(520-17), 1984 (525-13), 1996 (379-159), 2004 (286-251). The popular votes were: 1936 (27-16 million),
1956 (35 - 26 million), 1972 (47- 29 million.), 1984 (54 - 37million), 1996 (47 - 39 million), 2004 (62 -59
million).
3
In 2008, Obama won by 365-173 electoral votes and by 69-59 million popular votes.
4
Later in this paper, I will say more about Obama not having a narrative in 2012.
3
fielded a stronger election day organization, and if as a candidate he had been more
attractive, the president's missing narrative might have cost Obama the election
-- therefore this paper asks (1) why don't liberals like Obama tell stories? -whereupon, if they don't do that, (2) what do they do instead?
I. THE GAP
-- here is the point of departure -- in an age where news and campaigning are
dominated by television and social media, large and far-reaching "stories," i.e., tales,
parables, myths, themes, chronicles, extended metaphors, and so forth, adding up to
"narratives," can often, but not always, generate electoral success -- therefore, failure to
tell them constitutes a political liability for some candidates to public office5
-- the problem is that candidates who offer no stories must recreate their public image
every time they seek election6 -- this is because voters do not see them as firm supporters
of a particular world view which, via consistent stories from one election to the next,
conveniently labels the candidates who espouse those stories
-- in Why Conservatives Tell Stories and Liberals Don't (2011), I described
5
it can also be a liability after election day, in the legislative process -- for example, in recent negotiations
over the "fiscal cliff" between President Obama and Republicans in the House of Representatives -- I will
not explore this political disadvantage in this paper
6
Westen, The Political Brain (2008), p. 169: "…the left has no brand, no counterbrand, no master narrative,
no counternarrative. It has no shared terms or 'talking points' for its leaders to repeat until they are part of
our political lexicon. Instead, every Democrat who runs for office, every Democrat who offers
commentaries on television or radio, every Democrat who even talks with friends at the water cooler, has to
reinvent what it means to be a Democrat, using his or her own words and concepts, as if the party had no
history."
4
a gap on this issue, because, unlike conservatives, liberals don't tell stories, in the sense of
together offering the public a broad vision or overarching narrative -- some liberals may
tell small tales (say, anecdotes) but those don't add up to a large and shared narrative
Liberal Cases
-- the liberal shortfall can be demonstrated via books (a manageable corpus)
rather than articles (whose number is infinite) by (a) politicians, (b) publicists, and
(c) academics
-- for politicians, see Al Gore, Mario Cuomo, Paul Tsongas, Gary Hart, Jimmy
Carter, Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, William Proxmire, Paul Wellstone, Robert
Wexler, Charles Rangel, Jesse Jackson, Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Harry
Reid
-- for publicists, see Robert Borosage, Peter Beinart, Thomas Frank, D. J. Dionne,
Naomi Wolff, William Greider, Naomi Klein, Jonathan Kozol, Barbara Ehrenreich,
Robert Kuttner, Adriana Huffington, Marian Wright Edelman, Rachel Maddow, Will
Marshall, Jared Bernstein, Noam Chomsky, Paul Krugman, Jeff Faux, Thomas Mann,
Norman Ornstein
-- for academics, see John K. Galbraith, Benjamin Barber, Herbert Gans, Richard
Sennett, Neal Postman, Frances Fox Piven, Robert Bellah, Laura Kipnis, Susan Strasser,
Eric Alterman, Robert Putnam, Garrett Hardin, Mark Crispin Miller, Jules Henry,
Christopher Lasch, T. J. Jackson Lears, Todd Gitlin, Daniel Boorstin, Robert Frank, Paul
Blumberg, Andrew Hacker, Paul Wachtel, Robert Reich, Robert Heilbroner
5
-- these works show that liberals promote wide-ranging discussions of an endless
variety of social, political, economic, and environmental problems but do not propose
solutions that can be linked to a shared story line
II. RIGHT VS. LEFT
-- conservatives do not suffer from this impairment -- right-wing advocates (see
Buckley, "The Magazine's Credenda,"1955; Viguerie, The New Right, 1981; Gingrich
and Armey, Contract with America, 1992; Limbaugh, The Way Things Ought to Be,
1993; Magnet, The Dream and the Nightmare, 2000; Delay, No Retreat, No Surrender,
2007; and Feulner, Getting America Right, 2007), promote repeatedly and consistently a
set of concepts that, together, add up to a story line praising traditions and free
markets7 -- for illustration, quote part of Bush II's first inaugural address8
7
Thus Viguerie, The New Right, p. 11: "… a conservative believes in six basic things: (1) a moral order,
based on God; (2) the individual as the center of political and social action; (3) limited government; (4) a
free as contrasted to a planned society; (5) the Constitution of the United States, as originally conceived by
the Founding Fathers; and (6) the recognition of Communism as an unchanging enemy of the Free World"
Or, Gingrich and Armey, Contract with America, p. 4: "… five principles… describe… the basic
[conservative] philosophy of American civilization: individual liberty, economic opportunity, limited
government, personal responsibility, security at home and abroad."
8
(January 20, 2001) "We have a place, all of us, in a long story - a story we continue, but whose end we
will not see. It is the story of a new world that became a friend and liberator of the old, a story of a
slave-holding society that became a servant of freedom, the story of a power that went into the world to
protect but not to possess, to defend but not to conquer. It is the American story - a story of flawed and
fallible people, united across the generations by grand and enduring ideals. The grandest of these ideals is
an unfolding promise that everyone belongs, that everyone deserves a chance, that no insignificant person
was ever born. Americans are called to enact this promise in our lives and in our laws. And though our
nation has sometimes halted, and sometimes delayed, we must follow no other course. Through much of
the last century, America's faith in freedom and democracy was a rock in a raging sea. Now it is a seed
upon the wind, taking root in many nations. Our democratic faith is more than the creed of our country, it is
the inborn hope of our humanity, an ideal we carry but do not won, a trust we bear and pass along…. While
many of our citizens prosper, others doubt the promise, even the justice, of our own country. The ambitions
of some Americans are limited by failing schools and hidden prejudice and the circumstances of their
birth…. We do not accept this, and we will not allow it. Our unity, our union, is the serious work of leaders
and citizens in every generation. And this is my solemn pledge: I will work to build a single nation of
justice and opportunity. I know this is in our reach because we are guided by a power larger than ourselves
6
Liberal Efforts at Repair
-- aware of an electoral liability here, the absence of liberal stories is noted and
explored by, for example, liberals like Waldman, Being Right is Not Enough (2006);
Nunberg, Talking Right (2007); Lakoff, Whose Freedom? (2007); Westen, The Political
Brain (2008); and Alterman, Kubuki Democracy (2011)9 -- it is also a central theme, and
regret, in Sandel, Democracy's Discontents (1998)
-- because serious people on the left worry about the storytelling gap, some of them
suggest big stories that can be shared -- for example, see Greenberg and Skocpol (ed.),
The New Majority (1999) [esp. Faux, Greenberg]; Stiglitz, The Roaring Nineties
(2004); Waldman, Being Right Is Not Enough (2006); Gitlin, The Bulldozer and the Big
Tent (2007); Lakoff, Whose Freedom? (2007); McKibben, Deep Economy (2008);
Wolfe, The Future of Liberalism (2010); Friedman and Mandelbaum, That Used to be Us
(2011); Liu and Hanauer; The Gardens of Democracy (2011); and Frank, The Darwin
Economy (2011)
-- these books show that, when liberals try to tell stories to close the gap, those
they tell separately don't add up to one that gains widespread acceptance as the liberal
narrative -- in which case the problem, and the liability, remain10
who creates us equal in His image." (http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=25853 -- accessed
November 26, 2012)
9
Alterman, pp. 151-158.
10
The failure to formulate a liberal narrative is implicit in Schumer, Positively American (2007),
p. 118 -- there, Senator Schumer (D-NY) describes how, in the hope of matching a Republican capacity
for expressing political aims in clear and consistent ideas (i.e., a shared story), he solicited brief credos
from Democrats via a website referring to his book -- consequently, "An overwhelming number of people
7
Pragmatism and Humanism
-- now, in a situation where liberals don't usually tell stories, what do they do in
politics and, in the process, contribute to public life in America? -- that is, if liberals
choose not to live within stories, how do they deal with the freedom to live without
stories?
-- the answer is that liberals aim not at telling stories (and conforming to them) but
at solving problems11 -- for example, if this doesn't work, do that -- technically, this
approach to public affairs may be regarded as a form of (1) "pragmatism," which tests by
looking at results
-- later, I will discuss the pragmatism of Barack Obama -- meanwhile, let us note that
pragmatism rests on a deep outlook called (2) "humanism" -- humanism is not a popular
term today, partly because rightists denigrate it constantly12 -- but historians see
humanism in the West, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and beyond, as an
optimistic outlook based on confidence in human "agency"13 -- in effect, humanists reject
Edmund Burke's notion that (a) people cannot discover new moral principles or standards
responded with some bright and intriguing ideas…. The suggestions and ideas inspired me. The sheer
variety [emphasis supplied] also underscored the difficulty of the project."
11
Boyer, Myth America (2003), 22-44.
12
For example, J. Edward Rowe, Save America! (1976), pp. 43-44; Phyllis Schlafly, The Power of Positive
Woman (1977), pp. 144-145; John Ankerberg, "The Battle for the Heart and Mind of America," in Hal
Lindsey, et al., Steeling the Mind of America (1995), p. 12-14; and Samuel Blumenfeld, "The Whole
Language/OBE Fraud," in D. James Kennedy, Gary Bauer, John Ashcroft, et al., Reclaiming America for
Christ (1996), p. 192.
13
See Coates and White, The Emergence of Liberalism Humanism (1966) and Greenblatt, The Swerve
(2012). For primary sources, see Moore, Utopia (1516) and Paine, Common Sense (1776).
8
of government, in which case (b) they should live according to long-standing habits and
dispositions14
-- in public life, humanism and pragmatism are both short on stories and thus
politically handicapped, i.e., both generate electoral liabilities -- I'll come back to this
point
III. PHILOSOPHICAL SHORTCOMINGS
-- the gap problem starts in philosophy -- in the American confrontation between
liberals and conservatives, liberal thinkers can't "prove," by their own lights, what is
postulated as self-evident in the Declaration of Independence, i.e., that political and civil
rights should be equal and inalienable15 -- this happens because the Declaration depends
on natural law notions of morality,16 whereas modern standards of proof require
empirical evidence17 -- so, having no "proof," liberals abandon their own stories
-- thus Schumpeter, on behalf of "realistic" economics and political science, rejects the
greatest of such stories, e.g., "the classic doctrine of democracy"18 -- moreover, on behalf
14
Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), pp. 97-99. For similar reservations about human
agency, see George Will, "Rewriting History on the Filibuster" (Washington Post, December 22, 2012):
"Conservatives believe that 98 percent of good governance consists of stopping bad - meaning most - ideas.
So conservatives can tolerate liberal filibusters more easily than liberals, who relish hyperkinetic
government, can tolerate conservative filibusters."
15
This is a major theme in Ricci, The Tragedy of Political Science (1984).
16
See Becker, The Heavenly City of the 18th Century Philosophers (1932).
17
See Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation (1965), p. 3, on facts and values.
18
Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1947), ch. 21.
9
of "accurate" history, James Kloppenberg, Rogers Smith, and others, demolish Hartz's
inspiring story of America being born free19
Practitioners
-- lacking stories, liberal philosophers like Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here?
(2006) and Justice for Hedgehogs (2011), and Sen, Inequality Reexamined (1998) and
The Idea of Justice (2011), and Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971) and Political
Liberalism (1993), try with logic and verbal precision to convince readers that social
democracy is the best regime, i.e., that human beings, or at least smart ones, can draw
firm conclusions in the Humean realm of values -- or, liberal philosophers like Walzer,
Spheres of Justice (1984) and Politics and Passion (2006), recommend common sense
sobriety after arguing that different situations call for different ethical rules20 -- or, liberal
philosophers like Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and Contingency,
Irony, and Solidarity (1989), promote a technical pragmatism that, for many people,
inspires less than even unlikely tales
Shortcomings
-- in an orderly intellectual world, philosophers such as these would provide a
conceptual foundation for politically engaged liberals -- but they don't do that, because of
various shortcomings in recent, liberal philosophical literature
19
Smith, Civic Ideals (1999), and Kloppenberg, The Virtues of Liberalism (1998), esp. pp. 11-12.
20
See Fletcher, Situation Ethics (1997).
10
-- first, most of this literature is incomprehensible to ordinary citizens -- the Founders
wrote prose that most Americans could comprehend21 -- today, I can barely understand
academic philosophers22 -- therefore I gain little knowledge from reading their
works -- in that regard, most liberal voters are surely like me
-- second, even if they are sometimes comprehensible, the theses such philosophers
formulate are elaborated brilliantly but competitively -- that is, each scholar builds a
profitable academic niche23 -- as a result, most disagree among themselves and do not
furnish common principles that can inspire the faith and proposals for a liberal
camp -- one can move from Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944) and Falwell, Listen,
America! (1981), to the activism of Gingrich, Palin, and Ryan, i.e., from conservative
narratives to conservative electoral campaigns -- but Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971)
and Political Liberalism (1993), is not widely accepted and amplified by his colleagues
and therefore does not inspire liberal politicking
-- third, liberal philosophizing, animated by reason rather than stories, doesn't promote
shared ethical guidelines -- conservative critics who complain of this, such as Charles
Colson, James Wilson, Dinesh D'Souza, Bill O'Reilly, and Daniel Flynn,24 regard ethical
inconstancy (which they call "relativism") as a practical liberal weakness that cannot be
21
See Commager, The Empire of Reason (1977).
22
See Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart (1986), on academic specialization and mutually incomprehensible
disciplines.
23
On the evolution from independent to academic intellectuals, see Coser, Men of Ideas (1965), and
Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals (1987).
24
Colson, A Dance with Deception (1993); Wilson, The Moral Sense (1993); D'Souza, The End of Racism
(1995); O'Reilly, No Spin Zone (2001); and Flynn, Why the Left Hates America (2002).
11
repaired because, as a class of thinkers, liberals really don't together believe firmly in
anything25
-- fourth, much of the philosophical literature, even when comprehensible, is pallid,
cerebral, and dull -- books like Galston, Liberal Purposes (1991), and Macedo, Liberal
Virtues (1991), do not inspire like Buckley, God and Man at Yale (1951), or Goldwater,
Conscience of a Conservative (1960) -- to say nothing of Reagan, "First Inaugural
Address" (1981) -- liberal philosophy is not adequate emotionally; it does not touch what
Lincoln called "mystic chords of memory" -- it therefore has little impact on political
practices
-- by contrast, note the Tea Party's ability to galvanize Republican activists with
striking propositions, right or wrong, about ruinous federal taxes, irresponsible federal
deficits, runaway federal entitlements, tyrannical federal bureaucrats, and misdirected
federal bailouts26
IV. MODERNITY
-- a common denominator underlies these shortcomings in liberal philosophy:
liberal philosophers are a sector within the larger class of liberal thinkers, and those
thinkers live, for the most part, in a world of skepticism where they try sincerely to
replace the world of (subjective, uncertain) faith with something more modern and
accurate (empirical, scientific, rational) -- that is, liberal thinkers are committed to
25
26
For illustrations, see Reich, Reason (2005) and Sandel, Justice (2010).
Cite Congressman Paul, The Tea Party Goes to Washington (2011); Brody, The Teavangelicals (2012);
Street and DiMaggio, Crashing the Tea Party (2011); Senator Jim Demint, The Great American Awakening
(2011); Skocpol and Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Conservatism (2012); and Lepore,
The Whites of Their Eyes (2011); Armey, Give Us Liberty (2010); and Gingrich, To Save America (2011)
12
innovative inquiry a la Darwin, Marx, and Freud, where old truths are tested, challenged,
and sometimes replaced
Disenchantment
-- in a word, liberal thinkers (and among them liberal philosophers), who tell
no stories, are mostly secular -- Max Weber viewed this phenomenon as part of a broad
social trend toward disbelief -- therefore he argued that, after the Enlightenment, which
he regarded as promoting reason and rationality, the hallmark of "modernity" is
"disenchantment"27
-- emphasize! -- modernity defined this way is crucial to the incidence of political
storytelling -- the sequence is as follows:
-- (a) if Weber was right,28 many leading liberal thinkers today are (b) modern, and
thereby (c) disenchanted, and, consequently, (d) by conviction, do not want to revert to
enchantment
-- yet if people are disenchanted, (e) they will probably not seek the meaning of life in
stories, such as Creationism29 -- in which case, (f) when they deal with public affairs, the
same people are unlikely to tell political stories of the large kind that can be regarded as
narratives -- I made this point in Why Conservatives Tell Stories and Liberals
27
Weber, "Science as a Vocation" (1917) in The Vocation Lectures, pp. 12-13 -- also Gerth and Mills
(eds.), From Max Weber (1946), pp. 350-359.
28
For confirmation, see Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment 1932); Gay, The Enlightenment,
2 vols. (1966-1969); and Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire (1993).
29
Quote Richard Dawkins, who says somewhere that the process of natural selection is so cruel [based on
innumerable violent deaths] that he cannot believe that a beneficent God created it.
13
Don't, ch. 6, and I will extend it below
-- but first, extend this sequence very strongly, because it is essential for an
understanding of liberalism -- if people are disenchanted, they will prefer facts to stories,
or, in the modern idiom, science to narratives -- but their preference is not really
something they choose, because they are, in a sense, congenitally unable, by personality,
to feel that stories grasp reality more accurately than science30
-- that is, they may want to believe in stories -- but that is like wanting to believe in
God when one sees no convincing evidence that God exists31 -- they may also have a
talent for composing stories (for example, novelists and ad writers possess this
talent) -- but that does not mean that the disenchanted are capable of believing even the
stories they themselves might compose
-- in short, if liberals are by and large disenchanted, they cannot, except perhaps like
some born-again Christians, talk themselves back into being enchanted, back into
believing in stories -- and if an entire sector of the population is in that situation, we
30
I am searching, without success so far, for psychological research which tries to understand why some
people need stories in their lives and others do not. On the one hand, scholars such as Amia Leiblich study
stories but only those which are personal rather than shared. On the other hand, it is academically
fashionable (see works by Daniel Kahanaman) to investigate how individuals make decisions on the basis
of (1) some measure of information, or (2) a particular neurological configuration. But among
psychologists there is little enthusiasm, so far as I can see, for asking which people believe in stories and
how those might lead them to make certain decisions and take certain actions. Nevertheless, see Erich
Fromm, Escape From Freedom (1941), "Ch. I: Freedom - A Psychological Problem?"
31
Freud, The Future of an Illusion (1927). See also Sam Harris, The End of Faith (2004), p. 72: "To be
ruled by ideas for which you have no evidence (and which therefore cannot be justified in conversation
with other human beings) is generally a sign that something is seriously wrong with your mind…. This
leaves billions of us believing what no sane person could believe on his own…. Jesus Christ - who, as it
turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death, and rose bodily into the heavens - can now be eaten in the
form of a cracker. A few Latin words spoken over your favorite Burgundy, and you can drink his blood as
well. Is there any doubt that a lone subscriber to these beliefs would be considered mad?"
14
should expect that they will not usually tell stories or sympathize much with people who
do32
Humanism
-- meanwhile, note that, broadly speaking, putting aside enchantment marks people
who are "humanists," where humanism is the historical term assigned to (a) philosophy
centered on human needs and (b) politics centered on human creativity -- humanism
assumes that men can, in large measure, overcome what Sandel, Liberalism and the
Limits of Justice (1982), called social, economic, and political encumbrances and then
act, without divine inspiration and aid, freely to improve their lives and circumstances33
V. ENLIGHTENMENT NUANCES
-- for what I am trying to understand, it is useful to regard disenchantment and
modernity as related -- but the link is analytically fuzzy -- so note that it is stated more
exactly but somewhat differently in Gay, The Enlightenment (1966), which describes the
32
The duality here, between stories and science, underlies the thought, attributed to Blaise Pascal, that "the
heart has reasons that reason does not know." To make some of the former more persuasive than if they
would stand alone, great storytellers weave tales to tell us about heartfelt "truths" they cannot prove
logically or empirically. An especially powerful story of this sort appears in Herman Wouk, The Language
God Talks: On Science and Religion (2010), pp. 169-180. First, Wouk, an orthodox Jew, shows how
science, especially via its language of mathematics, empties the universe of meaning. Then, he argues that
that meaning can be restored by the kind of story that Wouk excerpts from his novel War and
Remembrance (1978). The story centers on Arnold Jastrow, delivering a sermon about the Book of Job on
the night before he is to be taken from the Thereisenstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia and
transported to his death in Auschwitz, Poland.
33
over hundreds of years, and in numerous manifestations, humanism evolved as an alternative to Christian
notions such as the doctrine of Original Sin, the Great Chain of Being, and the Divine Right of Kings, all of
which assumed, in various ways, that human capacities are inherently limited
15
Enlightenment in principle as rejecting "mythical" (or "mythopoetic") thinking in favor of
a "critical mentality" (epitomized in science)34
-- yet because particular thinkers sometimes mix Gay's two approaches, I will refine
Weber's category of "disenchanted" people by noting recent claims in intellectual history,
which describe the philosophes as divided (approximately) into Radical Enlighteneers
(Spinoza, Diderot, d'Holbach, etc.) and Moderate Enlighteneers (Hume, Voltaire,
Rousseau, etc.) 35
-- for example, in terms promoted especially by Jonathan Israel and Philipp Blom,36
Enlightenment radicals (such as d'Holbach and Condorcet) promoted disenchantment and
swept aside historical, literary, and theological justifications for government by few -- but
Enlightenment moderates (such as Locke, Ferguson, and Voltaire), while endorsing some
repair of the Old Regime, often retained framework notions of divine interest and
34
Gay, Vol. I, pp. 90-94 -- by using Gay, I am agreeing with him that the Enlightenment is a matter of new
ideas and major thinkers, i.e., a sort of moment or process or breakthrough in intellectual history -- another
way of looking at the Enlightenment is to see it as an historical period, i.e., the Age of Enlightenment -- in
the latter case, one looks at all of the history of that era, from, say, the 1680s (Newton, Locke) to the
French Revolution -- from that angle, the Age contains many trends, acts, events, aspirations, reforms,
breakdowns, and conceptual changes, some forward-looking and others retrograde -- in which case, the
Age is so many things, to so many people, that it is impossible to define "the" Enlightenment per se and
talk about it coherently
35
note here a qualification -- Americans were a side-show in the Enlightenment and did not have to
struggle much against the resistance to 18th century reformist ideas thrown up by some European thinkers
and institutions (see Coates and White, The Ordeal of Humanism, 1966; see also the European need for
complex diplomacy that endorsed considerable political retrogression in Europe after Waterloo -- on this
score, see Kissinger, The World Restored, 1954, and Bew, Castlereagh: A Life, 2012) -- so there is a sense
in which terms that describe European philosophes in all their variety (see Outram, The Enlightenment,
1995), were not exactly relevant to Americans then or applicable now
36
Israel, A Revolution of the Mind (2010), and Blom, A Wicked Company (2010)
16
intervention in human affairs, and sometimes they claimed that superstition and tradition
are necessary bulwarks of virtuous behavior and social stability37
-- that is, (a) Enlightenment moderates tended not to promote systematic
disenchantment, and their social thought did not condemn stories in principle (for
example, they told stories of a "social contract") -- therefore, their descendents today,
including many American conservatives, still tell and rely upon stories -- thus Rus
Walton, John Whitehead, and Jerry Falwell38 insist that moral injunctions can only bind
citizens when they (the injunctions) are absolute and, as such, can come only from God
(whom we know via stories)39
-- this as opposed to (b) Enlightenment radicals who were more inclined to humanism,
i.e., to a sense that, based on their competence and self-sufficiency, human beings can
decide for themselves how to relate decently to one another -- in America, such radicals
37
thus Voltaire insisted that "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him." -- for an
American example of Enlightenment moderation, cite the colonial loyalist Seabury, A View of the
Controversy Between Great Britain and Her Colonies (1774), who accepted the tradition of English rule
over the Empire.
38
Walton, One Nation Under God (1975); Whitehead, The Stealing of America (1983); and Falwell, The
New American Family (1992).
39
there is an important point here which space does not permit me to analyze in this paper, concerning
modern American liberals who are not entirely disenchanted, for example, Martin Luther King, Jimmy
Carter, and Mario Cuomo -- such liberals believe in transcendent stories -- however, even King spoke more
in public about the Constitution than about Natural Law -- it was a choice which suggested that, because
liberals usually endorse the separation of church and state, he, like many of his devout compatriots, for the
most part set aside stories about God as unnecessary to America's public conversation about public affairs - see the same approach in "Religious Belief and Public Morality" (1984), a speech delivered at Notre
Dame University and reprinted in Mario Cuomo, More Than Words (1993), pp. 32-51 -- many modern
American conservatives disagree
17
included Paine and Jefferson40 -- for a modern example, see Sam Harris, The End of
Faith (2004), ch. 6
European Detours
-- at any rate, continental Europeans until 1945 were sidetracked repeatedly by
Romanticism, Nationalism, Communism, and Fascism -- these ideologies, buttressed by
stories, all assume that encumbrances (of religion, ethnicity, class, and race) do and
should shape people's lives -- in the light of this historical record, Hartz offered his thesis,
in The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), via De Tocqueville, that America was,
fortunately, born free of most encumbrances -- for examples, quote Crevecoeur, Letters
From An American Farmer (1782), and Jefferson, Notes on Virginia (1785), on religious
tolerance in America
America's Political Moment
-- as Hartz noted, America's Founders managed not to sink into lives shaped by
European ideologies -- instead, they went beyond the natural law inspiration of the
Declaration and constructed the Constitution, which can be regarded as a bundle of
utilitarian solutions for many problems of government41 -- that is, the Founders
sometimes differed among themselves on philosophy (for example, Adams vs. Jefferson)
but they managed to agree (more than European thinkers) on institution building
-- in this sense, America enjoyed a political Enlightenment that was not perfect but
40
41
Paine, Common Sense (1775), and Commager, Jefferson, Nationalism, and the Enlightenment (1975).
the switch from natural law to utilitarian justifications can be seen in Jeremy Bentham, A Fragment on
Government (1776)
18
was strikingly successful -- (a) it embodied a belief in humanism as the capacity for
immediate agency42 (the contrary view is Burke)43 -- and (b) it solved, via federalism,
separation of powers, an independent Judiciary, an elected Executive, and so forth (all
products of human agency!), some but not all governmental problems44
VI. WHAT IS HAPPENING?
-- the bottom line so far is that some liberals (such as Drew Westen and Geoffrey
Nunberg) see not telling stories as a political liability -- moreover, just as some left-wing
protagonists recognize this situation, so do some leading journalists
-- on this score, cite Thomas Friedman,45 Richard Cohen, Nicholas Kristof, Paul
Krugman, Roger Cohen, Frank Rich, Howard Fineman, E. J. Dionne, and Thomas Frank,
42
for example, Hamilton, in The Federalist (Modern Library), Federalist No. 1, p. 3: "It has frequently been
remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to
decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good
government from reflection and choice."
43
Burke was against "political arithmetic" and for a "social contract" bounded by preferences of the dead
and interests of the to-be-born -- for contrast, see Jefferson on occasional revolutions against tyranny -- but
avoid a Whig interpretation of history here -- Americans were never total humanists -- many Founders were
deists and therefore opposed to what philosophes called "enthusiasm" (i.e., pious ignorance based on
stories) -- it followed that many Americans strongly believed in men's inherent capacities -- but they did not
see all people as "men" (possessing inalienable rights) -- thus Jefferson, Hamilton, etc., saw the masses as
less than competent -- property qualifications limited voting -- black people were mainly enslaved -- Native
Americans were oppressed -- the franchise was mostly closed to women -- Asians were long barred from
immigration -- only in the 20th century were women and Southern blacks permitted to vote -- only after
World War Two did feminism and gay rights advance -- on all these, see Smith, Civic Ideals (1999), and
Hulliung, The American Liberal Tradition Reconsidered (2010)
44
for some that were ignored, see Beeman, Plain, Honest Men (2010), pp. 308-336; Ellis, Founding
Brothers (2002), pp. 81-119; Dahl, How Democratic is the American Constitution? (2001); and Levinson,
Framed (2012)
45
for example, Friedman, "More Poetry Please" (New York Times, November 1, 2009), "I don't think that
President Obama has a communications problem, per se. He has given many speeches and interviews
broadly explaining his policies and justifying their necessity. Rather, he has a 'narrative' problem. He has
not tied all his programs into a single narrative that shows the links between his health care, banking,
economic, climate, energy, education and foreign policies. Such a narrative would enable each issue and
19
Pity the Billionaire (2012)46
Liberal Pragmatism
-- so what is really happening? -- historian James Kloppenberg, Reading Obama
(2011), argues that Obama should be classified as a philosophical pragmatist -- this is
another way of saying that he is a later-day humanist, but Kloppenberg does not use this
term -- quote from Obama's first inaugural address for examples of pragmatism and
humanism47
each constituency to reinforce the other and evoke the kind of popular excitement that got him elected." See
also Marcus, "Obama's 'Where's Waldo' Presidency" (Washington Post, March 2, 2011), "On health care…
[Obama] took on a big fight without being able to articulate a clear message or being willing to set out any
but the broadest policy prescription. Lawmakers, not to mention the public, were left guessing about what,
exactly, the administration wanted to see in the measure and where it would draw red lines."
46
these journalists complain that Obama has no narrative -- actually, sometimes Obama tells large
stories -- for example, see his commencement address at Knox College, 2005 -- but even when he tells one,
he doesn't repeat it, his colleagues do not make it their own, and the media quickly forget it -- by way of
contrast, and for memorable repetition that links the Right to a powerful long-term narrative on "freedom,"
see the following book titles -- economist Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (1968); Senator Jesse
Helms, When Free Men Shall Stand: A Sobering Look at the Supertaxing, Superspending,
Superbureaucracy in Washington (1976); economist Richard McKenzie, Bound to be Free (1982);
sociologist William Donohue, The New Freedom: Individualism and Collectivism in the Social Lives of
American (1990); Congressman Dick Armey, The Freedom Revolution (1995); economist James Bovard,
Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen (1999); finance professor Dale
Haywood, et al., When We Are Free (2001); radio and television host Sean Hannity, Let Freedom Ring:
Winning the War of Liberty over Liberalism (2002); CEO of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, Guns, Freedom
and Terrorism (2003); Senator Jim Demint, Saving Freedom: We Can Stop America's Slide Into Socialism
(2009); Congressman Ron Paul, Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect our Freedom (2011).
47
Obama, January 20, 2009: "What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath
them, that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long, no longer apply. The question
we ask today is not whether government is too big or small, but whether it works, whether it helps families
find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified…. [D.R. - pragmatism] Now,
there are some who question the scale of our ambitions, who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too
many big plans. Their memories are short, for they have forgotten what this country has already done, what
free men and women can achieve when imagination is joined to common purpose and necessity to courage
[D.R. - humanism]." (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/us/politics/20textobama.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 - accessed on November 26, 2012)
20
-- the point is not new -- for much of their time in office, liberals like FDR and JFK
were also pragmatists -- quote from the "Oglethorpe Speech," 1932,48 and the "Yale
Commencement Address," 196249 -- but this means that, in the sweep of American
history, such presidents were more committed to citing facts (empiricism) and revising
circumstances (reform) than to advocating core beliefs (a long-term story) -- on the
background to this outlook, see West, The American Evasion of Philosophy (1989) -recall also DeTocqueville, Democracy in America (1832), on Americans' disdain for
philosophy50
-- if Kloppenberg and West are on the right track, we should regard pragmatism as a
sort of default setting for liberalism51 -- Kloppenberg does not say so, but if liberals really
are, at heart, pragmatists, then they are politically vulnerable (but not entirely) to modern
campaigning -- after all, stories, which they lack, don't guarantee electoral success but
may help produce it
-- ergo: while vulnerable on this point, what is Obama doing as President when he
48
"The country needs… and demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a
method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something." From
Roosevelt's campaign speech at Oglethorp University in Atlanta on May 22, 1932, excerpted in Howard
Zinn, (ed.), New Deal Thought (Indianopolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), p. 83. When asked if he had a political
philosophy, Roosevelt replied "Philosophy? I am a Christian and a Democrat - that's all." Quoted in
Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (1964).
49
"What is at stake in our economic decisions… is not some grand warfare of rival ideologies which will
sweep the country with passion, but the practical management of a modern economy. What we need is not
labels and clichés but more basic discussion of the sophisticated and technical questions involved in
keeping a great economic machinery moving ahead." From "Text of President Kennedy's Commencement
Address to Yale's Graduating Class," New York Times, June 12, 1962, p. 20.
50
DeTocqueville, Vol. II, First Book, ch. 1, p. 3.
51
See Remnick, "Trump, Birtherism, and Race" (2012).
21
is not telling large stories?52 -- in a way, he is like American liberals during the Cold War
who, while lacking a conclusive democratic theory (story),53 deployed the practical
concept of "totalitarianism" against what they saw as mistaken but sometimes attractive
ideologies (stories) of the Right or Left -- therefore the president is highlighting the
results of local right-wing ideas and policies
-- that is, it is as if Obama has recognized that (unlike during the Cold War) his main
opponents are not abroad but at home -- here, plausible storytelling comes from the
American right (for example, the Tea Party) and can best be challenged by condemning
patent oppressions imposed by, say, modern culprits like stock brokers and banks
Shklar's Sort of Liberalism
-- beyond the Kloppenberg thesis, this exercise of pragmatism can be seen as a
recent expression of Judith Shklar's sort of liberalism -- political scientist Shklar points
out, in "The Liberalism of Fear" (1984), that liberalism should be defined not as a project
designed to create a new ethics but as a program intended to prevent the sorts of cruelty
and tyranny that patently marked the ancien regime54 -- in which case liberalism, since
52
note that Obama's 2008 campaign promoted mainly a personal odyssey rather than a narrative shared
with other Democrats
53
here, as usual, the story-telling gap shows up -- liberals who felt they had no satisfactory democratic
theory during the Cold War, invented as an alternative the "end of ideology" concept -- but many American
conservatives promoted a democratic theory that was, and still is, satisfactory to them, about all men by
nature desiring freedom -- thus President George W. Bush justified the Iraq War, which he called
"Operation Iraqi Freedom," by saying that "We will prevail because the desire to live in freedom is
embedded in the soul of every man, woman, and child on this Earth." ["President Discusses the Future of
Iraq," February 26, 2003] -- see my discussion of this point in Why Conservatives Tell Stories and Liberals
Don't, p. 169.
54
Shklar's thesis implicitly rejected conservative charges that disenchanted liberals since the Enlightenment
are remiss for not creating new ethical guidelines to replace the theological and historical ideas they
22
the Enlightenment, exists to criticize the existing order and improve it -- that is what the
philosophes did;55 that is what the Founders did; and that is what is happening today56
-- in line with Shklar's thesis, there are now innumerable liberal theories and surveys
and explorations in fields like gender relations, family life, consumerism, mass
communications, environmental studies, government secrecy, education, money in
politics, globalization, unemployment, welfare, corporate power, public transportation,
and Wall Street corruption, where the main aim, like that of "muckrakers" in the Gilded
Age, is to expose indecency
-- emphasize! -- in other words, the long-term assumption underlying recent
muckraking is humanism (rarely named as such), where a liberal defines and exposes
indecencies because he or she believes that ordinary people, via the democratic
institutions they have created and maintain, can overcome bad things in life -- this as
opposed to the conservative notion, sometimes credited to Austrian School economist
Ludwig von Mises, that only a variable, flexible, adaptable, and unregulated marketplace
(not shaped by human design!) can foster a "price system" that will keep track of the
economic information that people need to pursue their "utility preferences"57
undermined -- for such charges, see Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981); Paul Kahn, Putting
Liberalism in its Place (2005); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (2007); Steven Smith, The Disenchantment
of Secular Discourse (2010); and Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation (2012).
55
thus Voltaire's watchword, ecrasez l'infame
56
Charles Frankel, The Case for Modern Man (1955), p. 33, defines modern liberalism as a passion for
social reform.
57
Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991), discusses the conservative concepts of what he calls
"perversity," "futility," and "jeopardy" -- all of these, like von Mises' view of the marketplace, challenge
liberal assumptions about the ability of human beings to deliberately repair and improve social
23
The Obama Mood
-- the sort of thinking identified by Shklar, inspires and justifies what Obama says
in public -- recently, and more specifically, Obama's charges resonate with a certain
backdrop of liberal talk, where post-New Deal, ordinary Americans (retirees, farmers,
veterans, clerks, industrial workers, small businessmen, students, professionals, etc.) got
along fine until about 1970, after which the middle class began to lose income and
influence, especially after 1980, to the point where restoring prosperity to that class
became a central Democratic policy plank
-- this theme was present in the 2012 campaign, but it was not adopted by Democrats
as a ubiquitous, drumbeat sort of narrative -- it appears in, for example, Hacker and
Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics (2011), and Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality (2012),
and Noah, The Great Divergence (2012), and Smith, Who Stole the American Dream?
(2012) -- when set against the Crash of 2008, talk in this vein condemns the results of
government policies based on the conservative narrative of trickle-down or supply-side
economics58
Stories versus Facts
-- put this another way -- Obama is trying to undermine stories on the Right mainly
institutions -- many conservatives also endorse the concept of "unintended consequences," which
challenges the efficacy of human agency and is discussed in Ricci, Why Conservatives Tell Stories and
Liberals Don't, p. 15
58
see Jonathan Chait, The Big Con (2007) -- add quotes attacking trickle-down economic ideas from
Obama's side of the Romney-Obama debates.
24
by citing facts from the Left -- this may work because a determination to deal
pragmatically with immediate realities that are hard to overlook (like an elephant in the
living room) can sometimes, as during the Great Depression, compete successfully
against even powerful stories
-- on the other hand, FDR's acceptance speech of 1936 noted the predations of
"economic royalists" -- here was a New Deal story line, not just a recital of annoying
facts, which, for some time, justified pragmatic liberal projects such as government's
building infrastructure, i.e., parks, dams, libraries, courthouses, airports, school, hospitals,
roads, bridges, and more -- that story was not much told by Democrats after World War
II, and certainly not after, say, 1970
-- Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform (1996), explains that, on the way to 1970,
Democrats switched from creating public works to fostering economic growth -- this
meant they would press to expand the economic pie so that, hopefully, everyone would
benefit -- the new aim, which didn't focus on who gets more or less of GNP, is usually
promoted by both Democrats and Republicans and therefore has become almost a
consensus value in the Liberal Tradition59 -- still, liberal extensions of the economic
royalists story appear in, say, Palley, Plenty of Nothing (1998), Hartmann, Screwed
(2007), Barlett and Steele, The Betrayal of the American Dream (2012), Frank, Pity the
Billionaire (2012), and Ferguson, Predator Nation (2012)
59
Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1957), was one of the first liberals to explore America's enthusiasm for
growth and also to highlight some shortcomings of that enthusiasm
25
VII. OVERCOMING THE LIABILITY
-- if liberals are politically handicapped by an inability to tell stories, it would
seem they are doomed to achieving only occasional electoral victories60 -- nevertheless,
from time to time, it is possible for pragmatists to overcome that handicap -- so we may
conclude by noting how is this so
Charisma
-- (1) charisma helps -- sometimes conservative candidates (Reagan) have
charisma and sometimes liberal candidates (Clinton) have it -- where charisma is present,
stories are less important than otherwise -- therefore if the liberal alone has it, he or she is
likely to win
History
-- (2) citing facts may not help -- while conservatives gain some electoral traction by
using stories to persuade voters what to support, liberals may rely too much on voters'
having a sense of history: where were we then and how did that happen? where we are
now and who is to blame? -- the hope is that voters' pragmatism, spurred by reference to
an accumulation of striking facts, will generate liberal victories61
60
This is one implication of Frank, What's The Matter With Kansas? (2004) -- his argument is that
Democratic candidates should get more votes than they do from citizens injured by Republican support for
small government, individualism, and globalization -- in other words, in Frank's opinion, such voters are
guided less by a pragmatic insistence on their own economic "interest" than by misplaced enthusiasm for
"values" promoted by conservative stories of tradition and the marketplace
61
Shklar, "The Liberalism of Fear," recommends "historical memory" as the context for liberal
opposition to cruelty -- because Shklar wrote mainly for academic readers, we cannot be sure that she
thought the general voting public would know enough history to be inspired by it
26
-- but history, which may have practical lessons to teach about, say, handling cruelty,
intolerance, folly, inequality, and exploitation,62 is not a dependable campaign substitute
for stories -- this is because stories are easy to remember, while public knowledge of
history fades, in which case some previous solutions to recurring problems may no longer
seem to voters worth promoting or maintaining
-- give some examples (all arguable) of poor historical memory -- (a) the European
enthusiasm for going to war in 1914, after several generations of mostly local
peace -- (b) the post-1980 dismantling of New Deal financial regulations, as if markets
could now function well without them -- (c) the American invasion of Afghanistan,63
after Russians failed to control that country -- (d) the growing strength of right-wing
politics in today's Europe, even though fascism led to World War II -- (e) the widespread
praise, especially among American conservatives, for Francis Fukuyama's 1989 thesis
that dangerous ideologies are gone forever,64 as if twentieth century wars and
confrontations were not about adult behavior but juvenile delinquency65
62
On cruelty, see Reiman, The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison (1989); Mauer, Race to Incarcerate
(1999); Beckett, The Politics of Injustice (2003); Jackson, Legal Lynching (2003), and Dave Egger,
Surviving Justice (2008). On intolerance, see Murphey, God's Jury (2012), and Edsall and Edsall, Chain
Reaction (1991). On folly, see Tuchmann, The March of Folly (1985), and Cohen, Military Misfortunes
(1990). On inequality and exploitation, see Prucha (ed.), Documents of United States Indian Policy (1990),
and Zinn, A People's History of the United States (1995).
63
rather than conducting a police operation against Al Qaeda
64
"The End of History," The National Interest (1989).
65
this point, phrased differently, comes from Yack, Liberalism Without Illusions (1996), p. 10
27
One-Time Stories
-- (3) one-time stories are the best bet -- Obama's first presidential campaign can be
described as promoting a one-time story fit for telling in 2008 to the available
audience66 -- advertising works this way in the short run, as a serial sort of story-telling in
search of what works rather than the truth -- and Democratic consultants (no less than
Republicans) understand the imperatives of advertising
-- promoting one-time stories, which vary from election to election, can be an
effective way for liberals to finesse the unbridgeable gap on long-term stories -- it can
permit pragmatists (who are inherent skeptics) to compete for the moment with long-term
story-tellers at election time -- after all, a one-time story line can achieve temporary
credibility while never intended, or understood by its creators, to be true for all time67
Organization
-- a final possibility should be noted -- (4) getting thoroughly organized to turn out
the vote on election day, with hundreds if not thousands of local offices, telephone banks,
social media announcements, coffee klatches, last minute SMS messages, and so forth,
can to some extent trump the power of stories -- thus it may have clinched President
Obama's victory in 2012
-- still, the president's getting organized very strongly in 2012 is probably irrelevant
66
67
but see ft. 51, above
this is in contrast to campaigns fashioned by conservatives, from Barry Goldwater to Paul Ryan, who
believe that their narrative expresses the Truth -- see Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (1960),
p. 5: "Conservatism, we are told, is out-of-date. The charge is preposterous and we ought boldly to say so.
The laws of God, and of nature, have no dateline…. The challenge is not to find new or different truths, but
to learn how to apply established truths to the problems of the contemporary world."
28
to the long run, because it may have worked for two reasons that will not return -- first,
the president started building his organization two years before the election, which he
could do as an incumbent -- that advantage will be gone in 2016, when both presidential
candidates will be nominated only months before election day -- second, in 2012, Mitt
Romney did not build as strong an organization as he might have -- why this happened is
not clear -- but the Republican Party will not repeat that mistake in the future -- by 2016,
they will surely level the organizational playing field, perhaps by directing super-PAC
money more to that end than to television ads