By Lisa Van Dusen

January 15, 2024

As voting got underway for the 2024 Republican US presidential nomination amid the Iowan pathetic fallacy of suitably, brutally bitter weather, it seemed like an opportune moment to revisit the recent evolution of narrative in American politics.

That far less literary, more literal pathetic fallacy, the guy who won on Monday, is the unlikely leading man in democracy’s recent global affliction by unfathomable, gobsmacking narratives. If this were literary fiction, Trump would be a score-settling practical joke orchestrated against the constraints of democracy by an intelligence community drunk on the narrative omnipotence conferred by 21^st-century technology. One more reason to mourn the passing of John Le Carré.

In our stranger-than-fiction reality, we must settle for the privilege of witnessing a political moment besieged by previously unthinkable outcomes, best captured Monday night by the Mother Jones headline, Florida Man Facing 91 Criminal Counts Wins Iowa Caucuses (above).

Back in that pre-polycrisis utopia of the mid-aughts, when Barack Obama was emerging into the peripheral vision of American culture as a serious challenger to political cynicism, conventional wisdom and the persistence of presidential racial profiling, narrative was a good thing.

At the time, people would say things like, “Yeah, Obama’s got a great narrative.” I know, because I was one of them. Back then, having a great narrative meant that Barack Obama’s personal biography included the sort of authentically character building, obstacle-overcoming experiences that provided him with a perspective on the world that a large cross-section of voters might relate to and/or appreciate, and which made his personal biography a critically acclaimed literary event years before he became a politician. It did not mean that he’d exhibited a supernatural ability to bamboozle voters.

The political power of Obama’s narrative — the son of a white Kansan anthropologist and Black Kenyan economist, editor of the Harvard Law Review, South Side organizer — became clear at the 2004 Democratic convention in Boston, via a speech that, in an age when few speeches nudge history, was powerful enough to make Obama the obvious answer to the question of who would be America’s first Black president. It was a narrative that needed no embellishing, no torquing, no spinning and no selective curation of omissions and amplifications to connect the value of Obama’s experience and worldview — starting with his view of America — with what he could offer his country and the world as a leader.

There was no shortage of analysis and scholarship generated at the time about the role of narrative in Obama’s rise, and to the degree that it was seen as a driver of his success — the way success in America tends to be dissected for transferable advantage — a great narrative suddenly became something every politician coveted. “We’re telling a story about who we are,” Obama would remind aides early in his first term, an imperative that apparently mutated as it was passed along the political food chain from the sane and authentic to the patently less sane and inauthentic — performative and otherwise — into a license to tell voters any story at all, no matter its ratio of truth to bull****.

Part of the post-Obama backlash waged by entrenched interests against the power of democracy to put the first Black president in the White House based in part on his great narrative has been to turn “narrative” into anti-democracy kryptonite.

At some point, the disproportionate political value attached to narrative in the wake of Obama’s 2008 victory became enmeshed with the internet-enabled migration of the worst covert operations tactics — notably but not exclusively propaganda and disinformation — to other spheres of endeavour, especially politics, with the sort of predictable results currently both discrediting democracy as a system and misrepresenting voters as discernment-deficient masochists undeserving of it. The hijacking, hacking and engineering of narratives became standard anti-democracy practice and a new form of political and geopolitical warfare. In other words, part of the post-Obama backlash waged by entrenched interests against the power of democracy to put the first Black president in the White House based in part on his great narrative has been to turn “narrative” into anti-democracy kryptonite.

So, the definition of narrative in politics — like the definitions of “electability”, “disqualifying” and “treason” — has changed. It, too, has sprouted a set of quotation marks, so that any reference to narrative carries an implied irony reflecting the degree to which it now describes something whose value is based not on inherent authenticity or fact but on the replication of authenticity and the fabrication and manipulation of fact to produce an emotional and psychological impact and, in some cases, to rationalize an otherwise wholly implausible scenario of impunity or incrimination, success or failure.

Narrative has been appropriated as a substitute for character because a “narrative” can be fabricated and exploited for all manner of false advertising and voter catfishing. The narrative trajectory of narrative’s trajectory — from Hillary Clinton’s Bosnian sniper-fire embellishment to George Santos’s completely confected and regularly re-confected biography — is littered with salutes to the Obama-inspired obsession with, commodification of, and ultimate devaluation of first, narrative, then “narrative”. One more instance of democracy’s degraders as third-graders; if we can’t win the narrative game fair and square, we’ll just rubbish the table.

Obama’s narrative made his character a feature, not a bug of his candidacy, which could not be said of all presidential contenders, then or now. It can be said of Joe Biden, which is why his authentic narrative of experience, resilience, empathy and competence has been deluged with propaganda and disinformation to transform his strengths, including on foreign policy, on ethics and on competence, into perceived weaknesses. That process includes the relentless use of his age as a wildly asymmetrical disqualifier compared with Trump’s 30,000 lies in office, two impeachments, 91 charges in four criminal cases and one violent, deadly and reprehensibly disingenuous coup attempt fuelled by, you guessed it, a wholly manufactured narrative.

In functioning democracies, when voters are presented with candidates who tell the truth, who have a record of consistent beliefs and character traits, who wholeheartedly defend democracy on the understanding that our best lives depend on the freedom and dignity of all lives, those candidates tend to win. It’s why Obama won in 2008. It’s why Joe Biden won in 2020.

No “narrative” can change that fundamental fact about democracy, and the narrative of the next 10 months will once again prove its immutability, one way or the other.

Policy Magazine Editor and Publisher Lisa Van Dusen was a Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington. She covered the 2008 presidential campaign as a columnist for Sun Media.