It’s the reason why [insert candidate] will win

The battle of the story

Ok ok I’m no soothsayer — I can’t tell you who’s going to pull it off. But you’ll forgive me for trying to boost my open rates after *gulp* plopping into your inboxes a survey of two millennia of metaphysics arguing that modernity is in thrall to bourgeois narcissism. 

But now that you’re here, let’s revisit a forecast from earlier in the year: back in January, I suspected the vibes would shift rightward, with 2024 marking a year of revanchism for the right as it clawed back territory lost in the 2017-2022 culture wars. The forces of reaction indeed made major political gains in 2024, from Trump’s continued dominance of the Republican Party to the defeat of left standard-bearers Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush in Democratic primaries to public opinion’s lurch right on immigration. Now, Kamala Harris is at the end of a presidential campaign in which she has tacked hard to the center, distancing herself from her 2019 liberal wishlist of a platform. The left-wing rallying cries of “ceasefire now” and “no arms for genocide” have gone unheeded, and even greater war and misery in the Middle East looks likely.

Still, a major variable in the vibe shift is yet unknown: the election. Just how much revanchism are we talking here? 

Because this is a blog about power, I want to introduce my readers to a tool that will help analyze the attempts to make meaning of tonight’s results. In previous posts, I’ve used the spectrum of allies to demonstrate how the right forced the resignation of Harvard president Claudine Gay and the power map to visualize where Joe Biden was deriving his legitimacy. Here’s a new tool — the battle of the story.¹

Anyone who has watched cable news is familiar with this concept. The hacks call it “spin.” It’s the fight to define the narrative after an event, to help the public interpret what just happened. I like Beautiful Trouble’s reminder that narratives are “based on the recognition that the currency of story is not truth, but meaning.” Which story you agree with or find most resonant will probably have less to do with the truth than it will with which values it strikes within you. We can all see the same things (for example, the stars in the sky) and come to different conclusions about what they mean (think of all the ways of connecting the dots to make a constellation).

Here’s baby me giving a training in 2016 using this constellation metaphor. You can kinda see the stars on the butcher block.

The battle of the story is the fight for common sense (or narrative hegemony, if you want to be all Marxist about it). You’re winning when your side isn’t viewed as offering a story at all, but simply is recounting what happened.²

Take the idea of a “carbon footprint.” You’re likely familiar with this: your behavior, like taking an elevator instead of the stairs or hopping on an airplane instead of enjoying a staycation, has consequences that can be measured in greenhouse gas emissions. This used to be a fairly academic concept, employed by scientists to compare the “ecological footprint” of different nation states. Then in 2005, British Petroleum ran an advertising campaign to popularize the idea that individuals like you and me should take ownership of our emissions by eating, for example, more greens. The value implied in the carbon footprint narrative is the ethic of individual responsibility. We are ourselves responsible for climate change.

Forget the decades of mass deception waged by the fossil fuel industry to obfuscate climate science. Never mind the incessant lobbying to sink renewable energy. Who’s responsible for the climate crisis? It’s you and me baby.

When I got to college in 2011, the idea was everywhere. Mainstream climate solutions were pitifully, laughably inadequate — as if convincing college students to take shorter showers was anyone’s idea of taking responsibility for fighting climate change. 

Much of my work over the last 15 years has focused on fighting this narrative battle. It’s not you alone who are responsible for climate change and thus must reduce your carbon footprint (although that’s part of it). The real culprits are the fossil fuel executives who make millions and millions of dollars by poisoning our air, water, and democracy, and the politicians they buy out to keep us hooked on an energy source that’s killing us. The solution to the climate crisis is not atomized individuals consuming greener products, but collective action and government intervention to make all our lives better.³

Think back to the 2016 election. What narratives won out then? One was that elite liberals had discounted the resentment of the white working class, who exacted revenge on the dismissive, out-of-touch professional class by electing Donald Trump. (There was a narrative battle even within this thread: was it racial antagonism or economic insecurity that most motivated these voters?) This story won out thanks to the complacency of the Clinton campaign, whose expert technocrats recommended eschewing campaign stops in the Rust Belt in favor of fundraisers on the coasts. This mass discrediting of the liberal establishment opened up space in the Democratic Party for everyone from resist libs to DSA to contest for the future of its platform. And contest we did.

A narrative that did not win in 2016 was that the left cost Clinton the election. Of course there were pundits who argued that Bernie weakened the nominee by taking his campaign to the convention. You could even make the case that disaffected leftists sank Clinton in Pennsylvania: Jill Stein won more votes there in 2016 than Clinton lost to Trump by. But this did not really catch on as a narrative, in part because Bernie himself campaigned so hard for Clinton and because her campaign itself was so feckless.⁴

The story in 2016 that became the popular understanding of what happened provided room for the left to grow. Hubristic Democratic party leaders backed Clinton against evidence that she was a weak candidate, resulting in her losing a winnable race to a fascist clown and bringing misery upon the republic. This story, told in so many ways on so many platforms, motivated many people — myself included — to take matters into our own hands and contest for power within the desiccated husk of the Democratic Party.

Regardless of the result, the story in 2024 is not going to be so clear. Perhaps it will in hindsight. To quote Ross Douthat quoting Hegel, “the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk.”

Here are some narratives that may emerge from a Harris victory:

• For never was a story of more Roe.

Since Dobbs, the 2022 Supreme Court case that overturned Roe v. Wade and thus revoked a fundamental right from the American public, Democrats have overperformed expectations in elections. While Harris has run on a message of freedom, including the freedom to have an abortion, the issue of reproductive health has not dominated headlines in 2024 the same way, say, inflation or Israel-Palestine has. But if legendary pollster Ann Selzer is right and senior women in Iowa support Harris over Trump 63% to 28%, then that’s the ballgame. These women knew a life before Roe and they are not going back. 

• The country has a Donald Trump attention hangover. 

I admit this is vibes but bear with me. Just like the emotional hangover from the pandemic is still preventing the culture from having a moment to process what that was — resulting in a sort of collective amnesia — my theory is that we could be in store for a massive repudiation of Trump. Call it an attention hangover. I, for one, am so ready to bury this man who has dominated my attention for a decade. I’ll go out on a limb and venture that if most Americans agree with me and vote against him — even on the barest of majorities — a story will emerge about how at this point, the country is just exhausted by Trump’s antics. The clown show is over. (Judging by attendance at his rallies this week, it already is.)

• Trump got high on his own supply and whiffed it at the goal line.

If Harris ekes it out, it might be the Trump campaign who is remembered as having flown too close to the sun. So assured was the campaign of victory, the narrative will go, that Donald Trump went full unchained and reminded everyone why they hate him. The MSG rally. Blowing a mic stand. Riffing on political opponents facing the firing squad. Ultimately, it’s not offending liberal constitutions that turned the dial (that’s his whole thing), but his insulting a key swing constituency in his closing arguments. If this narrative takes hold — which will depend on how close the results are — then it leaves the door open for the Trumpism Without Trump faction of the MAGA right. In this reading, it’s his boorish personality, not his fascist policies, that doomed the campaign. 

• kamala IS brat 

Youth turnout during the Trump era has been historically high. Grandpa Joe got a higher percentage of the youth vote in 2020 than Obama in 2008. If young voters show up to the polls in record numbers again, they may be able to claim agenda setting power for a Harris administration and make brat summer permanent. 

And if Trump does indeed win…

• Find the easiest target and punch left. 

After largely holding its punches in 2016 because of Clinton’s own goals, the establishment will resort to its favorite past time of punching left if Harris loses. A detente that largely held between establishment Dems and the left through the midterms was broken in the aftermath of October 7th, and recriminations will fly with even more bitterness if Harris loses. The Democratic establishment will blame the Uncommitted campaign for refusing to endorse their candidate, overlooking the fact that they are indeed asking their supporters to vote against Trump. Party hacks will blame young people for failing to back a candidate that has refused to break with Biden on his insistence of arming Israel’s war crimes. Does the left have the power to counter this narrative? I’m not convinced. 

• dems are gonna look themselves in the mirror, take a deep breath and tell themselves 'we gotta get more racist'

It seems likely that, no matter who wins, Trump will improve his margins with working class voters of all races. In this, he has been defying an article of faith on the left, that his obvious racism and draconian immigration policies will sink him among people of color. If he pulls off a victory by assembling a multiracial working class coalition — the very goal the left has claims — it may very well spell the end of the era of liberal identity politics (which Trump’s 2016 victory largely began). 

• The death of “deliverism” 

Back in the good old days of 2021, anti-monopolist crusader Matt Stoller and American Prospect editor David Dayen, popularized the term “deliverism” to describe a theory of how to win elections. Make shit happen! Improve people’s lives! Campaign on that! This was largely a response to “popularism,” the groundbreaking idea that you should campaign on popular issues and dial back the relevance of unpopular ones. Here’s the thing: Democrats delivered, on razor thin margins, the biggest changes to American political economy in decades……yet they are not running them. Exactly zero Republicans voted for the Inflation Reduction Act that turbocharged America’s clean energy economy, and yet the vast majority of federal spending is going into red districts that will likely go again for Trump. Perhaps it’s too early for voters to judge the impact of the investments. Fair. But if polarization is indeed so entrenched that billions of dollars in federal spending cannot shift votes, it raises the question: why try at all?

• It’s the (perception of) the economy, stupid 

The economy is in a better place now than the Congressional Budget Office predicted it would be before Covid. Inflation has come way down. The unemployment rate remains low. Interest rates are starting to ease. The American economy is the envy of the world. Voters say the economy is their top issue, because they are sick of paying more for groceries than they did when Trump was president. Voters really really really hate inflation, even when their wages outpace the prices they are paying. If Trump wins, this will be a huge part of the story. 

• What’s the matter with men?

In the same way the 2016 election ushered in a cottage industry for ethnographies of the white working class (hello, JD Vance), I suspect a Trump victory will do the same for the crisis of masculinity. Trump is improving his numbers among men of all races right now, in part because he appeals to their sense of grievance and patriarchal self-interest, in part his people are offering men a pathway to meaning in a way the left is not. 

None of these narratives are preordained, but all are possible, I think, given the conditions. If I’m reading the goat entrails correctly, then Harris will pull it off. But the coalition she assembles will likely be fragile — heavy on suburban whites that may defect to a Mitt Romney-type promise to lower their tax rates in 2028. If the Democratic realignment away from the working class continues, another Trump is possible. But that’s the story of another battle. 

1. The idea was developed by the Center for Story-based Strategy, then known as SmartMeme, in the 2000s

2. Becoming the popular narrative will also likely involve whitewashing. Consider that MLK was among the most hated men in the country at the time of his assassination. His legacy wasn’t vindicated by history so much as fought over by different factions until he was subsumed into the myth of America.

3. I think we won this battle, but as I get older, I worry that we won it too much. Bring back a reasonable level of personal responsibility!

4. Seriously the anecdotes from the campaign are shocking. According to Left Adrift by Tim Shenk, their secret weapon was an algorithm named Ada that ran 400,000 election scenarios a day…all, evidently, except the one that mattered.