Twenty-five years ago today I was sitting in the conference room of an academic department watching images of terror unfold on television. I was living in the middle of Pennsylvania. There were reports of a plane down in the southern part of the state that day. I remember going outside to look at the sky and see if I could spot more incoming disasters.
For me, 9/11 led to many things, but among them was a book, The Iconoclastic Imagination: Image, Catastrophe, and Economy in America from the Kennedy Assassination to September 11. Of the books I have written, it is the most difficult, I know, for readers. It is written in an idiom of cultural analysis practiced among academics, full of allusions, citations, and concepts. (It was not my tenure book, but it helped me get another promotion.)
But it may also be the most heartfelt book I have written. For at its core was a question: why do catastrophes mean so much in American political culture? I was thinking of those “where-were-you-when?” events we still remember: JFK’s assassination, the explosion of the spaceship Challenger, and 9/11. These events are not just disasters. They have functioned as major plot lines in American stories: stories of conspiracy and tragedy, courage and adventure, violation and rebirth.
The distinguishing feature of American political culture today is that such stories, whatever the worth, are not being told. We have lost the plot lines.
This week the Republican Party is holding its mid-term convention in Texas. The headline, coming from our ostensible President, is that if we—that is, you and I—vote for Republicans this November, he will see to it that every adult American gets a $5000 check from the federal coffers. That’s not a plot line. It is a form of electoral clientelism using a dubious promissory note.
In my last post, I wrote about the importance of persuasion in a democratic society (or any society for that matter!). The political scientist, Bryan Garsten, whom I quoted, argues that persuasion is ultimately the work of audiences, not speakers. As I read a text, listen to a speech, or watch a video, if I am authentically persuaded, it is because I have done the thinking in my own head and convinced myself that the message is worthy of my assent.
The two great rivals to persuasion, Garsten argues, are manipulation and pandering.
The speaker who manipulates his audience so as to bring them to a belief or action, without their consent . . . has not persuaded but coerced. In contrast, the speaker who merely finds out where his audience itches and then scratches there . . . has not managed to change his listeners’ minds at all.
Our ostensible national leaders today are by and large not persuaders; they are manipulators and panderers. In offering $5000 in exchange for a Republican vote, Trump was pandering. In having no intention to follow through on this promise, he was manipulating.
He’s always been a panderer and manipulator. His ramblings are designed to keep listeners from following an argument and making a judgment. His insults and name-calling are but a form of itching the grievances of those who identify with him. And his payout schemes, quite unlike the welfare system (what Republicans have long criticized as “government handouts”), which is rooted in a theory of justice, are just blatant attempts to buy votes.
It is true, Trump’s “Make America Great Again” represents a kind of great American plot line. (Trump, by the way, took the line from Bill Clinton.) But the problem with MAGA is that it is, and always has been, a brand not a story. MAGA is about swag and style, not a narrative of restoration.
Immediately after 9/11, President Bush stood before the American people and told a story of American vengeance. It was a comeback story, as well as a story of defiance. Bush put 9/11 into an American plot line. He connected it to World War II. He drew it into the long arc of American resolve. He made it about the American mission to the world. Whatever we think of these plot lines, they were undeniably plot lines.
Bush’s leadership was a failure, but it was not because of the plot lines he drew. It was because of poorly executed war policies and because of a different kind of disaster that was quietly brewing in America—the 2008 financial crisis.
Today we live in a country that has no plot lines. The elite have made themselves into a class of manipulators and panderers. And this is at the heart of American decadence.
What to do?
I am thinking that it is important for us to tell ourselves and each other stories of America. Among the Right, American stories have been reduced to brands and bling. Enough with the merchandisers! On the Left, American stories are too often styled as passé, lame, uncool. Enough with the cool kids! We need plot lines. We need stories. We need a collective sense of ourselves.