Getting Our Stories Straight

Cathaleen A. King

The reason that today’s liberals have such a following is not their innate intellectual superiority or the inherent rightness of their cause. It’s because they’re better storytellers. That’s the conclusion that comes to mind after reading a few segments of a blog by marketing-guru Seth Godin. When the choice is between a set of well-presented facts on one side, and a story that speaks to us on the other side, says Godin, “The storytellers win every time.”

The story that liberals tell is so familiar and so entrenched in the public mind that even conservatives know it by heart: liberals are young, hip, happening. They’re smart enough to question authority and energetic enough to change the world. They are the future. They care. Their story and their image are polished so brightly that they throw everyone else into shadow almost by default: the outsiders are automatically cast as old, authoritarian, intellectually inferior, and mired in the past. The conservatives have countered largely by declining to tell a story at all; instead, they’ve branded themselves as “beyond image”, and met the liberals’ impassioned pleas with facts, figures, and dates. They may claim to be taking the moral and intellectual high ground, but in doing so, they have put themselves in the position of bringing a knife to a gunfight. The necessity of measures such as a slow and painstaking ground effort in Iraq is difficult enough for most Americans to swallow without forcing them to give up all pretenses to social acceptability in the bargain.

Conservatives, then, have three possible courses of action to get their fellow Americans onboard: they can express their outrage that it shouldn’t have to be this way, condemn those who are unable to overcome the image barrier, or learn to tell a better story.

The last choice is undoubtedly the most challenging, but it also stands the best chance of succeeding. For example, consider the shift in perception that occurred when conservatives and pro-troop moderates turned out in large numbers to counter a major anti-war protest in March 2007: holding aloft a sea of American flags, they threw the scattered objectives of the protesters into sharp relief. Suddenly, the protesters could no longer claim to be the sole voice of disaffected Middle America; a fair slice of Middle America had obviously chosen to stand on the sidelines under their own flag rather than take center stage under the banner of the openly-Communist Workers World Party. However, the new story was not the conservatives’ tendency to rally around the flag, or even the disturbing agendas of some anti-war groups. It was the picture of conservatives and right-leaning moderates as a force every bit as dynamic, diverse, and passionate as that of their liberal counterparts—and, at least at that rally, a much larger one.

This story is exactly the sort of weapon that conservatives need in the current battle for public opinion. Having established both their character and their numbers, they are well-positioned to offer the public a viable alternative to standing with the liberals or being automatically dismissed as unworthy. This new story will also provide a strong foundation for the facts-and-figures strategy favored by conservatives; after all, it’s much easier to justify a position when it’s the one supported both by the facts and by the popular majority.

And if that position just happens to be under an American flag rather than a Communist banner, so much the better.