Stories of Hope, Stories of Fear

Before dropping off to sleep, or upon waking up, do you ever have a feeling of dread? Of course you do! It’s 2020. The year when a seemingly endless parade of bad news comes at us day after day…after…day. Some days are better than others, but it seems if you are a heavy user of social media (for me, Twitter is almost required to monitor news sites for my work), fear, danger, and catastrophe are pretty much the narrative of most posts. If you watch and read what’s going in the political sphere, it’s worse. Even the most encouraging news is almost always laced with a poison pill of dread. Even the weather reports are guilty of this narrative. In California, there’s an obsession with drought, the heat is always record-breaking, Red Flag fire conditions mean a firestorm apocalypse is hours away, and the air quality becomes a daily search for pockets of “good air.” No wonder we’re emotionally exhausted. The news always seems bad.

There’s a reason for this. Fear and anger get our attention. Think about it for a moment — and now add a social media dimension. How many times have you posted something personal about your life on social media where you got a lot of positive reactions? Do you remember all the times you were congratulated or supported? Or do you remember that one asshole troll who made a negative comment? Nine times out of ten, you remember the troll.

It took time, but a sizable number of people have figured out what pushes our buttons. Few excel in the button-pushing game as well as Donald Trump. His entire career has been built on bringing attention to himself. As I’m writing this, we’re in the last stretch before the November 3rd election, and the media attention on Trump hasn’t waned — even as his poll numbers consistently show his chances of winning the election are pretty low. But after the 2016 contest where the media lavished Trump with free coverage while assuring the public that Hillary Clinton had a 70 to 80-percent chance of winning the election, very few have a lot of confidence in polls when Trump is on the ballot.

However, this post isn’t really about Trump. It’s about narratives that make for a successful campaign. I’ve been kind of hooked on these mini-documentaries that The New York Times has been doing. One from 2016 titled “How To Win An Election” is interesting because there are really two stories/narratives campaigns use to frame their message. One is hope — and the other is fear. Mark McKinnon, who helped John McCain in his 2008 campaign for the president, lays out why these stories work. Have a look.

McKinnon is correct. The public craves stories because stories are easy to comprehend. Even Plato understood this when he was laying out his ideal society in The Republic. After spending 90-percent of the book arguing what makes for The Good Society, he includes two stories to make his ideas more accessible to us plebs: “The Allegory of the Cave” and “The Myth of Ur.” Both give the reader hope about an understanding of Knowledge of Pure Forms and the immortality of the soul. But there’s fear built into the narrative as well. They aren’t the best-told stories, but they drive home Plato’s points.

While messages of fear are often effective, they don’t always work. Why is that? Well, for example, if we take the Year of Fear that is 2020, people are emotionally maxed out from the fear button being pushed. It’s like trying to force more gasoline into an already full tank. The liquid is spraying everywhere, but no matter how much more you try and force gas into the tank, doing so won’t get you any more miles between fill-ups. The same is for fear or hope. There has to be a space where one or the other message is effective. For example, one of the reasons why Trump could lie in 2016 about unemployment numbers being 40-percent (and get away with it) is because even with the relatively good economic conditions under the Obama years, people weren’t entirely feeling it. Like supporters of Bernie Sanders, Trump voters wanted something better. The hope and change that Obama ran on wasn’t quite living up to the ideal in the minds of many voters. So, Trump (and Sanders, to a lesser extent) could use fear to gather support — because there was space for that message to resonate. There was also a level of comfort that allowed people to “take a chance” on someone who was braying how he’ll make American great again. That was the hopeful message (believe it or not).

Well, now things are demonstrably bad. A pandemic that has killed 216-thousand people and counting, an economy that’s in the toilet, climate change accelerating to the point where wildfires, powerful hurricanes, polar vortexes, and the like have become more regular occurrences, political corruption that starts with Trump and rolls downhill, and individuals liberties for women and healthcare are on the ropes. That’s a whole lot of bad — and people know it. Where’s the space for fear when fear makes up the majority of the news?

This is part of the reason why Joe Biden’s narrative of hope is resonating with a lot of voters. After four years of fear, people are hungry for something better — and there’s plenty of space for other, more hopeful, messages to resonate.

Time will tell what the future holds after November 3rd. But even with the news that a Biden win (and the Dems taking the Senate and holding onto the House) is looking more and more likely, there’s still that feeling it could be snatched away in a series of scenarios outlined by the press and so-called pundits that, yes, just promote more fear.