The Power of Story in Politics…

…or how conservatives hoodwink poor and middle-class Americans into voting against themselves.

Growing up I was told by someone I very much respected (and still do) that to succeed you need to think and act like you’ve already succeeded. So, for instance, go to an interview dressed like you’ve already got the job. Or think socially/economically like you’ve already “arrived.” After all, in America, if you can think it or dream it, you can be it.

But, in reality things aren’t that simple. And the fact is that if you are the average poor or middle-class American and the rules of the game are stacked against you, then it is difficult to achieve your dreams.  And the reality was that I was the lower middle-class daughter of a high-earning father who died without a pension even after working for the same company for over 20 years and whose mother had to go back to work as a teacher to support the family and the person I was talking to had very much “arrived” because he inherited the company his own father worked his whole life to build.

Obviously my life would have been different had my father not died of massive cardiac arrest in a hospital without a crash cart. And my life would have been different if the company he worked for saw fit to vest workers in a pension system much earlier in their careers.

But the fact is the hospital didn’t have the equipment needed to save his life (and even if it did, there’s no guaranteeing he would have lived) and the company did not care enough about its workers–even its management–to help them create a secure future for their families. As for the hospital, well, healthcare is expensive and equipment is expensive and in small towns and rural areas across our nation, the highest quality care is simply unavailable. As for the company’s attitude towards its workers, times have changed. Most major corporations allow employees to vest in their pension plans much earlier. Of course, they often rob the pension fund to pay for other things–such as health care premiums–and then are left with underfunded pension plans upon which they default and expect the government’s pension insurance to bail out.

So, what am I rambling on about? My point is that I am just an average “Jane” from a small town in Middle America who had a rough break in her early life that fundamentally reshaped the rest of her life. The lack of adequate health care and the absence of a pension cushion for my family utterly changed the trajectory of my life, my sibling’s lives and, especially, my mother’s life who, as a widow had to figure out how to provide for four kids. For those reasons, among many more, I believe in the principles of the Democratic party.

I believe in the idea that quality health care should be accessible to all Americans–no matter where you live–and it should be affordable. I believe that employers wouldn’t be employers without employees and that companies should treat their workers as if they’re on the same side instead of on opposing teams. I believe that people who dig ditches or build highways or drive ambulances or teach kindergarten or change bedpans in ICU’s, etc. work just as hard as executives who make exponentially higher salaries and are rewarded handsomely even when they drive their companies into debt or our nation’s economy over a cliff. I believe that an accident of birth and zip code should not mean you do not deserve the best education this nation can provide.  And I believe, above all, that a government founded by the people for the people should work on behalf of the all the people and not just those with the money to buy influence in the halls of power.

Further, I believe that most Americans who grew up just like me agree with those same principles. So, if I’m right, why do so many poor and lower-middle class Americans go to the polls and vote against all those things?

By siding with the Republicans against health care reform, they are siding with corporations whose only reason for being is to make a profit rather than with their own doctors (polling shows the majority of doctors in America support serious reform) or their own families who need quality affordable health care. They are saying they’d rather have sky high salaries for health care executives than affordable premiums for their own families. By siding with the Republicans against forcing large banks to pay a small transaction fee to help repay the taxpayers who bailed them out, they are essentially saying, “Go ahead, rob me blind just because I don’t like idea of big government interfering with big business.” But what’s unAmerican about making sure taxpayers get paid back? For that matter, what’s unAmerican about paying taxes? Without taxes, we’d have (among many other things) no public schools to educate our children, no public roads on which to travel, no Medicare to support our seniors, and no military to defend our democracy. (To those teaparty folks who want Washington to keep it’s hands off their Medicare, I’d say…well, I can’t really print what I’d say….) In short, without taxes, we’d have no America.

So why are so many Americans against themselves? Why do they throw their voices and their votes behind those who’ve already made it at the expense of others–like themselves–who have not reached the pinnacles of power and wealth? In a short article on BBC News, two scholars say it is because American’s 1) don’t want to be schooled by “elites” and 2) they’d rather listen to a good story than learn the details of a policy and how it might affect them.

Stories not facts

In his book The Political Brain, psychologist Drew Westen, an exasperated Democrat, tried to show why the Right often wins the argument even when the Left is confident that it has the facts on its side.

He uses the following exchange from the first presidential debate between Al Gore and George Bush in 2000 to illustrate the perils of trying to explain to voters what will make them better off:

Gore: “Under the governor’s plan, if you kept the same fee for service that you have now under Medicare, your premiums would go up by between 18% and 47%, and that is the study of the Congressional plan that he’s modelled his proposal on by the Medicare actuaries.”

Bush: “Look, this is a man who has great numbers. He talks about numbers. I’m beginning to think not only did he invent the internet, but he invented the calculator. It’s fuzzy math. It’s trying to scare people in the voting booth.”

Mr Gore was talking sense and Mr Bush nonsense – but Mr Bush won the debate. With statistics, the voters just hear a patronising policy wonk, and switch off.

For Mr Westen, stories always trump statistics, which means the politician with the best stories is going to win: “One of the fallacies that politicians often have on the Left is that things are obvious, when they are not obvious.

“Obama’s administration made a tremendous mistake by not immediately branding the economic collapse that we had just had as the Republicans’ Depression, caused by the Bush administration’s ideology of unregulated greed. The result is that now people blame him.”

The idea that a well-told, simple and engaging story can pull the wool over our eyes is fascinating and explains a lot in human history. Coupled with the emerging science that shows how humans seek patterns in data, it could explain a lot of the political silliness going on today.

For instance, perhaps that’s one reason many people who deep down find it disturbing to have a black man as president but who are uncomfortable with thinking of themselves as racist have latched onto the “birther” argument–i.e. that Obama is not a citizen.  People say, “of course I’m not a racist, but how else can you explain how this man came to be president? It has to be a plot! A nefarious plot by Muslim extremists intent on installing the Antichrist as president…”

As ridiculous as that sounds, it is no more ridiculous that someone who is poor or underemployed being against health care reform because it is “socialist.”  The article goes on:

Thomas Frank, the author of the best-selling book What’s The Matter with Kansas, is an even more exasperated Democrat and he goes further than Mr Westen.

He believes that the voters’ preference for emotional engagement over reasonable argument has allowed the Republican Party to blind them to their own real interests.

The Republicans have learnt how to stoke up resentment against the patronising liberal elite, all those do-gooders who assume they know what poor people ought to be thinking.

Right-wing politics has become a vehicle for channelling this popular anger against intellectual snobs. The result is that many of America’s poorest citizens have a deep emotional attachment to a party that serves the interests of its richest.

Thomas Frank says that whatever disadvantaged Americans think they are voting for, they get something quite different:

“You vote to strike a blow against elitism and you receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our life times, workers have been stripped of power, and CEOs are rewarded in a manner that is beyond imagining.

“It’s like a French Revolution in reverse in which the workers come pouring down the street screaming more power to the aristocracy.”

Ultimately, what happens is that the workers manning the barricades alá French revolution are, in reality, manning the barricades against themselves. When the battle is over, the bodies left in the street will be theirs, and all the while, the aristocracy will be sitting in their corporate palaces eating cake.