CONCLUSION
RECLAIMING THE LIBERAL STORY
Liberalism is trust of the people, tempered by prudence;
conservatism, distrust of people, tempered by fear.
— WILLIAM GLADSTONE
The communication code is the internal structure we all use to translate language and image and experience into meaning, to convert territories into useful maps.
We express our identities in every aspect of our communication, from the modalities we use to the frames we create. When we communicate, we’re saying something about who we are—in each of our parts, as whole individuals, and as members of our society.
When you chunk all the way up, you find that every communication is part of a larger story about who We the People are. Each little story we tell ourselves is also a story about liberty, about democracy, about community. They are stories about what it means to be a citizen of the United States and what it means to be a citizen of the world. They are, ultimately, stories about what it means to be human.
What we call politics is no more and no less than that collection of stories.
THE REPUBLICANS’ STORY
When Democratic strategists try to understand the people who voted for Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, they assume that those voters were making decisions based on issues like abortion, free trade, taxes, and so forth. They think that when Joan Smith says, “I am a Republican,” she agrees with all the positions that Republicans take on a laundry list of issues.
In fact, if you poll the John and Joan Smiths who identify themselves as Republicans, you will find that many of them disagree with almost all of the planks of the official Republican Party platform and would aggressively agree with most of the parts of the Democratic Party’s agenda.
The Republican Party is on record in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade, but 62 percent of the American people want the Roe v. Wade ruling to stand.1 The Republican Party is on record as believing that taxes should be lowered, but in 2006 a full 60 percent of Americans said that the amount of income tax they paid that year was fair.2 The Republican Party has denied or downplayed global warming, but 60 percent of Americans think that global warming is already happening, and 70 to 80 percent are worried about pollution of our air and water.3 Finally, it was the Republican Party that gave us the Iraq war, but as the 2008 elections approached, 70 percent of Americans disapproved of that war and 60 percent wanted the United States to get out.4
Joan Smith, it turns out, doesn’t actually care that much about the Republican platform. What she cares about is the story that goes along with the word Republican.
Being a Republican is a multimodal experience that evokes a very particular feeling. The visual modality (brand/logo) they have claimed is the American flag. The auditory modality is “Stars and Stripes Forever.” The kinesthetic modality they’ve imprinted on their followers is “standing tough, standing tall, and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.” These modalities anchor a feeling of security, which reinforces the conservative core story that the world is a bad place and that we need a few, rare, powerful, “good” paternalistic people to protect us from it.
In 2004 Andrew Card, then President Bush’s chief of staff, explained to Republican delegates from Maine how Bush understood his role in the conservative story. Card said, “’It struck me as I was speaking to people in Bangor, Maine, that this president sees America as we think about a ten-year-old child.” Card added, ‘“I know as a parent I would sacrifice all for my children.”5
Anyone who believes the traditional American liberal story finds Card’s suggestion that we should think of ourselves as children offensive. We are grown adults with rights and responsibilities and the inherent ability to make good decisions derived from our own intrinsic goodness. From the conservative point of view, however, Card’s story was reassuring. Conservatives want to be protected from their own latent evil and the explicit evil of all other people, and the president was offering that protection.
This kind of example demonstrates that the conservative core story Republicans tell themselves is not just a metaphor. The conservative core story of fear and hierarchy actually defines and creates the modern Republican identity.
THE DEMOCRATS’S STORY
The American flag, “Stars and Stripes Forever,” and standing tall and tough were all solidly Democratic “brands” during the presidencies of FDR and JFK. When we think “Democrat” today, Americans often don’t see a particular image, hear a particular sound, or feel a particular emotion. That’s a real problem because the communication code is based on those modalities. It illustrates why it’s so important for Democrats to reclaim the American flag and the national anthem as their logos and traditional, egalitarian American democracy as their brand.
Republicans talk a lot about the benefits of their brand and programs—their followers will feel safer, be more secure, and have control over “their” money. Conversely, Democrats often are mired in lengthy descriptions of features. Most Democrats know all the features they are interested in: universal single-payer health care, a viable social safety net, prison and sentencing reform, a livable wage, support for unions, and voting reforms, for example. But there’s no explicit “benefit” statement in lists of features/programs like these.
Republicans have learned from their allies in big business the importance of branding and leading with benefits. They sold everyone on the benefits of lowering taxes so “you can keep more of your money” (without telling us that they were actually going to borrow “our” money from our children and grandchildren) before they rolled out tax cuts for the wealthy. They sold the benefit of living in a society that “protects children” before rolling out deceptive legislation and PR stunts equating homosexuality with pedophilia.
Democrats have forgotten that the meaning of a communication is the response you get. They’ve forgotten that to be persuasive, they must tailor their map to their audience’s territory.
WE THE PEOPLE
The traditional American liberal story is the story of We the People.
As Americans, the most important part of our social identity is our role as citizens. To be a citizen means to be part of, and a defender of, the commons of our nation. The water we drink, the air we breathe, the streets we drive on, the schools that we use, the fire departments that protect us—these are all the physical commons. And there are also the cultural commons—the stories we tell ourselves, our histories, our religions, and our notions of ourselves. And there are the commons of our power systems (in the majority of American communities), our health-care system (stolen from us and privatized over the past twenty-five years, our hospitals in particular used to be mostly nonprofit or run by mostly city or county governments), and the electronic commons of our radio and TV spectrum and the Internet.
Most important for citizenship is the commons of government—the creation and the servant of We the People.
Franklin D. Roosevelt understood this commons. In his “Four Freedoms” speech, he said, “Necessitous men are not free men.” Hungry people aren’t free people, no matter what you want to call them. Hungry people can’t be good citizens: they’re too busy taking care of the hungry part of themselves to care about the citizen part.
Republicans don’t want to fund FDR’s social safety net because they fundamentally do not believe in the concept of We the People collectively protecting all of us in anything other than a military/police way. They don’t believe that “the rabble” should run the country. They want big corporations to run the commons of our nation, and they think that the most appropriate role for citizens is that of infantilized consumers—of both commercial products and commercially produced political packaging.
This is the fundamental debate in our society: Are we a nation of citizens or a nation of consumers? Are we a democracy run by citizens, or are we a corporatocracy that holds consumers locked in dependency by virtue of their consumption?
Consumerism appeals to the greedy and selfish child part of us, the infantilized part that just wants someone else to take care of us. The core message of most commercials is that “you are the most important person in the world.” Commercial advertising almost never mentions “we” or “us.”
What is at stake today is the very future of our democratic republic. If we accept an identity as fearful, infantilized consumers, we will be acting from our baby part and allowing corporate America and an increasingly authoritarian government to fill the role of a parent part.
The story we are told is that we should surrender all of our power to corporations and just let them govern us because a mystical but all-knowing godlike force called “the free market” will eventually solve all of our problems.
That story fits in very well with the conservatives’s other story: that we are children who need to be protected from evil humans; and because corporations are amoral and not human, they are intrinsically and morally superior to evil humans.
To save democracy we must crack that code and bring back the code so well understood by the Founders of this nation: that we’re a country of barn-builders, of communities, of intrinsically good people who work together for the common good and the common wealth. We begin this process by speaking to the responsible part of us, the part that enjoys being grown up and socially responsible.
The story we have to tell is the story of citizenship, derived from our best and most noble parts. It’s the story of We the People.
We talk a lot about the features of citizenship, like the right to vote, but we sometimes forget what the benefits are. The main benefit of citizenship is freedom—not freedom from external or internal dangers (although that is included in the package, it’s only one of the six purposes listed in the Preamble to the Constitution) that conservatives obsess on, but freedom to think as we want, to pray as we want, to say what we want, and to live as we want to fulfill our true potential as humans (the other five things listed in the Preamble).
The question, ultimately, is whether our nation will continue to stand for the values on which it was founded.
Early American conservatives suggested that democracy was so ultimately weak it couldn’t withstand the assault of newspaper editors and citizens who spoke out against it, leading John Adams (our second president and our first conservative president) to pass America’s first Military Commissions Act-like laws: the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. President Thomas Jefferson, who beat Adams in the “Revolution of 1800” election, rebuked those who wanted America ruled by an iron-handed presidency that could— as Adams had—throw people in jail for “crimes” such as speaking political opinion, and without constitutional due process.
“I know, indeed,” Jefferson said in his first inaugural address on March 4, 1801, “that some honest men fear that a republican government cannot be strong; that this government is not strong enough.” But, Jefferson said, our nation was “the world’s best hope” precisely because we put our trust in We the People.
WHO WILL TELL THE TRADITIONAL AMERICAN LIBERAL STORY?
When I was working in Russia some years ago, a friend in Kaliningrad told me a perhaps apocryphal story about Nikita Khrushchev, who, following Stalin’s death, gave a speech to the Politburo denouncing Stalin’s policies of arbitrarily arresting people and throwing them in prisons or mental institutions without rights of habeas corpus. A few minutes into Khrushchev’s diatribe, somebody in the back of the Politburo audience shouted out, “Why didn’t you denounce Stalin then, the way you are now?”
The room fell silent, as Khrushchev swept the audience with his glare. “Who said that?” he asked in a reasoned voice. Silence.
“Who said that?” Khrushchev demanded, leaning forward, his voice tinged with anger. Silence.
Pounding his fist on the podium to accent each word, he screamed, “Who—said—that?!” Still no answer.
Finally, after a long and strained silence, the elected politicians in the room afraid to even cough, a corner of Khrushchev’s mouth lifted into a smile.
“Now you know,” he said with a chuckle, “why I did not speak up against Stalin when I sat where you now sit.”
The question for our day is Who will speak up against authoritarian policies in America? Who will speak against politicians who abuse American democracy by punishing reporters and news organizations through cutting off their access, who punish politicians by targeting them in their home districts, who punish truth-tellers in the Executive branch by character assassination that even extends to destroying their spouses’s careers?
We must not make the mistake that Jefferson warned us against. We must not remain silent, like Khrushchev’s people did. We must speak out.
We are citizens. It’s time to reclaim that identity. And with the tools of competent communicators, each of us is equipped to tell the story of We the People and restore our democracy.
Democracy begins with you. Tag—you’re it!