The art of success in politics, economics and even war is to tell compelling stories. Data, formal speeches, slide decks, clever debating points and tools of close analysis all have their place – but the trump card in persuasion and winning hearts and minds is a good story. To win is to have owned the best narrative. Get the message wrong and it turns into an unbelievable, losing fairytale.
Thus, one of the reasons the Russians will ultimately fail in Ukraine is as much their weak story as any military frailties, while the Ukrainian account in response is so strong. Few, even inside Russia, believe Vladimir Putin’s story that Ukraine was always and immutably Russian, justifying such death and destruction to reassimilate it into its “natural” motherland.
It’s an evil fable. Ukraine’s counter narrative – that it is fighting for its sovereignty and freedom before an unprovoked aggressor – is genuinely more credible. So when last week there was claim and counter-claim about the drones that attacked the Kremlin in an alleged assassination attempt on Putin, the bar of neutral opinion sided with the more successful storyteller – Ukraine.
A successful narrative has to have roots in reality and involve struggle against obstacles – the participants so gaining wisdom. Even economists, the lovers of data, spreadsheets and charts above any other, are increasingly recognising the value and importance of narratives.
Yale University’s Nobel prize-winning Professor Robert Shiller has even written a book about it, Narrative Economics. Throughout history, he writes, human beings have found themselves telling similar stories about new technologies threatening or creating jobs, about economies needing more conspicuous consumers or more frugal housewives or insisting that the integrity of money needs to be anchored in something independent of government, because governments cannot be trusted. Economists need to learn to go with the flow.
Economic and political stories overlap and feed off one another. Since the late 1970s, the political right has been the most adept at borrowing from familiar and homespun narratives to build a nearly unassailable rightwing economic common sense. Wealth creation is about individual entrepreneurs taking risks, the most admirable activity of all. They flourish best when taxes are low and governments are small, keeping tight control of what they spend like any frugal household – and certainly not debasing the coinage by printing money. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher told this story – neither Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama nor Tony Blair managed successfully to challenge it.
But President Joe Biden is pulling off what they failed to do – constructing a new and successful story to succeed the right’s. It’s why even at 80 he is so politically important, and his decision to run again – despite the risks – is so justified. He promises, like story-changing Reagan and Roosevelt before him, to be the author of an era-defining narrative. His key verb is “to build”. It’s an end to the claims of trickle-down economics, he says, which claims ultimately to benefit all. Instead, “we will build from the bottom up and middle out, not the top down”. When he hears the word climate, he likes to say he hears the word jobs.
A recent speech by his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, defined the encompassing nature of Biden’s rupture with the old story – and the ambition of the new. It was simply breathtaking. First, it was emblematic that the story was told by a national security adviser: economic, foreign and security policy now going hand in hand. The US, Sullivan declared, had messed up in the previous 40 years. It had bought the narrative that free markets at home and abroad would spread capital most effectively, creating prosperity and bringing the world together. The story had turned into a malevolent fable. What it meant in practice was “the privileging of finance over fundamental economic growth, which was a mistake”.
Too much free trade had undermined sectors that delivered middle-class jobs, which instead had been hollowed out, with supply chains and entire industries moving overseas and creating disillusion, disaffection and undermining democracy – a not very veiled reference to Donald Trump. Russia and China had seized the opportunity to subsidise their industries and, rather than making peace, were now aggressively challenging the US. The old story, instead of creating order, had created its opposite.
The tax cuts and business deregulation preached by the rightwing supply-siders have failed totally, said Sullivan. The new Biden approach was to deploy government spending on a vast scale to trigger investment in new and green technologies, which would bring supply chains and industries back to the US, create middle-class jobs and enhance security and democracy. It was working, he said. Large-scale investment in semiconductors and green, clean technologies had jumped 20 times since 2019, implying a $3.5tn boost to investment in the decade ahead. There would be carefully structured trade deals with the EU and Pacific countries; Britain was not mentioned once. The aim was not to confront China but to become less dependent on her. In the end, he declared, we all rise or fall together.
This is an emphatic new story – and it will have ramifications here. The Tory party is in trouble because its Brexit, tax-cut, end-the-nanny-state stories are ageing, failing and turning into disliked, unbelieved fairytales amid so much economic and social wreckage. The banking crisis in the US – surging again after Trump’s round of deregulation – is another reminder that the world of dropping regulatory “burdens” and expanding freeports has run its course. After the drubbing at the local elections, some shaken Tory politicians call for a return to “real conservatism” – but what does that mean?
A conference of National Conservatism – or “NatCon” – in London on 15 May purports to answer the question. But its story, judging by a joint article by two of its speakers, Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Frost, is to reaffirm the philosophy that the US national security adviser declares is provenly wrong and defunct. It does not rise to any of today’s challenges; instead it causes them.
Into this vacant space the Labour party should step with its nascent story. Following Sullivan, there is a highly developed one to hand – to build for a better shared future. It may be shamelessly copying Biden, but copying winners is no bad strategy for wannabe successful storytellers.
• Will Hutton is an Observer columnist
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