The 'Big Lie' Is Great Storytelling
Ryan Sanders has a thought-provoking piece for the Dallas Morning News on the need for Conservative Christians to tell better stories. Sanders traces many who have told powerful stories that have compelled people to better action or helped people to marvel at beauty, writers like Faulkner and Victor Hugo. And, of course, Sanders points out that one of the many things that made Jesus so compelling to people was Jesus’ ability to tell a good, powerful story.
Sanders’ call for better stories gets to the point that we all crave to make meaning of the world around us. Stories have the power to take what we see and find not just meaning but a vision. They give a vision for what can or should be. With this in mind, I would like to add that it is not just conservative Christians who need to tell better stories but also those who are politically Conservative.
Sarah Longwell had a piece for the Atlantic out Monday where she talked with Trump supporters about why they still believe in the Big Lie about the stolen election. The article is worth reading, but she reports that the main reason is essentially that people believe the Big Lie because they want to. But taken with Sanders’ piece on stories, I think there is more to see here. People believe the Big Lie because it’s a better story than the truth. For Trump supporters, the truth is that their guy lost and their opponent won, but what if you could believe that it was all a big scam? Facts cannot beat this story; Longwell points out that “attempts to set the record straight tend to backfire. When you tell Trump voters that the election wasn’t stolen, some of them tally that as evidence that it was stolen.”
The story that there is, somewhere, a cabal of people dead set on keeping Trump out of office is too great to ignore. It’s like a great spy thriller, and all of America gets to be a character. And no one is telling a better story. The Left is not trying to win Trump supporters with a story of how their lives will be better under President Biden. Likewise, many on the Right choose to parrot the Big Lie because it plays to a base of people craving to hear something false and salacious over true and ordinary.
So, if facts cannot defeat the Big Lie, what can? To Sanders’ point, a better story. Sanders reminds us that in the 90s, apologists were all the rage. People wanted to hear that it was rational to be a Christian. That there is logic to faith. But rationality and logic only win out if you are Vulcan. Humans have always been drawn more to things that pull on our emotions. We always crave something that makes us feel good over being told that we are good. And it is precisely for this reason that to overcome the Big Lie; Conservatives must find a better story.
4 More Things
1) Erik Wemple at WaPo has more coverage of the study that paid Fox News viewers to watch CNN. In short, there’s more to the story. Wemple reports that the study’s authors found that “CNN does engage partisan coverage filtering. They should be aware of that and can do better as a network.” During the study, CNN had less coverage of the Abraham Accords, a win for then President Trump, and a story of Nancy Pelosi flouting COVID restrictions in San Francisco.
2) Ryan Bort at Rolling Stone has some troubling reporting on the increase of guns in Republican campaign ads. The reason why this is of note is for two reasons. The first is that the majority of these ads come from Trump-affiliated candidates. The second is that these ads often focus on a need to defend America from the Left or RINOs. With the imagery of the guns and some explosions, this message takes on a more violent tone; these politicians seem willing to hint that they would use violence to achieve their goals. After Jan 6th, that no longer seems like a far-fetched scenario.
3) Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York City, has an OpEd in the Boston Globe on an important development in American politics: the rise of righteous intolerance. Bloomberg is touching on an issue mentioned before in this newsletter; people seem increasingly less tolerant of those with differing ideas or opinions. And Bloomberg also points out that this intolerance is bipartisan. The Left and the Right have work to do to come together and find common ground to fix the problems in our nation.
4) Speaking of finding common ground, The New Republic has released new polling that shows that while the Right and Left do have profound disagreements on what is best for America, there are a few issues where bipartisanship solutions could be fruitful. Issues like illegal immigration and border security have long been viewed as a Republican platform, but TNR reports that 61% of Democrats would like improvements there. Likewise, 59% of Democrats are okay with the two senators per state rule, something some on the Left might be shocked to know. And finally, “a slim majority of Republicans (58 percent) consider the increasing economic power of the very wealthy to be a problem (versus 81 percent of Democrats), and a full 77 percent are troubled by the influence of big money in elections—just five percentage points fewer than Democrats.” These results do not mean bipartisan legislation will be straightforward, but common ground is possible.