Democrats are terrible at understanding how narratives work

Seriously, it's not rocket science. Unless you're a US Senator, apparently

Already it’s overwhelming. In his first 24 hours as president, Trump has pardoned hundreds of violent criminals who assaulted police officers, fired career civil servants, blabbered incoherently in front of cameras for several hours, had trans people formally eliminated in the eyes of the federal government, halted clean energy production, and purported to overturn the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship by executive order.

To those of us who deplore everything Trump stands for, it’s the unwelcome return of a familiar political problem from 2017-2020: where do you focus your energy? How do you communicate the scale of the horror to the public? Even learning about all the misdeeds and abuses takes a substantial portion of the day, never mind conveying it to others.

But folks, it’s actually not that hard. Human beings have for thousands of years been using a very reliable system to explain complex events to other humans. It’s called “creating a narrative.”

The reason narratives are effective is that all the stuff that is complicated and fast-moving doesn’t have to be understood by every single listener. It doesn’t matter if listeners pick up each episode or miss them entirely. The smaller events are used to reinforce, repeat, emphasize, and bolster the larger narrative. Over time, people begin to see each new development framed in the narrative.

So, Democrats: your job is to argue that Trump is unfit, corrupt, decrepit, incompetent, and authoritarian. You want voters to form a mental image of him as unsafe, unreliable, untrustworthy, immoral, and inept. He can is selling out to the highest bidder; he is motivated entirely by greed, hate, and stupidity. His family is corrupt, and everyone who touches him is corrupt. He elevates violent men because they praise him, and dictators because they also praise him. He’s liable to get us all killed or destroy the federal government. When he’s president you can’t sleep easy at night, because there is no one competent leading the country who can respond to any crisis. It’s indecent and insane he’s president.

(This narrative has the added benefit of being entirely correct.)

Then, you just flood the zone with every horrible thing he’s done. React appropriately and angrily. It does not matter if every Democrat is reacting to the same thing, as long as the reaction is appropriately negative.

Indeed, it’s useful to have people mad about many different things at once, which maximizes the chance that some of it will land. Think about how information works in the modern media ecosystem: some stuff blows up, goes viral, and is seen by everyone, but you can’t predict in advance what it will be. Better to have lots of people saying lots of things to maximize your odds, than everyone saying a single thing, and hoping it’s right.

It certainly doesn’t matter if people capture every horrible detail. Some abuses will attract more attention than others. That’s fine. The goal is to ensure that everywhere people look, they see more evidence of the key narrative of Trump’s incredible unfitness and corruption. That’s how narratives work! The pieces promote the whole.

This is, notably, how Republicans have attacked Democrats in the past. There wasn’t a coherent narrative of wrongdoing against Hillary Clinton — in fact, she really committed no serious wrongdoing of any kind — but the right successfully flooded the discourse with endless half-formed stories that looked and sounded somewhat scandalous. The narrative stuck, even if none of the details did. Like so with Biden: it’s very hard to name specific instances of corruption or wrongdoing, but it hardly prevented the right from attacking the “Biden crime family” and constantly linking him and his administration to misbehavior. Even more successfully, the right propagated a narrative that the Biden presidency was inert and adrift, because Biden was checked-out mentally, despite the fact that Biden presidency pursued and completed more policy projects than any administration in living memory. The narrative stuck, with many liberals repeating it, even though the actual evidence in its favor was incredibly weak.

Narratives are so powerful that they can be sustained even when they’re completely false, because people are drawn to the overarching theme, not the details that the narrative are built from.

For whatever reason, Democrats seem to struggle with this simple approach. They are obsessed with carefully selecting a single message, and then pursuing it with discipline. In the eyes of many Democrats, it’s better to have every single member of the party repeating the same carefully tested point. The Democratic instinct in the past has been to find a single, particularly galling abuse and home in on it, explaining it in great detail to “educate” the public.

This was, for instance, the approach undertaken both in Trump’s first impeachment, for his attempted blackmail of Ukraine, and by the Jan. 6 committee. In both instances Democrats made elaborate, careful cases, reduced to simplest terms, so that voters and the public could understand in precise detail what Trump had done wrong. In the Ukraine impeachment, Democrats were so laser-focused on the specific wrongdoing that they ignored other leads pointing to severe corruption — e.g., the presence of a server full of incriminating phone calls between Trump and other world leaders — because they thought it would “distract” from their crystal-clear narrative.

But this is incorrect: it actually undermines the creation of narratives. There was no opportunity for anything to organically catch the interest of the public — it was one giant prescripted performance, and to the extent that performance was of lesser interest to someone, there wasn’t any alternative.

For Trump’s second presidency, let’s do things differently. Let a thousand scandals bloom. Exploit the fact you have hundreds of elected officials and thousands of prominent voices and chase after every bit of wrongdoing. As long as Americans are hearing bad things about Trump, and not good things, you’re still promoting the core narrative of his unfitness. And that’s the essential fact that voters need to carry into the ballot booth.