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BOOKS Spinning out of control

CARLOS MARTINEZ recommends an investigation into how mendacious political narratives are constructed

The Art of Political Storytelling: Why Stories Win Votes in Post-truth Politics
by Philip Seargeant
(Bloomsbury, £21.99)

THOUGHT-PROVOKING and opinionated, The Art of Political Storytelling, is an account of how politicians and their spin-doctors borrow from the world of myth and fiction in order to construct compelling political narratives capable of attracting mass support.

Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign provides the quintessential example of this. Trump was depicted as an underdog, a political outsider, going to battle on behalf of “the people” against the malevolent forces of the Washington status quo.

It's a deeply satisfying story — a classic “overcoming the monster” tale, with Trump as the protagonist. The antagonist — all good stories must have one — is the political elite which has been enriching itself while allowing the Chinese, and the Mexicans and the Muslims, to tear up the structure of US life.

It’s a simple, instantly recognisable story that offers a happy ending: Trump gets into the White House and Makes America Great Again. It’s such a compelling narrative that it isn’t significantly sidetracked by some startling plot-twists — the horrifying misogyny, the racial slurs, the dodgy business dealings.

The book’s author Philip Seargeant notes that ever since the start of rolling news coverage on cable TV in the 1980s, news and entertainment have been on a converging path. “Any broadcast environment that’s chasing ratings will seek out conflict and sensationalism; it will look to coerce or manufacture drama.”

This process has accelerated sharply in the era of social media, where clicks mean money. In this world of showbiz politics, news broadcasting is increasingly about story-telling, about tapping into emotions as a higher priority than presenting rational argument.

Seargeant points out that all this creates an environment in which populism flourishes. Politicians with simple, appealing stories that pit good against evil are capturing the popular imagination with powerfully dramatic slogans. Hence “Get Brexit Done” can win more support than a huge programme of reforms designed to genuinely improve the lives of millions.

Concerns about populism have been rising over the last few years. The liberal perspective, which it seems is shared by Seargeant, worries about all forms of populism because they all lead away from a safe starting point of liberal capitalism. In such a framework, class analysis is nowhere to be found.

Yet if we’re willing to look through a lens of social class and ideology, we see that “left populism” and “right populism” are profoundly different phenomena.

Of all people, Tony Blair inadvertently hit the nail on the head when he said that “the right attacks immigrants while the left rails at bankers.” This is another way of saying that the left has correctly identified neoliberal capitalism as the cause of the vast social problems faced by our society, while the right finds a scapegoat which it uses to divert attention from the inequality and misery built into our economic system.

So what “left” and “right” populism have in common is that they both address themselves primarily to ordinary people. Both claim to oppose the status quo and both put forward a story of “the people” against entrenched power.

The difference between them is that left populism, as personified by Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders or Hugo Chavez, actually does oppose the status quo, actually does represent the interests of working class and oppressed communities.

Right populism, as personified by Donald Trump, Boris Johnson or Jair Bolsonaro, is in reality a fake populism, identifying a rising popular sentiment against the status quo and leveraging it to divert and divide, thereby protecting that status quo.

In doing so, right populism is playing a political role that finds a fairly clear analogy in the rise of fascism in the 1930s.

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