What's the Real American Story?

Script

Donald Trump has perfected the art of telling a fake story about America. The only way to counter that is to tell the real story of America. 

The Story of how Donald Trump wins a 2nd Term

Bob Reich walks in, and positions the camera so it is lined up properly, behind him is a GREY BACKDROP.  Bob positions himself to speak on one side of the screen while archival plays on the other.

Donald Trump’s story is this:  Powerful alien forces  — immigrants, foreign traders, foreign politicians and their international agreements — have undermined the wellbeing of most Americans. These forces have been successful largely because Democrats, liberals, cultural elites, the Washington establishment, the media, and “deep state” bureaucrats have helped them, in order to enrich themselves and boost their power. Not surprisingly, according to Trump, all these forces seek to remove him from office. 

Now, none of it is true, of course.  But without a true story to combat Trump’s false story, Trump could win a second term as president. Even Trump’s fake story can be more convincing to millions of Americans than the truth without a story.   

So what’s the real story of America— the true narrative based on facts and logic and history? Let me show you. 

Four Essential Stories  

It didn’t begin with Trump. Since Ronald Reagan, Republicans have understood better than Democrats the art of political narrative.

Now, there are four essential American stories that transcend politics. They are the four legs of the table that holds the American imagination. The first two are about hope; the second two are about fear. 

The first story. 

The Triumphant Individual

This is the familiar tale of the little guy or gal who works hard, takes risks, believes in him or herself, and eventually gains wealth, fame, and honor.  The story is epitomized in Horatio Alger’s hundred or so novellas, whose heroes all rise promptly and predictably from rags to riches.  Or in the life of Abraham Lincoln, born in a log cabin, who believed that “the value of life is to improve one’s condition.” The moral: With enough effort and courage, anyone can make it in the United States.

The second story is:

The Benevolent Community

This is the story of neighbors and friends who roll up their sleeves and pitch in for the common good. It goes back to the puritans.  John Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity,” delivered on-board a ship in Salem Harbor 1630 was a new world version of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount.  Similar ideals of community found among the abolitionists, suffragettes, and civil rights activists of the 1950s and 1960s. “I have a dream that every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low,” said Martin Luther King Jr., extolling the ideal of the national community.

Now the two stories based on fear that have been used for more than 200 years of American history. 

The Mob at the Gates

This is the story of threatening forces beyond our borders. Daniel Boone fought Indians—described then in racist terms as “savages” or “heathens”. Davy Crockett battled Mexicans. Much the same story gave force to cold war tales during the ’50s of an international communist plot to undermine U.S. democracy and subsequently of  the “evil empire” and “Axis of Evil.” Now, sometimes this story has been true: America battled Hitler and other fascists in World War II. We have taken on the forces responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attack. The underlying lesson: We must maintain vigilance, lest external threats overwhelm and divide us.

The Rot at the Top

Fourth and finally, the last story concerns the malevolence of powerful elites. It’s a tale of corruption, decadence, and irresponsibility in high places—of conspiracy against the common citizen. The great bullies of American fiction have often symbolized Rot at the Top:  Willie Stark as the corrupt politician in All the King’s Men, and the antagonists that hound the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath. This tale has also given force to the great populist movements of U.S. history, from Andrew Jackson’s attack on the Bank of the United States in the 1830s through William Jennings Bryan’s prairie populism of the 1890s, right up through Bernie Sanders on the left and Trump on the right in 2016.

Speak to these four stories and you resonate with the stories Americans have been telling each other since our founding.  

Bob walks up to the camera, and spins it to the NEXT WALL.  Possibly use a projector effect, or pressing a button to show a virtually continuous chain of historical archival footage and images.  

Now for the politics: 

When Democrats Told Better Stories

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Democrats supplied all four stories, and they were true. 

During his 1912 campaign, Woodrow Wilson attacked the rot at the top, powerful business interests — the trusts — were keeping Americans from being truly free.  The struggle to break up the trusts would be nothing less than “a second struggle for emancipation,” by a national Benevolent Community intent on restoring freedom and democracy. The story of the mob at the gates -- would soon be revealed as the aggressors in World War I, which Wilson and the Democrats fought to make the world “safe for democracy.”

By the 1920s, Republicans were mostly apologists for big business and Wall Street. Their approach to foreign policy was mainly to avoid the Mob at the Gates—close the doors to immigrants, erect tariff walls, and isolate the nation.  They offered no particular view of the United States as a Benevolent Community. That was OK with Americans as long as the economy roared, but it left the Grand Old Party, the Republicans, vulnerable in harder times, which soon came.

The Great Depression and World War II presented the United States with palpable illustrations of the Democrat’s stories.  To cope with the Depression, Americans needed Social Security.  “We are determined,” Roosevelt said, “to make every American citizen the subject of his country’s interest and concern.” The Social Security Act embodied the Benevolent Community -- not just social insurance, but a powerful symbol of national solidarity. So, too, with unemployment insurance, the 40-hour workweek, worker’s compensation, and laws to strengthen unions. And then, of course, came Adolf Hitler’s war, which cemented this national unity as FDR led the country into battle with the most fearsome Mob at the Gates it had ever encountered, over the objections of Republican isolationists.

After the war, the Benevolent Community remained at the core of Harry S. Truman’s Fair Deal, John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. This national solidarity provided the provisions necessary for the upwardly mobile Triumphant Individual to succeed.  The G.I. bill, government-backed mortgages, Medicare and Medicaid, a guarantee of equal civil rights and voting rights were all part of this story. To the extent there was Rot, it was the southern politicians who refused to recognize equal civil rights. Meanwhile, the Democrats continued their assault on the Mob at the Gates, now morphed into a dangerous and expansive Soviet Union.

So what changed?

When Democrats Lost Their Stories

In the 1960s, the Rot at the Top disappeared from the Democrats’ message. Gone were tales of greedy businessmen or unscrupulous financiers. This was partly because the economy had changed profoundly. Postwar prosperity allowed the middle class to explode in size and the gap between rich and poor to shrink.

Rot at the Top rhetoric was also a casualty of the Vietnam War, which spawned an anti-establishment and anti authoritarian New Left and split Democrats down the middle. For many liberals, the Rot came to be personified by Lyndon Johnson, his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, and even the federal government itself. (Ironically, Richard Nixon’s White House and the Watergate scandal would hurt the Democrats, too, by confirming that the Rot at the Top was to be found in government rather than among business elites.)

The Vietnam War also undermined Democrats’ confidence about the Mob at the Gates. Soviet communism remained dangerous, to be sure, but they had no clear plan of action. Democrats stopped talking both about the Rot at the Top and about the Mob at the Gates, and thus stopped giving Americans convincing stories about what the nation was up against.

Enter Ronald Reagan, master storyteller, who jumped into the conceptual breach that Democrats had left open. For Reagan, the Mob at the Gates was not merely a Soviet Union that needed to be contained, but an Evil Empire that had to be destroyed. The Rot at the Top was big government—as Reagan famously claimed, “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem”.—and for Reagan, the Benevolent Community’s foundation was not New Deal-style programs but small, traditional neighborhoods in which people voluntarily helped one another, free from government interference. Through the alchemy of supply-side (“trickle-down”) economics, Reagan’s self-enriching triumphant individuals would, it was said, help us all.  And when Reagan talked about “Cadillac-driving 'welfare queens' and 'strapping young bucks' buying T-bone steaks with food stamps” Reagan signaled to white America a new mob at the gates.

George H. W. Bush continued this racial dog whistling with his notorious Willie Horton ad, implying that Democrats would release black criminals into the streets.

Democrats never revived their versions of the four stories.

Bill Clinton was a skilled politician, but he never found his own stories. His “new democrat” narrative was a re-packaging of dominant republican stories rather than a new democratic one. Blue-collar wages had flattened, corporate profits were rising, and Wall Street began flexing its muscles, but Clinton’s “Rot at the Top” remained Big Government.

Clinton even announced that the era of big government was over —and tried to prove it by ending welfare and slashing the federal budget.

Under George W. Bush, the September 11 terrorist attacks powerfully revived the Mob at the Gates, and the storyline he offered fit perfectly into the old story of the Soviet threat to the American way of life a generation before. Bush’s conservative agenda was also intended, as Bush explained, “by making every citizen an agent of his or her own destiny.” In fact, Social Security was to be turned into private accounts that Triumphant Individuals could use to gain personal wealth.

But it was in the retelling of the story about the Rot at the Top that Bush added most to the preceding Republican storyline. In addition to big government, his “rot” was also America’s “cultural elites.” 

Then came Barack Obama, who understood the triumphant individual as a product of a strong benevolent community — providing education and opportunity. After all, his life illustrated the story.  But Obama never quite figured out how to tell the other two stories.

His real failure was his reluctance to discuss the Rot at the Top. Obama didn’t want to blame Wall Street for the financial crisis, or for the huge toll the Great Recession took on average Americans. But the Street was to blame. Its political power had prevented prior administrations from regulating financial markets as they should have been. And while the Street was bailed out and no Wall Street executive went to jail, few homeowners received any help at all. And to this day, millions of Americans are still suffering its consequences, and feeling the resentments it spawned.

So what were Democrats to do? All their stories had vanished.

A True Story for our Times to Defeat Trump

So, what’s the true story for our time that speaks to the mob, the rot, the triumphant individual, and the benevolent community?  What’s the true story that can best Trump’s false story because it resonates with what Americans experience every day? 

The Mob at the Gates aren’t immigrants. They’re not democratically-elected governments that have been our allies for decades or more. They’re not foreign traders. 

The real Mob is comprised of thugs like Vladimir Putin and other tyrants around the world who are antagonistic toward democratic institutions, intolerant of ethnic minorities, hostile toward the free press, and eager to use government to benefit themselves and those who support them.

We need a new global alliance against them, led by the United States. Democratic leaders in America helped create NATO; maybe now it’s time for a Global Alliance for Democracy against authoritarianism. 

Meanwhile, America’s potential Triumphant Individuals depend critically on three things to prosper in the new economy: a good education, good medical care, and the right to join together to demand better pay and better working conditions. If we are truly a Benevolent Community, we will provide them to every American citizen. And all of us stand to gain. Wages, which have been flat for a generation, will rise.  The rising tide of productivity and wealth will lift the nation as a whole.

What’s holding us back? The real Rot at the Top—concentrated wealth and power to a degree we haven’t seen in this nation since the late nineteenth century. Mammoth corporations that are monopolized and hugely rich individuals have abused their power and wealth to corrupt our democracy.

In this, the rich have been helped by a Republican Congress and White House whose guiding ideology seems less capitalism than cronyism, as shown time and again through legislative and regulatory gifts to Big Pharma, Wall Street, Big Oil and Coal, Big Agriculture, and giant military contractors. 

But only through reinvigorating democracy will Americans be free from the crony capitalists that are controlling us.  

This is the true story of our times.

The next chapter of this American story is up to us.