COVID precautions are one area of competing political narratives
Republicans, with the help of Fox “News” and the Trump administration, are very good at creating and repeating political narratives. Here are a few that you will hear, in one form or another, over and over again:
–Government Bad/Corporations Good
–California and New York Bad
–Unions Bad (except Police unions)
–Scary Brown People (subsets include Blacks = “Thugs,” Hispanics = “Illegals,” Muslims = “Terrorists”)
–Oil Good/Clean Energy Bad
–“You’re on your own”
Moreover, Republicans love to be the aggressors and bring up these narratives all the time, whether at the dinner table, the supermarket aisle or elsewhere. So what to do when Republicans voice their Fox right wing narratives? Well, Republicans shouldn’t have all the fun. We should respond to their right wing narratives with our own narratives.
You might ask, “what are the Democratic narratives? I never hear them articulated.” It’s true that the Democratic Party does not have the equivalent of Fox “News,” conservative talk radio and other right wing media to push out their narratives on a daily or hourly basis. Hopefully, one day, such communications networks will be created. However, the Democratic Party narratives can be found at various sources, such as the Democratic Party Platform, the Democrats’ website, President-elect Joe Biden‘s 2020 presidential campaign website (now his President-elect website), right here at Messaging Matters, YouTube videos of the presidential and Democratic primary debates this year, and elsewhere. You can think of these narratives as expressions of Democratic values, articulated in a storytelling, anecdotal or other clear and compelling way. Moreover, if you listen for these narratives, you will hear them from many different places, including current standard bearer Joe Biden, his Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former President Barack Obama, other Democratic leaders in the U.S. House and Senate, etc. Here are a few Democratic narratives, or expressions of values, that you will likely find very familiar:
—Good Government to protect us from corporate abuse
–Justice and equality for all
—Protecting the quality of our air, water, soil and environment
–Everyone, and all companies, should pay their fair share of taxes
–Safety from gun violence
—Affordable healthcare for everyone
–Belief in good science to address COVID and other problems
So now let’s look at one example of a Democratic response to a right wing narrative, having to do with COVID, that happened just yesterday:
Republican: “What do you think of what’s going on in California with COVID? They’re shutting down everything, not even letting people be together.”
Democrat: “Well, they could be like Florida, where they say, ‘come on in, everything’s open, bars, restaurants everything. Only you’ll probably get sick, and you may die.'”
Note that, by starting off the conversation with their narratives (in this case it’s “California Bad”), Republicans are trying to frame the conversation in a manner advantageous to them. Essentially, they’re trying to tilt the playing field in order to win the argument before you can even reply, like always going first at Tic-Tac-Toe. However, by responding to their narrative with your own (in this case, criticizing Florida for putting bad politics over good science when it comes to the Coronavirus), you take away their ability to frame the discussion, and thus you return the game back to a level playing field, or perhaps you can even tilt the conversation your way.
By thinking about these Democratic narratives, you should hopefully be able to plug them in and create a compelling response to a variety of Republican narratives, whether made at a dinner table conversation, on social media, or elsewhere. You may be pleasantly surprised at the reaction from the right wingers when they hear your well-articulated narrative. Indeed, they might be speechless.
Photo by Phillip Pessar, used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/NN8PAV
