Making Meaning

Tell a better story

“The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” ― Richard Powers, The Overstory

Actor Robert De Niro appeared Tuesday with retired Capitol Police officers Harry Dunn and Michael Fanone, Jan. 6 combat veterans, outside the Manhattan courthouse where closing arguments were underway in Donald Trump’s falsified business records trial.

The Ink explains why the stunt was significant:

When we spoke with writer and policy wonk Heather McGhee earlier this month, she pointed out that Democrats have a serious “meaning making” problem. Which is to say, Trump understands what Democratic leaders tend not to: that in today’s media environment and attention economy, an effective candidate needs not only to seek votes but also, crucially, to be an active, vigorous participant in the cultural process through which voters construct meaning.

Voting is downstream; meaning making is upstream. Authoritarian leaders tend to be deft at working at both points of the river. And pro-democracy leaders are often at risk of earnestly seeking votes downstream and ignoring the sense-making part.

A trial, for example, doesn’t explain itself, as obvious a situation as it may appear to be. A trial is a thousand fragments of reality. It needs to be arrayed into a story in people’s minds to gain meaning. That meaning could be “Donald Trump is relentlessly persecuted by the powerful elite because he fights for people like me,” or it could be “Donald Trump is a lifelong charlatan who does crimes the way you do breakfast.”

Friends in the Writers Guild lament regularly that Democrats don’t avail themselves of the professional storytelling skills they are more than willing to share. Democrats rely instead on the Beltway Boys Club, the campaign industrial complex of former Hill staffers who, once they leave government employ, hang out shingles as chummy campaign consultants.

I’ll remind you again:

“I don’t get it. When a consultant on the Republican side loses, we take them out and shoot them. You guys — keep hiring them.”
— Nationally prominent Republican official

From “Crashing the Gate,” by Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga (2006)

What was different yesterday is that De Niro is an excellent storyteller. He “made meaning out of the narrative fragments of the Trump trial, telling a story that people might tell themselves, the kind of story about Trump the penny-ante grifter that New Yorkers certainly know in their bones.”

As McGhee explained it to us recently:

Biden is nowhere in our daily and cultural lives, which is, actually, I think, even worse than him being this caricature of a doddering old man. He is not an avatar for anything we either are or want to be. He is not a brand. He is not a style. He is not a storyteller. He’s not a cultural icon or a logic, and he doesn’t knit together different things that we experience on a daily basis into a story. 

Perhaps a shift is in the works. Can Biden engage in more of this meaning-making himself? That remains to be seen, but yesterday offered evidence that the Democrats are trying to speak to people where they live.

Another storyteller, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, made the same point in his commencement address at Brandeis University. He quoted novelist Richard Powers: “The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”

Biden is not a natural. He needs help he may not know he needs. Perhaps someone got to him. Good. It’s not enough to be the most qualified for the office. (Ask Hillary Clinton.) You first have to be the best candidate. Different skill sets. Plus, what’s worked for Biden his whole decades-long career needs to adapt to current realities. His “MAGA Republicans” speech at Independence Hall in 2022 showed he can bring it. But he needs to bring it, and bring it, and bring it if he expects to be part of “our daily and cultural lives.”

De Niro recently narrated a Biden-Harris ad, suggesting maybe our Democrats is learning (intentional Bushism).

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