I agree that this is important. We always have to tell our stories authentically and from our true material place in the world. That’s the actual connection between culture, identity, and politics that the wokesters refuse to recognize.
Absolutely. "Ordinary Americans, really and truly, are not pining to hear a more compelling story about the public squalor and economic dysfunction they are compelled to live with every day. What they need is universal healthcare, affordable housing, and an education system that doesn’t drown them with debt." Ask Zohran Mamdani.
He’s referring to the tradition described by American sociologist Robert Bellah — the tradition running through Lincoln FDR Roosevelt JFK Reagan etc. this is the political realization of the Christian egalitarian ideal that is actually the foundation of American liberal democracy. That’s the tradition he is invoking. The one you owe your ideas to.
Not the Dems looking for narrative and brand and story fixes.
Yeah I’m a bit frustrated with how lazy this take is — like if you understood Obama’s theology and anything about religious studies in America you’d recognize the difference between this type of narrative and the soulless stuff most Dem strategists have in mind when they talk about this
Unquestionably true. The solution is simiple. Just copy FDR. He faced the same problems and used both government and communication to solve them.
I can think of one partial exception, one case where more communication would have helped. A few parts of the Biden administration were trying to bring back the New Deal. Lina Khan and her colleagues made a real difference. BUT the party refused to support them and refused to ADVERTISE their actual GOOD WORK. Instead the party kept chanting weird magical nonsense about "democracy" and "insurrection".
Your piece constructs a compelling but ultimately flawed dichotomy. By arguing that Americans need "structural and material change, not better storytelling," Savage implies that moral and ethical narratives are merely a superficial gloss—a centrist distraction from the hard work of fixing a broken system. But this critique fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the stories Obama is talking about, and more importantly, where they come from.
You treat these "meta-narratives" as if they are top-down messaging strategies cooked up in a consultant’s office to excuse a lack of structural reform. In reality, the most powerful moral and ethical stories do not distract from material reality; they illuminate it. These stories emanate directly from dialogue with those most affected by the policies that are keeping our country from being the great country it once was.
When a family shares the crushing reality of choosing between prescription medication and rent, or a worker describes the indignity of laboring for a wage that cannot sustain a dignified life, they are not asking us to ignore material conditions. They are translating systemic, structural failures into a profound moral demand. Their stories are the living, breathing evidence of the policies holding our nation back.
To dismiss "storytelling" as a relic of 2004 is to ignore the actual voices of the marginalized. Data, policy papers, and structural critiques are vital, but human beings organize, mobilize, and vote based on shared values and mutual empathy. The "moral and ethical story about how we live together" is not a substitute for material change—it is the indispensable engine required to achieve it.
One cannot build a coalition broad enough to execute massive structural reform without a shared narrative. And as long as that narrative is rooted in honest dialogue with the Americans suffering most under the status quo, storytelling isn't a retreat from the fight for a better country; it is the battlefield itself.
The kind of storytelling you describe has been exploited by the do-nothing Democrats for decades. It's not sharing; it's exploitation, the modern version of Lo, The Poor Indian.
It's true that the consultant class loves a good poverty porn monologue to mask legislative cowardice, Liz. But claiming that listening to the marginalized is just 'Lo, the Poor Indian' goes too far in the other direction. People aren't just victims of exploitation; they are political agents demanding power. Dismissing their stories as mere 'exploitation' erases their agency just as much as the consultants do.
I could accept your position except as it happens I am one of the marginalized, who just happens to have sufficient experience of the matter to know how the political class has been exploiting us for decades while doing jack-shit thats useful for actually making our situation better.
Dont't be humble about it. The country has had it with the flip sides of neo-liberal and neo-conservative politics and economics, and the Dems still don't get it.
Biden passed an ambitious agenda of public spending on the enviornment, creating full employment and the public was not won over. To the extent that material concerns are at the heart of unrest if the present, it'd have to be concerns about cost, rooted largely in questions about housing scarcity.
I couldn’t agree more. I, for one one, argue that the Democratic Party needs to focus on exactly the issues you identify and with actual programmatic substance, and I believe that the party overall needs to recast itself as the party of “Making-it in America.” This is the central issue: people have become increasingly financially insecure and vulnerable, and all of the talk about overall growth in GDP, etc., is beside the point. The average person, all 350 million+ of them (minus the .001% that are financially secure), is vulnerable in so many different ways to, literally, ruin in this country, that this is the reason why a total disaster of a human being like Trump, simply by acknowledging this and campaigning on ‘a plague on both their houses’ could win the day and then again on a second day. I wish I could understand why this is so hard for our Democratic Party leadership to either understand or get behind . . . .
Love this. Though I think the left needs to work on our stories a little more too, not at the cost of a material analysis, of course.
The left needs to stop shouting slogans and learn to communicate without using the establishment trigger words.
I agree that this is important. We always have to tell our stories authentically and from our true material place in the world. That’s the actual connection between culture, identity, and politics that the wokesters refuse to recognize.
Absolutely. "Ordinary Americans, really and truly, are not pining to hear a more compelling story about the public squalor and economic dysfunction they are compelled to live with every day. What they need is universal healthcare, affordable housing, and an education system that doesn’t drown them with debt." Ask Zohran Mamdani.
He’s referring to the tradition described by American sociologist Robert Bellah — the tradition running through Lincoln FDR Roosevelt JFK Reagan etc. this is the political realization of the Christian egalitarian ideal that is actually the foundation of American liberal democracy. That’s the tradition he is invoking. The one you owe your ideas to.
Not the Dems looking for narrative and brand and story fixes.
Spot on, but you just triggered most of the readers!
Yeah I’m a bit frustrated with how lazy this take is — like if you understood Obama’s theology and anything about religious studies in America you’d recognize the difference between this type of narrative and the soulless stuff most Dem strategists have in mind when they talk about this
Barack Obama is still a massive piece of sh*t
Unquestionably true. The solution is simiple. Just copy FDR. He faced the same problems and used both government and communication to solve them.
I can think of one partial exception, one case where more communication would have helped. A few parts of the Biden administration were trying to bring back the New Deal. Lina Khan and her colleagues made a real difference. BUT the party refused to support them and refused to ADVERTISE their actual GOOD WORK. Instead the party kept chanting weird magical nonsense about "democracy" and "insurrection".
Your piece constructs a compelling but ultimately flawed dichotomy. By arguing that Americans need "structural and material change, not better storytelling," Savage implies that moral and ethical narratives are merely a superficial gloss—a centrist distraction from the hard work of fixing a broken system. But this critique fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the stories Obama is talking about, and more importantly, where they come from.
You treat these "meta-narratives" as if they are top-down messaging strategies cooked up in a consultant’s office to excuse a lack of structural reform. In reality, the most powerful moral and ethical stories do not distract from material reality; they illuminate it. These stories emanate directly from dialogue with those most affected by the policies that are keeping our country from being the great country it once was.
When a family shares the crushing reality of choosing between prescription medication and rent, or a worker describes the indignity of laboring for a wage that cannot sustain a dignified life, they are not asking us to ignore material conditions. They are translating systemic, structural failures into a profound moral demand. Their stories are the living, breathing evidence of the policies holding our nation back.
To dismiss "storytelling" as a relic of 2004 is to ignore the actual voices of the marginalized. Data, policy papers, and structural critiques are vital, but human beings organize, mobilize, and vote based on shared values and mutual empathy. The "moral and ethical story about how we live together" is not a substitute for material change—it is the indispensable engine required to achieve it.
One cannot build a coalition broad enough to execute massive structural reform without a shared narrative. And as long as that narrative is rooted in honest dialogue with the Americans suffering most under the status quo, storytelling isn't a retreat from the fight for a better country; it is the battlefield itself.
The kind of storytelling you describe has been exploited by the do-nothing Democrats for decades. It's not sharing; it's exploitation, the modern version of Lo, The Poor Indian.
It's true that the consultant class loves a good poverty porn monologue to mask legislative cowardice, Liz. But claiming that listening to the marginalized is just 'Lo, the Poor Indian' goes too far in the other direction. People aren't just victims of exploitation; they are political agents demanding power. Dismissing their stories as mere 'exploitation' erases their agency just as much as the consultants do.
I could accept your position except as it happens I am one of the marginalized, who just happens to have sufficient experience of the matter to know how the political class has been exploiting us for decades while doing jack-shit thats useful for actually making our situation better.
Dont't be humble about it. The country has had it with the flip sides of neo-liberal and neo-conservative politics and economics, and the Dems still don't get it.
Biden passed an ambitious agenda of public spending on the enviornment, creating full employment and the public was not won over. To the extent that material concerns are at the heart of unrest if the present, it'd have to be concerns about cost, rooted largely in questions about housing scarcity.
I couldn’t agree more. I, for one one, argue that the Democratic Party needs to focus on exactly the issues you identify and with actual programmatic substance, and I believe that the party overall needs to recast itself as the party of “Making-it in America.” This is the central issue: people have become increasingly financially insecure and vulnerable, and all of the talk about overall growth in GDP, etc., is beside the point. The average person, all 350 million+ of them (minus the .001% that are financially secure), is vulnerable in so many different ways to, literally, ruin in this country, that this is the reason why a total disaster of a human being like Trump, simply by acknowledging this and campaigning on ‘a plague on both their houses’ could win the day and then again on a second day. I wish I could understand why this is so hard for our Democratic Party leadership to either understand or get behind . . . .