My belief and experience as a novelist is that stories are the most effective means, perhaps the only means, of moving people.
At every juncture in our lives, we seek stories to explain, comfort, and bless. We bond through shared stories, and we choose friends, spouses, jobs, and places to live based on the stories we can build around them. Stories are the frameworks by which we construct who we think of ourselves, and they are how we make sense of the world.
Regarding the latter, in late 2016 many Democrats believed that Donald Trump Just won the presidential electionGenerally, they settled on a story pitched to them by a modern-day Huck Finn named J.D. Vance. Hollywood’s tale It will be Feature films.
Vance told well-educated, affluent progressives comforting stories about how the people they grew up with were ignorant, bigoted, and largely blaming themselves for their tragic fate in life, painting an entire subculture as too stupid and incompetent to vote in their own interests. Vance got liberals to hold Trump responsible, and they applauded, despite the fact that his politics are the polar opposite of theirs, and that his book is a 300-page exercise in victim blaming, which progressives openly consider a cardinal sin.
One of the reasons Vance’s book resonated so strongly with wealthy white leftists is that it dovetails with a story they’ve been telling themselves for some time — a story that has grown increasingly louder, more insistent, and less tolerant of dissent over the course of the next four years of Trump’s presidency. This story has been labeled in many ways, but the variations share a basic narrative: White people — all white people — are the perpetrators of, and the beneficiaries of, an immovable apartheid system.
Imagine you’re a poor white man from a rural area. It’s as if your life, you and everyone you know, were summoned out of thin air to be used as disposable cogs in a machine you didn’t create or control. That’s the story, or lack thereof, of growing up in central Maine, an environment very similar to the one Vance describes in his book. Where I come from, many people ek out meaningless subsistence that doesn’t enrich themselves or anyone else, drink and smoke to numb the hollow pain, and die as soon as they feel like it.
The phrase imposed on us today by the urban elite in response to this cycle of despair is:Death of despair.“But despair doesn’t kill us. We die because we lack a story that connects us to some purpose. We die because we were born without a plot.”
At least that’s how it always was for the people I grew up with. My grandfather smoked four packs of cigarettes a day and only needed one match. It’s not hard to imagine it wouldn’t take long for such a habit to kill him. My father smoked half as much, but he inhaled so much Agent Orange during the Vietnam War that it was enough. Their combined life spans barely shy of 100 years.
I myself quit smoking a while ago, but there’s still a void inside me that wants to be filled with the malicious warmth of smoke, a void exactly the same size and shape as the lost story of why I’m here and why I matter.
Throw everything you want into this void: booze, drugs, cigarettes, of course, food, sex, money (if you’re lucky enough to get it), etc. The hole inside me will just swallow it all and leave me sitting there, an abyss staring back forever. I’ve really lived a life of work and purpose, but I must constantly be on guard against the thing that has killed so many of the people I love. Despair comes and goes, but the absence of narrative remains. And it’s deadly.
Now imagine this is your life, with no redeeming story whatsoever, and then suddenly someone tells you that, no, you do have a story, and in it you are the bad guy. You are complicit in and benefiting from the suffering of others.
How do you react to news like this? Let me tell you how I and many of the people I know reacted. We looked around and wondered where the wealth and privilege we always heard about came from, and why we were living such short, unhealthy lives when one of our birthrights should be to live longer, healthier lives. And we looked back at the people who were telling us these stories about ourselves and realized that they actually had no idea who we are or what life is like from our perspective. They may actually be accusing us of sin when they themselves are the ones who are guilty.
Without a compelling narrative about our place and purpose in the world, there is a void that must and will be filled with other things: a persistent desire, consciously or unconsciously, to annihilate ourselves; a vulgar pride of place that leads us to believe that people from elsewhere are our enemy; the wild proposals of cheap-sale demagogues.
While I can’t fully understand the feelings of my cousin who died of COVID, I can understand his reasons for refusing to get vaccinated, which rang true with his entire experience of over-educated people with money and power trying to control him without caring about his interests.
Poet Marge Piercy I have written “The pitcher cries for water to carry, the man cries for real work.” Perhaps the way to stop the cycle of despair between poor whites and everyone else is to create a society in which everyone, no matter how humble their origins, has water to carry and is respected for it.
Now, Republican vice presidential candidateJ.D. Vance would change his narrative. He would turn 180 degrees and tell the people he comes from that, after all, they are not responsible for their problems. In fact, progressive white Democrats have abandoned them and are blaming them for the ills of the country. And Vance would A hypocrite and a sneaky opportunisthe wouldn’t be wrong.
We may have prejudiced or xenophobic tendencies, or we may be simple-minded by the standards of Ivy League-educated people like Vance. But we are not stupid. We know when we’ve been ignored, belittled, or used as a political punching bag. We are trying to sort out our place in an American story that hasn’t gone well recently. And like everyone else, we will go where we’re asked and cast in our lot with those who will at least pretend to acknowledge our grievances and struggles.
Until the Democratic Party finally realizes this and finds a story to tell about it, I doubt the republic will survive long, because in the absence of a progressive narrative that actually embraces them, many people where I live will continue to believe the fascist narrative they have been told for the past eight years.
Ron Curry He is a novelist and screenwriter whose essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Salon, and elsewhere. He lives in Maine.
