Davide Battistella — Were Democrats Beaten By Their Own "War Of Narratives"?

I read a quote somewhere last week that went something like, “JFK put a man on the moon, Obama put a man in the ladies room”. This got me thinking about President Obama’s oft cited, “war of narratives”.

Who says something like this? Well, it’s people who believe that as long as they control the narrative, as long as they control the story, then they are winning. The facts don’t matter, the actual events, the situations, the way things unfold, these are also the things that do not matter.
What matters most to a person who believes that the world is based on a “war of narratives” is that their ideas and world view are the only possible alternative.Isn’t this what doomed the Democrats in the Election? Did they not just believe that they had a superior narrative to the one that was being proposed by Donald Trump? So much so that they practically hid their candidate while waiting for her pronouncement as president. 

With a president and leader, who holds a belief that the “war of narratives” is all that matters, Democrats have slipped into a very narrow (albeit progressive) world view....

From this perch, you ignore what is going on around you and it is your job and the job of your party to push any given issue through the filter of a given narrative. So take any issue and run it into the ground to convince people your narrative is the only acceptable one. You can blame people for falling down this slippery slope because it usually involves, at some point, the absence of using common sense. 

Sure, Republicans push narratives as well, but they don’t seem to do it with such zeal and with the world view that whichever particular narrative du jour is the only plausible, logical story that exists.

This is a worthwhile read about controlling the narrative. 

I disagree somewhat with the author about this being more a problem for the Democrats than the Republicans. It may seem that way now, since the Democratic establishment is a victim of its own narrative during the election, first, to marginalize Bernie Sanders, and then Donald Trump. They started to believe their own BS.

But I think this also affected the campaigns of John McCain and Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney was just a sure that he was going to win as was Hillary Clinton, right up until the final hours of the voting. Mitt apparently got over it, but I don't think that John McCain ever did.

Zero Hedge
Were Democrats Beaten By Their Own "War Of Narratives"?

Davide Battistella