At least since the 2008 primaries I have been noticing a tendency on the part of media commentators and pundits to explain political in terms of "narrative." Thus during the Democratic primary Clinton and Obama were compared with respect to the compellingness of their narratives, and later, similarly, Obama and McCain (the latter won handily). Lately the use of "narrative" has escalated: since the Massachusetts special election, there has been an enormous amount of discussion about how Obama and the Democrats had "lost control" of the narrative, putting them irrevocably at risk of losing it all in November.
This "narrative turn" in political explanation is quite new. In fact, the use of "narrative" -- that is, the discussion of human events in terms of metanarrative, or narrative about narrative, in general is a relatively new explanatory systematics that has spread, over the last thirty years or so from literary theory (where of course it has held an honored and essential position for a very long time) to psychoanalysis and then psychotherapy; to legal studies (beyond the older understanding of narrative as what happens in courtrooms, to the use of the concept to explain the writing of statutes and the disempowerment of women and minorities in legal settings), through the social sciences generally, especially anthropology, and finally out of these scholarly purviews into the public political discourse.
The pundits, to be sure, have always had recourse to explanatory models to explain political outcomes: which candidate was supported by the most prestigious citizens? Had raised the most money? Spoke the most persuasively? Was the more "heroic"? The taller? Had the better hair? But these are specific and definite, and for the most part concrete. The recourse to narrative creates explanations both recondite and unprovable -- making them potentially dangerous.
Then why has it happened? I think there are a couple of major reasons.
First, as noted, the notion of narrative as explanation has arisen out of academia, so its use acquires its user with the patina of logic, learning, and objectivity. But perhaps more, narrativity (and this is yet another way in which it is different from other explanatory devices) suggests inevitability. To propose a narrative for a candidate -- or to worry that one candidate's, or one party's, narrative has been lost to the other side, is to invoke our understanding of the narrative arc -- the way stories play out because we have learned to expect them to end that way, from the time our parents taught us about this level of language by reading books to us and encouraging us, at the dinner table, to recount the events of our nursery-school day. We learned then in that way of the gripping power of stories: we could hold the floor uninterrupted by our siblings when we had a story to tell; we experienced the magic of "happily ever after" as Mommy or Daddy turned the pages.
So we have over the years come to expect stories to play out as their arcs demanded. And therefore the political metanarrative -- the narrative the pundits tell about politicians' narratives or lack of them -- seems peculiarly potent, both to the teller and the hearers/readers.
But we hearers/readers should be wary of settling back into childhood story-hearing mode. It's as deceptive as it is dangerous. In recent weeks, for instance, the narrative of the Democrats' loss of narrative control has obscured an important reality: there may be no narrative arc to recent events at all. The three pieces that are strung together to make the narrative of sudden Democratic vulnerability may not be parts of a single cohesive story at all, but rather three events that occurred for three separate reasons:
The Democrat lost in Virginia because that is historically a red state -- it is Obama's victory there in 2008, not the gubernatorial loss in 2009, that requires explanation. In New Jersey, the incumbent Democrat was wildly unpopular. And in Massachusetts, there are a multitude of factors: a personally attractive Republican candidate, a lackluster Democrat, Republican effort coupled with Democratic inertia, the existence in that state of a superior health-care plan that citizens did not want to be superseded by a less desirable national plan. These events should not be taken together: they are not the first chapter of a story, leading to an inevitable denouement; they do not magically spell the end of Democratic dominance. They do not signify nor represent the loss of narrative control, whatever that actually means.
The ability to create and appreciate narrative is unique to our species and makes us human. It is a precious gift. But we should not therefore be seduced into seeing it where it does not exist.