Narrative Worldviews
As I’ve discussed earlier, I think there are two basic political worldviews: the complex (comic, to use Burkean terminology) and the simple (tragic or melodramatic).
You’ll note that these are not ideological (mostly), having little to do with any coherent set of policies, but are instead about how we people see the world. Such worldviews do, of course, nudge people toward particular kinds of political acts, so they are not entirely divorced from policy. Therefore, while it’s tempting to tempting to see the chart with two column and think they represent the two major parties or political ideologies, the reality is more complex. As I’ve argued here, while the right is largely tragic/melodramatic, the left is actually split between the two approaches (think Hillary/Biden as aligned with the comic worldview, and Bernie with the tragic/melodramatic). In other words, the worldviews may push people toward policies, but the strength of that push remains undetermined.
Villain Dependency
While the chart above is wholly fascinating (I think!), what I want to focus on today is the role of the two villains: the primary villain (the “person” causing the problem) and the secondary villain (the political opposition). Comic folks see problems as systemic, and so not caused by any particular villain. So crime, for example, is seen as caused by things like poverty or racism or access to guns, and is therefore a difficult and complex problem that can be mitigated but not truly solved. The political opposition, then, is not causing the problem, but is merely preventing effective solutions to those underlying (systemic) causes.
But for the tragic/melodramatic folks, things are quite different: problems are caused by specific villainous agents. Crime is caused by criminals, who are simply bad people, and the solution is easy: lock them up. Solving poverty won’t do anything, they think, because bad people are fundamentally bad (they are not made bad, they simply ARE bad). The political opposition is then seen as being “soft,” coddling these fundamentally bad people instead of tossing them in prison forever.
The End of Villains
For a long time this dynamic was stable, largely, I suspect, because of the cold war. Liberals proposed policies aimed at winning the hearts and minds of disputed countries, persuading people that democracy and capitalism could make their lives better. Conservative proposed policies aimed at threatening or killing commies (think Reagan “joking” about outlawing Russia and saying the bombing begins in five minutes). And later, we had terrorists jumping into the primary role, and again we gunned up against the “axis of evil.”
All of this led to horrendous foreign policy, of course. Ruinous military spending on things that ranged from the truly horrific to the absurd. But domestically, it led to stability. As much as Republicans hated Democrats, the commies or the terrorists remained the target of their most violent rhetoric.
But now there are no easy villains to fill that primary role for the right. Putin is a threat, but more of a regional threat. China is played up as a threat, but it’s largely an economic threat; hardly the sort of world-in-the-balance stuff needed to sustain a tragic/melodramatic narrative. What’s an angry conservative to do? Who are they supposed to hate?
The answer, I’m afraid, is that they simply hate Democrats. Where before they hated the Soviet Union and merely scorned Democrats as weak, they have now collapsed the roles of primary and secondary villain. Democrats are the new “evil empire.”
It’s easy to blame Trump or Fox News for this move, and no doubt they deserve some blame, but at its core, a worldview that equates solving problems with defeating villains cannot survive in the absence of a villain. Consider, for example, the Republican Party platform in the 2020 election: do whatever Trump wants. This is a party without an agenda. People joke about how “owning the libs” is the sole activity of Republican congresspeople, but that’s only funny because it’s so true. Or maybe it’s only horrifying because it’s so true. What are Republicans for? Who knows? But what are they against? That’s easy: they’re against Democrats. And how does a democracy endure when one side believes the other to be essentially evil? I’m not sure it does.
Rhetoric & Running 