Disclaimer: I’m ignorant about a lot things. Here’s the things I’ll admit to: I dropped political science in college, not because I didn’t find it interesting but because I never showed up to the Friday discussions of International Politics. (This would be why I also failed The Philosophy of Love and Sex. Oops.) I dropped the journalism major because I failed Economics 101. (A writer who’s irresponsible with money? What kind of monkey shine is this?) I’ve also never made a quiche and don’t want to know how.
But I’m trying to understand how narrative works. We all know the basic structure, right? You have a beginning, a middle, and an end. You know what recent political slogan also shares those qualities? “Make America Great Again.” It presupposes that America was once great, it’s currently not, and will be great once more because of us. Simple. Unifying. Four words, even. It doesn’t track as well with “I’m with her,” which is inherently divisive, because if you’re not with her, you’re against her, a message cemented by the “deplorables” gaff. Hillary Clinton’s response to MAGA was “America is already great,” which is probably better stated as “America’s better than it’s ever been, statistically,” as the former doesn’t contain a story, just an ending– which apparently translated to half the country as no change.
Political and media narratives generally don’t share this three act structure– they are always written in the middle of things, without time to contextualize history or put a neatly wrapped bow on top of it. That happens after the fact, when history is canonized. These stories are written now.
It’s interesting to see it from a fiction writer’s perspective. Because we know, or are struggling to realize, that every story has a different set of triplets embedded within each of their narrative wombs. Every story has a Hero, a Villain, and (oftentimes forgotten) a Victim.
That might be why the most enduring religious (and political, it its own way) narrative of western culture is of Jesus Christ. Not only is there a Beginning (Bethlehem, three kings, shiny star, manger), a Middle (proselytizing, gathering disciples, miracles, crucifixion) and an End (resurrection, Heaven, legacy of Christianity) but the HVV trinity is also soundly in place: There’s a Hero (Jesus), a Villain (Original sin, or Satan, or Rome), and a Victim (the poor, the sick, the lame, the oppressed). This parabola and narrative conflict has been carefully crafted over centuries of canonization.
Ok. The most maligned and divisive phrase you’re going to hear for the next four years is “That’s how Trump got elected.” Without adding to that garbage fire of vitriol, I’m going to try and extrapolate Trump’s campaign message using the HVV dynamic, while also adding, in political narratives, no one will ever claim to be the villain, while claiming to be the victim is viewed as politically weak.
Trump’s campaign universe had all three characters in a neat package:
The Hero (Himself, tremendously), the Villain (The corrupt, backstabbing government insiders), and the Victim (The working class people who feel their diminishing industries have been forgotten).
Versus Clinton’s:
The Hero(es) (Clinton, women everywhere), the Villain (Trump), and The Victim (…)
That last box is left a little blank, although there were many possibilities to fill it– Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women, claimed Mexican immigrants were rapists, that Muslims were dangerous, that stop and frisk policies aren’t biased against POC, that prisoners of war were losers, you name a demographic, he– in no uncertain terms– victimized them.
Which ended up as footnotes in the debates, if brought up at all. We saw play out a game of intense political chess. Politically, she can’t shift women over from the Hero slot to the Victim role (whereas Trump, somehow, did by bringing out the women that claimed Bill Clinton had sexually harassed). Her immigration stance was relatively soft and seen as hypocritical in the shadow of Obama’s mass deportations, while any discussion about Muslims was either deferred to the Middle East as America’s Eyes and Ears, or avoided in an effort to escape the goddamn Benghazi trials. When BLM was brought up, specifically when police brutality in black communities was addressed, Clinton went for the nuanced approach that we’re all a bit racist (statistically true) opposed to Trump’s proclamation of Law and Order— because she probably would’ve backed herself in a corner taking a more aggressive approach due to her Super Predator comments.
Sidenote: Clinton’s verbiage is interesting to me because it’s similar to how I instinctively write certain scenes: Exposition, Dialogue, Exposition, EXTREME LANGUAGE CONTRARY TO THE PREVIOUS EXPOSITION TO INDICATE A SHIFT IN VALUE, Expository endcap. It’s clear that Hillary Clinton is a reader. Trump’s language is interesting to me because it’s entirely made of extreme language, in short, obscene outbursts. Kind of like LA Confidential.
Where was I? Clinton’s Victim eluded.
She let the Villain speak for himself, which to be fair, seemed like a reasonable thing to do. To her credit, Clinton appears to be a very sensible person and believed that voters would see through Trump’s narrative (and over 3 million more people did, but we’re not going into that right now), but, in retrospect, by not allowing Trump to speak for himself, he gained a firmer grasp of that narrative with a broader platform and doubled down.
Let’s get away from the election. It’s over. It was disheartening, divisive and an ugly cartoon. And it’s over.
So let’s move on to how the media, now that it’s not encumbered by the election, is now encumbered by DJ Trump’s Presidency.
Again, these narratives exist in the middle, always, and also contain the three character structure of Hero, Villain, and Victim.
On the left, this time, the Victims take the center stage because there are so many people legitimately effected by the rapid-fire executive actions of the last two weeks: Women seeking healthcare at NGO’s outside of the US, Muslims from 7 specific non-terroristic countries, Green card holders, members of the LGBTQ community, Native communities that don’t want their water poisoned, Californians who subsist on nothing but avocados, peaceful protestors, federally funded science programs, lower class individuals who can’t afford healthcare, and a hell of a lot more that I can’t remember because of the executive order blitzkrieg (the violent flurry of which might be a political strategy in and of itself– like a missile released with chaff to distract enemy fire).
The villains are obvious: Trump himself, Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Betsy DeVos, Sean Spicer, it goes on. The Heroes come and go. Sometimes it’s Bernie, sometimes it’s Elizabeth Warren, but as of yet no solid figure has emerged.
In conservative media circles, it takes a little detective work to figure out the moving parts. The Hero is still Trump because he’s following through with his campaign promises. The Villain role has shifted directly to Muslims, immigrants, the companies and states that oppose the muslim ban, and leftist protestors. The Victim, this time, are harassed police and business owners.
That’s if the Victim is pointed out at all. Using the Victim role while in a seat of power is generally unwise. But there’s usually an implicit Victim and it took me forever to figure it out because it’s also a misdirection. Check out this Tweet:
In a discussion that didn’t include Veterans at all, this tweet focuses its empathy towards that demographic because without a Victim, the story isn’t complete. Sometimes you have to force it. Like when Kellyanne Conway invents a massacre to justify the traveling ban. Or #Pizzagate. Or like this:
Dick Spencer is carefully assuming the role in an to attempt to make his white supremacist movement appear sympathetic and oppressed– going so far as Alt-Righters (otherwise known as nazis) goad liberals into punching them at protests. They want that video to go viral because it confirms their notion that liberals are a hypocritically violent and ironically intolerant. In other words, it villainizes liberals.
I figure it’s important to practice deconstructing media narratives now, because not only is there a good chance that the White House press corps will be primarily Breitbart affiliates within a couple of months, but also if you want to have a perspective changing dialogue, it’s key to identify which characters are in their narrative. If you can’t understand their ideology, you can at least understand their story.
So when informing yourself on current events, regardless of your political views, ask yourself the following questions:
Who’s the Hero, Villain, and (most importantly) Victim?
Why are they portrayed this way?
Where does this story fall into the broader narrative being told?
Good luck out there.
Pierre Manchot 