Emperor's New Prose

Donald Trump is the best storytelling president we have had, at least since Teddy Roosevelt.

There are few leaders who have ever possessed his effortless capacity to call on symbols that move us. Not in the practiced way of an orator like Martin Luther King, Jr., Barack Obama, or Adolph Hitler, but in the intuitive manner of a Charles Manson, Benjamin Franklin, or Jesus of Nazareth. Pick whichever analogy offends your sensibilities the most (or least). Point is, some people just have such a knack for understanding, playing around with, and summoning at will the meaning cultures collectively ascribe to certain symbols that they do it without even trying. For good, for evil, or anything in between.

It’s what makes the administration’s botch job on immigration so surprising.

No, not on policy. On messaging. Storytelling. The threat of the foreigner is such powerful memetic stuff that even leaders with zero charisma can wield it to great advantage. Pat Buchanan, maybe the skin-crawliest man to ever run for public office in these United States, won several states in the 1996 primaries on an unapologetically nativist platform. THIS easy mode topic is where the grand master and founder of an entire art form finally steps Sideshow Bob-style on a circle of rakes? Really? This was Buckner Bucknering that ground ball, Webber calling that phantom timeout, and van de Velde smacking it into the water at Carnoustie all wrapped into one unprecedented political own-goal.

It isn’t really up for reasonable debate whether that is what happened here. The pendulum of public opinion has swung more wildly in the direction of the immigrant in the last 12 months than almost any topic of significance in America from the last quarter century that wasn’t directly related to Islamic terrorists flying airliners into a building. I wrote about this at length over the weekend.

Shitholes, Sanctuaries, and Springfield

One of the necessary conditions, I argue, for the breakdown in memetic power in this case was the loss of verisimilitude. The story that immigrants were bad and making everything in America bad and we had to do everything in our power to stop them, laws and courts and Constitution be damned, well, stopped seeming true to a huge portion of Americans. But factual accuracy is rarely enough to cause a story to break these days. For a story to truly break down, often you also need a break in semiosimilitude, or what the story means in the minds of those probing it for symbolic connection.

Everyone – including Stephen Pinker in his fancy new book rather boldly subtitled with a phrase Ben coined on these pages – loves to tell the story of The Emperor‘s New Clothes to illustrate the power of Common Knowledge. No one wants to admit that the emperor is naked, little boy says it out loud, everybody hears it and know everybody else heard it, common knowledge is established, now we can all acknowledge his nudity, etc. It’s a good illustration as far as it goes, but it abstracts from the extent to which people have imbued the story with part of their identity, their self-worth, their ego integrity, their livelihoods, and their grip on reality.

There is another Emperor’s New Clothes that we might tell. In this version of the story, there is a front row of apparatchiks who have built careers on the naked emperor. They have been enriched and empowered by his fame. “Look at the young fool who cannot see the robes of purple or the golden threads of his hem,” they shout at the young child after his outburst, “Take note of him and see that you don’t fall into such wickedness and folly.” The others in the second and third rows of the parade have built much, if not as much, on the emperor’s reign. Enough not to side with the child, anyway. So when these laugh and do not look around to see if others see the naked emperor they see, do you think that common knowledge will truly change? Simple truth, even one we know that everyone else heard, is not enough to break a story that we need to be true.

Verisimilitude cannot break a story we need to be true unless semiosimilitude breaks as well.

The study of the Springfield Moment from this weekend’s piece – and the months that followed it – is the story of a breakdown in both verisimilitude and semiosimilitude. There are enough people in the parade to tell the people that the Haitians are eating our pets without much risk. A child could shout that it was all a lie, but what would that do? The supplicants will drown him out with their own protestations of common knowledge, reframing it as “Even if they’re not literally eating our pets, they’re figuratively doing the same thing by taking over our cities, filling our jobs, etc. etc.” And while this messaging did take place here, too, as we wrote, it didn’t work.

It didn’t work because the memetic imagery the administration and its supporters chose over the weeks and months that followed broke a story that the crowd needed to be true: they needed to believe that they were not cruel.

Do not mistake me. An otherwise good people may coaxed into cruelty. Conversely, border and immigration enforcement – even if enforcement of laws may be in some cases personally devastating – are not necessarily cruel. But the imagery and symbols used to support immigration policies violated the semiosimilitude of a story tens of millions of Americans told themselves about themselves: “I am not cruel.” Some of those symbols and images were literal symbols and images, a stream of internet memes from official government social media accounts which mocked and dehumanized migrants. Others were symbols in the real world. They took the form of masked men raiding warehouses, black helicopters hovering over fields, and people posing by Alligator Alcatraz signs.

Most people can stomach actual cruelty. Feeling as if they are cruel, though?

Nobody was buying the emperor’s new prose.

The administration is pivoting its messaging. We might not like how the Department of Homeland Security framed an otherwise perfectly decent Morgan Weistling painting of a powerful scene – a pioneer family with a new child in a Conestoga wagon – with “Remember your Homeland’s Heritage.” I certainly don’t, mostly because I’m not especially fond of art I like being draped after the fact in the words of Blood and Soil.

But it doesn’t break semiosimilitude. It doesn’t challenge the meaning of a story people have attached to themselves. Frankly, most earnest and decent people will see it as wholesome, harmless, and uplifting. That’s why this kind of thing makes for excellent propaganda. That’s why this kind of art has been used and reused and coopted by politicians for effect for years.

Some years more than others.

It is too late to regain control of the narrative? Usually I’d say yes, but again, President Trump is very, very good at this. If anyone can manage to stitch a workable story back together, it’s him. Still, the lesson remains an important one: Yes, the child telling the truth mattered. But the true reason common knowledge shifted was that the story being told violated what too many supplicants needed to be true.

For more on the stories and common knowledge attached to immigration policy in the United States – including Perscient’s measurements of the rise and fall of each way of framing them over time – read Shitholes, Sanctuaries, and Springfield.