We built this form of democracy and now we must stand up to what it’s become and say “I don’t consent to this.”

Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country by Steve Almond. Red Hen Press, 272 pages, $14.04.

By Matt Hanson

Like most sentient Americans, author Steve Almond took the results of the 2016 election to heart. Explanations abound for why the candidate with less qualifications, less experience, and less votes ultimately wound up as the leader of the free world, but Almond decided to take a different tack from conventional political science. As an acclaimed short story writer and writing teacher, it made sense for Almond to understand the catastrophic election through the lens of storytelling, specifically what he calls “bad stories.”

For Almond, a bad story is an example of the lies that we are told and tell ourselves, consciously or not, about our history, our society, and our civic life. “If we want to understand the bad stories that dominated the 2016 election, we have to examine the context from which they arose, and accept that our received version of history is often nothing more than the needlework of the powerful.” To combat the tyranny of the insidious narrative, Almond seeks wisdom and counsel from literature. Drawing on literary sources from Melville to Bradbury to Steinbeck, Almond uses literary fiction to propose a different set of moral values than the ones currently offered by our politics.

Using literature as a guide, Almond painstakingly debunks a litany of seventeen bad stories with a commendable amount of wit, learning, and patience. Some of the bad yarns he cites seem obvious but, as our political life consistently reminds us, maybe you can’t fool all the people all of the time, but you can still fool quite lot of people quite a lot of the time. The idea of Trump as a “change agent” seemed like horsepucky to me then and now but I can easily remember plenty of people in the media crowing about how Trump was “a different kind of Republican” who promised to stick it to Wall Street and be “liberal” on “social issues.” It didn’t take a year in office for this idiocy to be exposed for what it was, but it’s good to be reminded of this fallacy for future reference.

Not all change agents are created equal — Almond brilliantly compares Trump to Captain Ahab, citing the one-legged monomaniac’s diabolically rousing speech aboard the Pequod. Their true mission, he explains to the crew, isn’t just finding the whale that did him wrong; it’s an assault on the nature of reality, “Trumpian in pitch if not diction.” Ahab tells the crew that “all visible objects…are but pasteboard masks” and exhorts the crew to “strike through the mask!” It’s a powerful comparison; the line encapsulates Trump’s apocalyptically bitter and brazen speeches, even if Trump himself would probably have no idea what it means. Our president’s appetite for political destruction is about tearing away the veneers of civility and democratic norms for their own sake. Thus Ahab’s charismatic nihilism feels in tune with the mood of the 2016 election.

One bad story that receives particular attention is that “our grievances matter more than our vulnerabilities.” The feedback loop of resentment works in a variety of ways, but it returns to people feeling as if their personal outrage is always more important than their material circumstances. Almond describes a scientist friend whose financial rough patch was smoothed over by Obamacare and whose job relied on federal grants. Yet he protest-voted for Gary Johnson out of an ill-defined disillusionment. When Almond pointed out that this enabled Trump, whose environmental record, to put it mildly, leaves much to be desired, his friend snaps at him for the first time ever and calls him an “elitist.” Almond argues that “elite served the same basic function as politically correct, the term [Trump] used to bludgeon any sustained consideration of bigotry. They were deployed not just to dodge a particular discussion, but to recast cynicism as a form of wisdom, and moral negligence as a form of martyrdom.”

This embrace of resentment motivates all the Ahab rhetoric and civility-trashing. For whatever reason, spite and resentment are the emotions that seem the most real, the most authentic, to many voters now. It’s a Nietzschean observation (surprisingly, a figure who goes unreferenced throughout the book) about the anger that builds up when large groups of people feel disempowered, pulled of their rightful place in society. Generated by anger, one can find any number of nearby masks to strike through, with predictably disastrous results.

Almond also has a great deal to say about our cultural addiction to entertainment and its deadening effects. Using the insights of Neil Postman, author of the never-more-relevant Amusing Ourselves to Death, Bad Stories‘ critique is based on the omnipresence of spectacle. CBS’s Les Moonves infamously remarked that Trump’s antics “might be bad for America but it’s damned good for CBS.” Tracing the malignant growth of talk radio after the collapse of the Fairness Doctrine, Almond explains how it reinforces the desire to think of politics not as moral debate but as blood sport, a continuation of football rivalries by other means. The political comedians of today — think Stewart, Colbert, Sam Bee, et al — also fall short in Almond’s eyes. Instead of rousing their audiences to action, Almond contends that they are merely reinforcing passivity and the need for entertainment, going for the cheap laugh that lets the audience vent just enough to keep the status quo intact. “What if Stewart’s daily doses were masking vital symptoms? What if the underlying disease — the one killing American democracy — was unseriousness?”

Here, I must protest. For a diehard liberal who comes from a long line of conservatives and evangelicals, The Daily Show meant far more to me than just a decent laugh before bed. Other than the occasional social studies debate, politics wasn’t something I was interested in until 9/11. If there was ever a time for a wake-up call, this was it. I had already shed my evangelical skin, but serious political engagement eluded me — until catastrophe arrived.

If you’re not already well-versed in it, politics can be an intimidating subject. There are so many issues at work — history, psychology, philosophy, economics, foreign policy, and so on — that it can be too daunting for people to engage in; no one likes to be caught flat-footed in the middle of an argument, especially when the rhetoric is so harsh and unforgiving. The Daily Show (among many other sources) became my beacon in the smog.

Aside from laughter (though of course it was funny as hell) Stewart helped to give me a language with which to talk about subjects that mattered a great deal. It reminded me that I wasn’t crazy. After consuming innumerable newspaper and magazine articles, books, documentaries, as well as endless conversations and debates, it’s not going too far to say that Stewart and his crew were a vital part of how I got woke. I don’t think that my experience of what turned into years of activism would have been the same without them.

In some ways, this disagreement suggests why Almond’s book is valuable. Education is a huge part of one’s political awakening; but who should do the educating? Discarding someone as part of an “elite” is not about protecting democracy but touting anti-intellectualism. Why should those who have proven expertise be kept out of the discussion, or be deprioritized over those who never took the time or could care less? As Almond puts it, “the Limbaughs and Savages of the world could only survive in a media landscape that allowed them to pose as journalists and experts without ever having to compete with actual journalists and experts…in which they could craft a vision of America entirely insulated from the world of empirical fact or historical context.”

Possibly the one good thing about Trump’s election is how it has politicized large swaths of people. It’s not cool to be indifferent to politics any more — with daily missteps coming from the White House, people are gradually becoming aware that the stakes are becoming increasingly high. Now is the time to harness the unrest and put that energy towards effective political action. Bad Stories is a useful book to give to the young person in your life who has started to ask the right unsettling questions. The answers will be up to them, of course, but deconstructing how we got here provides an excellent place to start.

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The Arts Fuse called Almond up at his home in Arlington to discuss the meaning of bad stories, how politics is like sports radio, the legacy of Jon Stewart, and how to be the subject, and not the object, of history.

AF: Why did you choose “bad stories” as the frame for this book? What was it about approaching our current political situation through the lens of storytelling that appealed to you?

Almond: Because I’m a storyteller, the majority of classes I teach are about stories, whether they be fiction or non-fiction, they’re all storytelling. This is what I talk about all the time, that is how I see the world. And now that I have small kids, they are storytellers. So, everything for me is seen through that lens. And in the other work I do, in the podcast Dear Sugars, we’re talking about other people’s stories. What I notice, consistently, and powerfully, is that we’re overrun with stories. With the news cycle’s aggregation of all the shitty stuff that’s happening, you can get really exhausted and dispirited and almost disoriented if you’re only looking at outcomes.

I had to take a step back from history, away from outcomes, and ask: what stories were we being told, and consenting to, and telling ourselves, and telling each other, that lead us to these bad outcomes? The basic rule is: if you have a bad story, you’re going to have a bad outcome. If you tell people that an honest effort to make health care coverage more affordable for vulnerable populations, is going to be a series of death panels that will put aged people to death — if you tell that story, you’re going to have a terrible outcome. There’s a zillion examples of that right now, such as Scott Pruitt tap-dancing on what remains of environmental regulations in this country.

I’m trying to take a bite of it in Bad Stories by saying, look: maybe this isn’t just about what aging whites in America are thinking, maybe it’s something deeper than that. I think it’s so important to think about stories in a macro way because placing Trump, by design or just by impulse, at the center of the culture guarantees that we’re having the wrong set of discussions. We’re not going to understand what led us to these outcomes until we examine the stories that got us here. We have to stop seeing Trump as the leader — he is the logical outcome of some much deeper set of pathologies that really do reside in some wishful but naïve notion of what America is.

AF: You talk about how sports fandom has become people’s main model of political engagement — instead of supporting specific ideas or principles, people see themselves as supporting a team. It’s us versus them. And you mention talk radio as a major inspiration for this. I agree, but doesn’t that take away a bit of the agency from the voter? One thing you can say about sports fans is that they really get into the idea of moral judgement.

Almond: I see your point, but when people are devoting such huge amounts of their lives to passive consumption of other people doing athletics, they are not spending that time and energy being focused on their spiritual life, their family life, their civic life. I say that as a long-time fan. I’ve spent untold hours debating and thinking about sports, and that means that I have been ignoring issues and concerns that aren’t as thrilling as rooting for a team. My critique of sports culture is not that it’s meaningless. Sports absolutely demonstrates that human beings (and Americans in particular) are willing to absorb vast amounts of information. But it’s not governance! It’s not even us going out and participating in athletics; we’re just sitting on our couches. Trump intuited this: Americans are sports fans, so they want a big brawl because elections are boring. We all got caught up in the spectacle of “What’s my newest source of outrage?”

AF: Concerning Fox news and conservative media in general, you point out that they offer the illusion of moral clarity. Do you think it’s giving them something to say, a well packaged phrase for them to repeat at a cocktail party to sound smart? Or that it’s articulating something people feel deep down? Is conservative propaganda fulfilling a need that people have or creating one?

Almond: The easy answer is both, but I would put it into slightly different terms. What affective propagandists all throughout history have done is tap into people’s primal negative emotions. Over the years the very wealthy, plutocratic interests and special interests have gotten more and more power. They have made it even more difficult for the 99.9% of us to feel that they are keeping up; wages are stagnating, but CEOs get massive bonuses. Capitalism is acting like a centrifuge that is concentrating wealth at the very top, in a way that is unprecedented.

People do feel lost and left behind and there’s a sense of declining utility. And the natural assumption for some is that whites are at the center of the culture and that their needs, desires, and suffering is the exalted thing we must pay attention to. What effective demagogues do is say, look: I can’t change the material circumstances of your life. But I can assure you that there is somebody who is to blame for it. They’re powerful storytellers, there’s an ecstatic sense of victimization. Hannah Arendt talks about this — how totalitarianism is “organized loneliness.” Well, now they’ve certainly gotten organized; Trump just inherited the audience share. That’s why my chapter on the Fairness Doctrine is so long- I feel I have to explain to people that this is not always how it was!

AF: You say in the book that the comedians — Colbert, Stewart, Oliver, Bee, etc. are part of the problem. Here I have to say I disagree. For me, Jon Stewart was somebody who made difficult and important topics funny and had a moral purpose behind what he was saying. Politics can be very intimidating for people — in some ways, they are afraid to take positions because they don’t want to be embarrassed. Stewart and Colbert don’t just say that Trump is bad — they say here’s why he’s bad, and let’s make fun of him together. You argue otherwise.

Almond: Well, I agree with everything you just said. They offer information and critical perspectives, but let’s be honest — at the end of the day, they are entertainers. The ultimate goal for all of them is a laugh. If we really look at Stewart’s making fun of Trump, if his intentions were to get people engaged, then he would have done an episode on Bernie Sanders, whose rise is really interesting and important. Instead, it’s always about the Trump show, because it will get more ratings. It’s not Stewart’s fault, really, it’s him doing his job, but we shouldn’t have any delusions about what’s happening. Ultimately, their currency is the laughter of a passive audience. It becomes aligned with what Neil Postman is talking about, and which I discuss in the book: that everything becomes entertainment.

The moment for me is The Rally to Restore Sanity. Stewart had gathered two hundred thousand people on the mall and there were a million people watching at home. I think a lot of those people are animated by the hope that we’re going to have a better election, with a better outcome. These guys are powerful figures, and ALL they need do is encourage people to vote, to make sure that ten other people vote, but that isn’t what he said. What he said was ultimately utterly cynical, he said: I just asked you here to congratulate yourself for being decent. And that means watching a comedy show, and I think that means he led people up a dead end. Three days later, the Tea Party sweeps into office and there’s dysfunction a-go-go- it’s more bad stories.

That’s part of why our conception of government has become so degraded, because we have one party whose sole agenda is to weaken people’s belief in the institution of self-government. Trump’s in power because they’ve been pushing this line for years and I don’t think it’s possible to have a rational and constructive dialogue, because they don’t care. We need such a fundamental reformation about what we want our leaders to do — we’re nowhere close to repairing the damage that’s been done to our idea of self-government over the past fifty years.

AF: At different points in the book you talk about being the “subject” of history rather than the “object” of history. Could you explain more about that?

Almond: Americans have become so taken by capitalism and the retreat into passivity and consumption that every cultural arrow is aimed at amusing yourself; don’t get out into the streets, don’t canvass, don’t make phone calls. The corporate sponsors want an audience. We’ve got to get back to the need for action and remind ourselves that these are not normal times and we need to reconnect with the idea of storytelling as a redemptive act. It is possible for us to make moral change; it’s inconvenient but it is possible, but it requires us to step away from certain habits of thought and feeling. Our muscles have atrophied. If I click on a Youtube clip of two pundits yelling at each other because one of them DESTROYS the other one, then I’m contributing to it.

We built this form of democracy and now we must stand up to what it’s become and say “I don’t consent to this.” We have to be more politically active and engaged. We are up against some powerful bad stories, and we need to respond with powerful good stories. Part of the power of a good story is that it reminds you that you can make a difference, you can act on your ideals, that you have a moral duty to your community to stand up. If you don’t like what’s happening, then you have a responsibility to make an effort to turn that into political action. It’s on all of us individually to take our self-governance more seriously.

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Matt Hanson is a critic for The Arts Fuse living outside Boston. His writing has appeared in The Millions, 3QuarksDaily, and Flak Magazine (RIP), where he was a staff writer. He blogs about movies and culture for LoveMoneyClothes. His poetry chapbook was published by Rhinologic Press.