Heroes Need Villains
Five years ago, I wrote a thread for Twitter about a young Saudi couple I knew: Loujain was a prominent women’s rights activist, Fahad was a famous comedian. They’d been grabbed off the street in other countries by Saudi state security and brought back to the Kingdom, where she was imprisoned and tortured, and he disappeared. I told their story and sent it to 800 followers. It blew up. By the end of the month the thread had gotten over 47 million impressions, Jamal Khashoggi’s editor (Karen Attiah—find her on Bluesky) had turned it into an op-ed at the Washington Post, and Adam Schiff had reached out to talk with me about how we might pressure the Saudis to release Loujain. What makes something go viral is often just the luck of a retweet, but a conversation with a veteran Times Mideast reporter resonated with me. He said he’d written lots of stories about Loujain over the years and none had gotten traction of my thread. But I didn't have to report the facts; I’d written a love story. I’d given people a sweet couple torn apart by powerful bad guys.
The election post-mortems are still being written: the difference came down to misinformation, voting access, anti-incumbency, racism, sexism... and, I think, the Democrats' story. I defer to experts on stats, but I know how to tell a good story—and how to recognize a bad one. In the current information silo age, where many of the biggest silos are controlled by right wing (or authoritarian-friendly) owners, it’s hard for Democrats to share their story, but a compelling one can still break through.
A compelling one can still break through.
A Harris for President news release in July stated: “JD Vance Is a Creep (Who Wants to Ban Abortion Nationwide).” The direct language was such a refreshing break from traditional, bloodless Democratic messaging (“While Mr. Vance is a decent person, we disagree profoundly on this issue.”) Around the same time, Tim Walz made a JD Vance couch joke--it wasn't Serious Policy Stuff, but he was tapping into a story that was actually more interesting to people than the Trump assassination attempt.
What the Harris campaign was doing was what Republicans have done for decades (and Trump excels at): create enemies for people to rally against. Targets to aim at.
Trump didn’t run on policies. He had no coherent platform. Lots of Trump supporters weren’t voting for something, they were voting against people he made them hate: Sleepy Joe, Shifty Schiff, black and brown people, trans kids... He gave them a simple story with a hero (him) and villains (Others). A despicable tale filled with lies, but still.
Meanwhile the Harris story changed. It moved into “I don’t want to talk about them, I want to talk about my plans” and “I’m here for Liz Cheney, too.” She was asking people to vote for something: small business loans, green energy jobs, America. All good stuff, all worth voting for…but there was no enemy. (Shit, Liz Cheney was the enemy for most of her life.) By the time Democrats got comfortable calling Trump a fascist, he’d already been calling Harris one for months. The word had lost its meaning (even for experts, its meaning has proven to be agonizingly debatable; for the larger public it's just a vague, academic word. It’s not visceral, like “vermin” or “enemies of the people.”)
I’m not saying Democrats need to start calling people vermin, but they need to get comfortable with identifying enemies—with saying what they’re for but also who they’re against. A team plays harder when it’s fired up to beat someone. I think the Democratic base didn’t want to hear. “We love Liz Cheney,” they wanted to hear “Anyone threatening to deport millions of people, including countless legal citizens, is a monster. As president I’ll represent everyone, but I won’t pretend everyone’s got an opinion I need to respect.”
At their one debate, Trump veered from a discussion about abortion rights to mock Harris and Biden’s failure to get most of their student debt relief past his extremist judges. She needed to stop and call it out: “You’re gloating about the fact that millions of Americans are stuck with debt? Did everyone hear that? What kind of creep says that?” When Trump bragged repeatedly about the low inflation rate during his presidency, she needed to say, "Does he think we're idiots? Does he think we forgot the pandemic? That's why inflation went up all over the world, and the US now has the lowest rate of any industrialized country." There was a story about inflation that Democrats didn't tell; instead they just agreed with the Republican one and said, "Yeah, for sure, the price of groceries need to come down, but our plan is better." Republicans wanted to make this a "normal" election about competing platforms; Democrats needed to tell the story that "these fucking weirdos think you're idiots."
Politicians like AOC get this; Chuck Schumer doesn’t. He’ll look vaguely constipated at the Al Smith dinner as Trump rails about enemies, but he won’t get up and leave; and he’ll likely spend another Trump term imploring his “distinguished colleagues across the aisle” to be reasonable. But we know the current GOP can’t be reasoned with. Harris taking the edge off the messaging dulled her story. People were being asked to vote for ideas (which should be enough)—but not against flesh and blood bad guys. Not against the creeps.
It’s always about the story. And a good story needs heroes and villains.
(Quick epilogue: after helping bring some attention to brave activists like Loujain, I got involved in Saudi human rights work. And, like many who have been doing that work far longer, I discovered that MBS simply has too much money to face consequences. Biden fist-bumped him; the World Cup will be in Saudi Arabia in a few years; Jamal Khashoggi’s murder has been forgiven. It was a stark reminder that a story doesn’t fix the world. But it can galvanize those who can. It can maybe even inspire a few thousand more votes in a couple of swing states.)