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Kamala Harris said she accepted the Democratic nomination for president “On behalf of everyone whose story could only be written in the greatest nation on Earth…” In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump said “we must…write our own thrilling chapter of the American story.” Other speakers at the conventions used the word “story” to talk about the nation and their own lives.
That both parties relied on the metaphor of a story to make their case is neither new nor surprising. In his influential 1983 book about national identity, political scientist Benedict Anderson wrote that a nation “is an imagined political community.” Nations have borders, laws, an official currency, and other administrative structures. But what gives life to those structures, what makes a nation more than paperwork and lines on a map, is the story it tells itself, about itself. As former Obama senior advisor and political analyst Ben Rhodes put it, “Every nation is a story. It’s almost never a simple one, and the story’s meaning is usually contested. National identity itself depends upon how we tell the story—about our past, our present moment, and our future.”
A national story may be more important in America than elsewhere. In comparing the stories told by the Democrats and Republicans at their conventions, the AP’s Ted Anthony wrote that “Americans live in one of the only societies that was built not upon hundreds of years of common culture but upon stories themselves… In some ways, the United States…willed itself into existence and significance by iterating and reiterating its story as it went.” When politicians talk about a “battle for the soul of America” they are talking about battle for America’s story. It is a dispute over our collective past and our shared future. Cleverly crafted stories make good political strategies. They also raise important ethical questions.
The American story is complicated, to say the least. On one hand, it is heroic and bold, full of soaring statements about equality, hope, faith, and opportunity. On the other hand, the man who wrote “All men are created equal” owned slaves, and most of our homes are on land Europeans stole from the people who were there first. Our economy relies on the work of visionary college dropouts like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg who ran with bold ideas. But women are still paid less than men for comparable work. For every story of persistence and success against the odds, there more stories of systems that thwart ambition and crush promise. As Flavor Flav pointed out long before he was America’s sweet and kooky uncle at the Paris Olympics, Elvis may have been a hero to most, but not everyone shares that view.
A story about a nation cannot capture all the facts, all the time. Stories leave in and leave out, highlight and hide. The most compelling stories are never fully true, but to work they must be true to life. It might be true that only in America could a “skinny kid with a funny name” become president, as Barack Obama declared in 2004 in Boston and again 20 years later in Chicago. But as a number of studies have found, job applicants with names that “sound white” get called back more often than those with names that “sound black.” Is it ethical for Harris to declare that “We are the heirs to the greatest democracy in the history of the world” given the disparities written into the Constitution, and that many Americans weren’t allow to vote for much of our nation’s history because of their race or gender? Is it ethical for either candidate to say that their political party alone is telling the true American story?
One way toward an answer is that candidates should tell a national story that is honest and also hopeful. In his prescient 1999 book Achieving Our Country, philosopher Richard Rorty wrote, “Stories about what a nation has been and should try to be are not attempts at accurate representation, but rather attempts to forge a moral identity.” In this view, an ethical story is one that honestly acknowledges the past and presents a better future. If America is still in the making, as many argue, then the most effective and ethical stories are ones that move us closer to our ideals. As candidates crisscross the country over the remaining weeks before the election, they should tell an American story that is honest about our past and present, and that offers a future that is as good as its promise. This story elevates people rather than degrades them, talks about what we can do together rather than why we should be apart, and that moves us toward the more perfect union promised in our founding documents. That story is always in the making, and one worth trying to make come true. An ethical – and strategically effective – story is one that helps America become as good as its promise.