What's Your Story?

Ah, W's redemptive story is what won the 2004 election. Who knew? Poor little rich boy from Midland, TX got mixed up with dope and booze. Then, he married a good woman and found the Lord. Praise Jesus! If this is (fair & balanced) hypocrisy, so be it.

[x The Chronicle of Higher Education]
Redemption and American Politics
By DAN P. McADAMS

Democrats woke up November 3 to see that they no longer lived in the America they had always imagined. They hoped a well-informed and self-interested citizenry would oust an administration whose tax reform favors mainly the rich, whose foreign policy has cost friends and made enemies abroad, and whose faith-based approach to leadership has exalted conservative ideology over rational discourse and scientific evidence. But President Bush's decisive victory in the popular vote combined with the sea of red spilling across the Tuesday-night electoral map suggests that blue-state Democrats are now out of touch with much of the rest of the country.

What explains this disconnect? Already pundits and pollsters have suggested many different possibilities -- from religiosity to gay marriage to the fear of Osama bin Laden. From my standpoint, however, the key factor is narrative. Put simply, the Republicans are better storytellers.

More precisely, the Republican Party has groomed candidates and honed messages that resonate deeply with a story of life that Americans hold dear. It is the narrative of redemption -- a story about an innocent protagonist in a dangerous world who sticks to simple principles and overcomes suffering and hardship in the end. This is a story that many productive and caring American adults -- Democrats, Republicans, and Independents -- love to tell about their own lives. Republicans, however, have found ways of talking about public life and political issues that reinforce this story. And to the extent that politics is personal, many Americans may vote their story, rather than their pocketbook.

As a research psychologist, I study how people tell stories about their own lives. My students and I collect these stories and analyze them as if they were works of literary fiction. Indeed, they are fiction, to a certain extent. People selectively remember the past and imagine their own futures to produce coherent narratives of the self that will provide their lives with some sense of unity and purpose. Stories give us our identities.

In our research, we focus on the life stories told by those adults who score very high on both objective and self-reported psychological measures of social responsibility and productivity. We want to understand especially well-adjusted people who are making the most positive contributions to their work, families, and society at large. Be they liberal or conservative, these highly productive and caring American adults tend to describe their own lives as variations on a general script that we call the redemptive self.

The story of the redemptive self in American life has two key themes. The first is the belief that as a young child, I was fortunate, blessed, or advantaged in some manner, even as others around me experienced suffering and pain. I am the innocent protagonist, chosen for a special, manifest destiny. As I journey forth in a dangerous world, I hold to simple truths, basic values of goodness and decency.

Research shows that highly productive and caring American adults, especially in their midlife years, are much more likely than other people to remember their past in this way. They are also more likely to claim that they have always operated according to deep personal values that are clear and true. While their values may not be those of George W. Bush, they tell stories about their lives that, like the president's own, underscore the power of moral clarity.

Visiting the United States in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans "have an immensely high opinion of themselves and are not far from believing that they form a species apart from the rest of the human race." Tocqueville realized that the Americans' sense of special destiny lay partly in their celebration of the individual self. "One's-Self I sing, a simple separate person," proclaimed Walt Whitman. And, "Is not a man better than a town?" asked Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Self-Reliance. (The fact that a town is made up of individual men -- and women -- seems strangely absent from Emerson's thinking.) Not only are we the chosen people, Emerson suggested, but each individual man (or woman) is chosen for a special destiny. That individual destiny is inscribed within an inner self that is always true and good. In Emerson's uniquely American brand of romantic individualism, the good and productive life is the heroic actualization of the inner self.

Flash forward 150 years or so. In interviews, highly productive and caring American adults tend to begin the stories of their own lives in the same way. They speak the language of chosen-ness and manifest destiny, albeit in contemporary and personal ways. To a significantly greater extent than adults who score lower on measures of care and productivity, they will identify a specific incident from childhood as symbolic of their enhanced status, as if to suggest that they have known they were special, that they were chosen, for a very long time.

At the same time, productive and caring American adults are especially likely to say that they held an early awareness that the world is not fair and that many other people suffer greatly. The juxtaposition of inner blessing and hardship in the outside world sets up a moral contrast. I need to use my goodness to make the world a better place. I need to use my gift in a positive way. The sense of individual mission that runs through the redemptive self is often linked to life principles consolidated in the teenage years, be the formative influences Ayn Rand, Maya Angelou, Tuesdays With Morrie, or Jesus. (While many cringed, Bush's fans ate it up when he identified Jesus Christ as his "favorite political philosopher" in a 2000 debate with Al Gore.)

The protagonists in these stories are not the tormented souls or ironic drifters celebrated by European existentialist writers and postmodern literary critics. They don't wake up in the middle of the night wondering what the meaning of life is. They know what is right, more or less, and they strive to put their life principles into action. There is a decided lack of ambivalence about moral and ethical values in the life stories of highly productive and caring American adults, be they evangelical Christians or card-carrying members of the American Civil Liberties Union. Instead, we witness clear-eyed, no-nonsense protagonists who have too many things to do and too little time to waste on a searching re-examination of what is good and true, who is God, and what they believe in their hearts to be right.

From Benjamin Franklin to Michael Jordan, prototypical American heroes and heroines are more pragmatic than reflective. They are too restless for prolonged philosophical debate. They brush aside nagging doubts, ignore complexities. They attach themselves to a few simple principles in life and then they move forward with vigor and confidence.

The second major theme in the story of the redemptive self is overcoming hardships and adversity. Especially caring and productive American adults often tell stories about their lives in which emotionally negative events lead directly to reward. These stories take many different forms. Stories of atonement describe a religious move from sin to salvation. Stories of upward social mobility depict the socioeconomic move from rags to respectability and riches. Stories of recovery tell how sick or addicted protagonists regained their health or sobriety. Stories of liberation chart the move from feeling enslaved to feeling free. From Franklin to Oprah, from Horatio Alger to 12-step programs, American folklore and culture have provided a treasure trove of redemptive narratives from which we all (unconsciously) borrow in fashioning the stories of our own lives.

The burgeoning popular literature on self-help offers a cornucopia of redemption tales, as do television talk shows, People magazine, and Hollywood. Politicians often celebrate their own redemptive journeys: Ronald Reagan rose from a dysfunctional family; Bill Clinton (nicknamed "the Comeback Kid") recovered from childhood poverty (as well as many self-inflicted wounds); George W. Bush turned his life around in his 40s, after years of drifting and drinking; John Edwards started out "the son of a mill worker," but he rose from there. Surveying American novels and short stories from recent years, the New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani wrote, "There is no public narrative more potent today -- or throughout American history -- than the one about redemption."

George W. Bush's personal story follows closely the script of the redemptive self. Born with a special blessing, he came close to squandering it all before he gave up alcohol, found the Lord, and rededicated his life to public service. It is a powerful recovery narrative, starring the kind of guileless protagonist that many Americans love.

In this kind of story, moral clarity trumps worldly sophistication (and debating skills). His detractors may call him stupid, simple-minded, and stubborn. But many voters see Bush as sincere and well meaning. They like that he does not seem to obsess over the complexities of the world. They find assurance in his commitment to simple principles. And even those who are not born-again Christians may admire his recovery story. We are all sinners, after all. Yet in the eyes of many people, Bush really seems to have redeemed his sinful past. For the past 10 years or so, he has kept his eyes on the prize. He has remained steadfast, unwavering. He has lived out a destiny to which he feels he has been called.

More important than the president's own story, however, is the way in which optimistic (if sometimes simplistic) Republican messages about "values," faith-based initiatives, individual freedom and responsibility, and the "ownership society" reinforce a grand narrative about a good and innocent protagonist who takes charge of his own life, stays focused through adversity, and ultimately triumphs in the end.

The heroes in this story are the small-business owners, the entrepreneurs, the soldiers, the preachers, and the un-self-conscious individualists who, like Emerson, trust the good and simple "man" over the ambiguous and complex "town." The enemies are ambiguous and complex collectives of various kinds -- "big government," for example, bureaucracies, the United Nations, and programs and policies that potentially compromise the innocent strivings of the good inner self.

It does not matter much that Republicans have actually grown the government (to say nothing of the deficit) rather than shrunk it, that they also advocate certain kinds of government programs and policies. It does not matter because politics is as much about stories as it is about anything else. Republicans are masters at simplifying the world into upbeat narratives about good protagonists who will find redemption in the end. By reducing taxes, empowering faith, and assuring national security, they promise to clear away the many obstacles and complexities that clutter up the world and stand in the path of the redemptive hero's quest.

The attacks of September 11 and the "war on terrorism," furthermore, play perfectly into the story of the redemptive self. Terrorism and war show us that the world is a dangerous, unredeemed place. In times of crisis, the good American protagonist must call upon the deepest reservoir of unwavering conviction and hope.

A dangerous world is indeed the kind of world that the good and strong hero of the redemptive self seems unconsciously to expect. Under conditions of adversity, he will fight the good fight. He will keep the faith. In the end, his suffering will give way to redemption. And along the way, he may even help to redeem others.

Dan P. McAdams is a professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University and author of The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education