A lie could travel from Maine to Georgia whilst truth was drawing on her boots.
—attributed to John Randolph, 1844
A friend returned from a motorcycle trip last fall and told me that he passed through a small Midwestern town where a local boy had just died of a fentanyl overdose. In Sam’s view, this was one more piece of evidence that the United States has been invaded by armies of drug-smuggling immigrants. Believing that we are a country under siege, my friend Sam voted for Trump.
I keep thinking of Sam while I watch my fellow Democrats wrestle with the results of the 2024 election. What did we do wrong? Should we become more progressive or retreat to the center? Should we adopt a more defensible position on immigration? The economy? Abortion? In all this soul-searching, I haven’t seen any ideas that will get Sam’s vote in 2028.
Focusing on issues is a spectacular failure to understand our situation. We did not lose on the issues in 2024. We lost because we were on the wrong side of the underlying narrative of the American story. And we must not let our occasional successes — the Wisconsin Supreme Court victory last week, for instance — blind us to the political reality of 21st-century America.
For more than half a century, the right wing has waged a relentless, well-funded propaganda campaign that has had stunning success at defining who we are as a country.
One foundation of that campaign is American Exceptionalism: the belief that we are a uniquely good country, better than any other, and subject therefore to different rules and constraints. In this view, we have — and we deserve — more freedoms, more opportunity, more guns, less regulation, and an overall better way of life. We do have problems, but they are caused by communists, hippies, flag-burners, welfare queens, and Black men (remember Willie Horton?) who want to rape our women. In 2024, our problems were brown-skinned immigrants who are killing our children and transgender boys playing on girls’ high school sports teams.
Fortunately, there is a literature on propaganda and how to combat it. A good starting point is Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center, where scholars study how Hitler sold Nazism to the German people and how propaganda is influencing democracies today. A visit to the Arendt Center website yielded this: “The point of propaganda is not to make people believe it. It is to foster cynicism so that we don’t know what to believe and come to believe that nothing is true, no facts are reliable, and the world is simply a battlefield for partisan ideas.”
Suddenly, Sam’s MAGA vote makes sense.
One antidote to propaganda is education. There is a reason that college-educated voters favored Kamala Harris by 18 points in 2024. But educating voters to be critical thinkers is a long-term project that will be hard to achieve in a country that is dismantling the Dept. of Education and providing vouchers so people can send their children to taxpayer-supported schools that teach the story of Noah’s Ark in science classes.
More immediately, we can recognize that propaganda is a story and counter it with the Real American Story: We are a great experiment, a country built by people from many different cultures with many different beliefs and customs, bound together by a shared commitment to our Constitution. We are not perfect, but at our best we work together to solve problems in ways that provide security and opportunity for us all.
That is a clumsy summary of the story. We need master storytellers to give the story wings. Barrack Obama spun the narrative masterfully in 2008 when he was making his case to the American people; see it set to music in Will.I.Am’s video Yes We Can.
The Real American Story is one we can be proud of, one that even Sam might embrace, if he heard it as often as he hears the MAGA story. All of us who are appalled at the rise of MAGA need to draw on our boots and go out and tell the real story relentlessly, 24/7, in schools and churches and workplaces, using media that reach us in our homes and on our phones and in public places, in bars and gyms and wherever people gather from Maine to Georgia to California.
George Liles, a former reporter for the Provincetown Banner, ran undergraduate internship programs for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He lives in Falmouth.
