The World Keeps Turning: The stories that shaped our votes

Allen Woods

Allen Woods

By ALLEN WOODS

Published: 02-14-2025 8:02 PM

I’ve spent weeks before and after the November election puzzling over images of undecided or pro-Trump voters, and came away baffled. How could young Black voters, young Latinos, low-income voters, and women of any age and ethnicity vote for a candidate who has proved himself a racist, relentlessly scapegoated immigrants from Latin America, gave tax cuts (and promised more) that siphon money from the poor into rich people’s pockets, and been convicted of being a sexual predator?

And yet they did, not overwhelmingly, but enough to win the Electoral College. How and why did that happen? I had no answer until Robert Reich’s blog provided an explanation I can understand, even if I don’t like the implications.

Reich is a prolific author, former presidential adviser for both parties, Cabinet member, lecturer, etc. His 5,000-plus words in posts for Dec. 12-13 last year (robertreich.substack.com/p/the-four-stories-of-america) are too complex to do them justice in a column. But the gist, as I see it, is that people vote in accordance with the stories they believe about our country and its politics — not origin stories, but stories about the recent past and immediate future.

Reich says Democrats dominated those stories from the early 1900s through the 1970s, and built a solid, reliable coalition of voters who returned them to office regularly.

Reich identifies four types of stories that influence crucial voters. He suggests that a successful party must tell those stories effectively; if they don’t, the opposition will fill the void with their own competing versions.

Two types of stories foster hope, while two others promote fear, naming each type to summarize a wide range of stories. Democrats encouraged hope through the Triumphant Individual: a hardworking American who started with little but overcame obstacles to become a success, sometimes with the assistance of the government. All Americans had a chance to become Triumphant and achieve the American dream through hard work and discipline.

Hope also came from the idea that America was home to a Benevolent Community that helped those in need and stood for what’s right. It included labor unions who defended and assisted workers, and the federal government that brought America out of the Great Depression and created popular and necessary social programs including Social Security, Medicare, and the GI Bill. The government also supported civil rights, sending troops to the South to enforce laws that provided greater equality in opportunities.

Fear was peddled by the story of the Mob at the Gates, who included military enemies in World War I and II, and then communism which threatened to “bury” us around the world. The Mob, for both parties, often included a convenient scapegoat: immigrants.

Your Daily Puzzles

Cross|Word

Flipart

Typeshift

SpellTower

Really Bad Chess

But for Reich, the crucial story has been the Rot at the Top. Large corporations and wealthy individuals were seen as voracious and predatory: the robber barons of the late 1800s Gilded Age, the Wall Street speculators and bankers who helped bring on the Great Depression, and the military-industrial complex of Eisenhower’s term. They opposed America’s Triumphant Individuals and needed to be kept in check by a Democratic Benevolent Community so that average Americans could advance toward the American dream.

But beginning around 1980, Ronald Reagan and Republicans successfully rewrote those stories through calculated efforts and Democrats’ inattention and complacency. Reagan shifted the villains in the Rot at the Top story from large corporations and wealthy investors to the government itself. He proclaimed that “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.”

Not only was the government now the Rot at the Top, it was the Democratic Benevolent Community that created it, giving help to many undeserving people (e.g., “welfare queens”). It was a precursor to Trump’s Deep State conspiracy and “Drain the Swamp” slogan.

Trump also expanded the Mob at the Gates beyond immigrants and fearsome terrorists: It is now the government (FBI, IRS, the Justice Department) that is “coming for you,” along with “woke” cultural elites who force your daughters to use the same bathrooms as transgender boys.

Reich lists multiple ways Republicans have successfully retold these essential political stories for years, mostly appealing to voters’ fears. His formulation explains how some young people of color, women, and lower-income voters could lean into Trump’s lies and exaggerations. They’ve been hearing the Republicans’ stories repeated forcefully so many times, on Fox News and elsewhere, over 40-plus years that they are accepted as true.

Democrats need to retell their own stories forcefully and repeatedly to combat what Reich sees as the “corruption of our system of self-government.”

Allen Woods is a freelance writer, author of the Revolutionary-era historical fiction novel “The Sword and Scabbard,” and Greenfield resident. His column appears regularly on a Saturday. Comments are welcome here or at awoods2846@gmail.com.