Political conventions are exercises in storytelling
Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic nomination “on behalf of everyone whose story could only be written in the greatest nation on Earth.” America, Barack Obama thundered, “is ready for a better story.” JD Vance insisted that the Biden administration “is not the end of our story,” and Donald Trump called on fellow Republicans to “write our own thrilling chapter of the American story.”
“This week,” comedian and former Obama administration speechwriter Jon Lovett said Thursday on NBC, “has been about a story.”
In the discourse of American politics, this kind of talk from both sides is unsurprising — fitting, even. Because in the campaign season of 2024, just as in the fabric of American culture at large, the notion of “story” is everywhere.
This year’s political conventions were, like so many of their kind, curated collections of elaborate stories carefully spun to accomplish one goal — getting elected. But lurking behind them was a pitched, high-stakes battle over how to frame the biggest story of all — the one about America that, as Harris put it, should be “the next great chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told.”
The American story — an unlikely one, filled with twists that sometimes feel, as so many enjoy saying, “just like a movie” — sits at the nucleus of American culture for a unique reason.
Americans live in one of the only societies that was built not upon hundreds of years of common culture but upon stories themselves — “the shining city upon the hill,” “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” “all men are created equal.” Even memorable ad campaigns — “See the USA in your Chevrolet” — are part of this. In some ways, the United States — not coincidentally, the place where the frontier myth, Hollywood and Madison Avenue were all born — willed itself into existence and significance by iterating and reiterating its story as it went.
The campaigns understand that. So they are putting forward to voters two varying — starkly opposite, some might say — versions of the American story.
From the Republicans comes one flavor of story: an insistence that to “make America great again” in the future we must fight to reinvigorate traditional values and reclaim the moral fiber and stoutheartedness of generations past. In his convention speech last month, Trump invoked three separate conflicts — the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and World War II — in summoning American history’s glories.
