https://www.frontpagemag.com/this-election-years-tournament-of-narratives/
Every presidential election season, the media publicize explanatory tales that profile each candidate’s character, virtues, and vices, and identify and promote the critical issues, polices, and goals at stake in our choice. In the postwar period, new technologies of communication––especially the internet with its hordes of commentators and podcasters, cataracts of information, non-stop serial polling, and instant photos and videos available 24/7––have multiplied and intensified the narratives that shape the political parties’ platforms, and the voters’ opinions.
This November will be Donald Trump’s third presidential election, and it comes laden with narratives that Democrats and establishment Republicans, both stunned by Trump’s 2016 upset of consummate insider Hillary Clinton, have employed to demonize the president and salve the wounds to their arrogant self-regard and insider hauteur.
We all know the “narremes,” the basic, repeated verbal units, that comprise the story: Russian election interference, the Steele dossier, and threats to “our democracy” from the January 6 “insurrectionist,” to name a few. Trump himself is the villain of the tale: a semi-fascist admirer of autocrats, a warmonger, and plotter of coups; a rapist, racist, sexist, Islamophobic Hispanophobic heartless Scroogian capitalist, and an uneducated boor, crass philistine, and crude jingoist.
These are just a sample of the favorite slurs endlessly recycled by the corporate media PR firm and their clients–– the progressive, leftist “woke” Democrats and their NeverTrump Republican fellow travelers.
Joe Biden’s narremes, of course, have been starkly different. For one obvious thing, the postwar partisan politicization of the media today has reached a critical level not just of partisanship, but blatant lies and denials of patent facts, a carry-over of the media’s “slobbering love affair,” as Bernie Goldberg put it, that they had carried on with Barack Obama.
Abetted by social media and C-suite colluders, in 2020, the media marketed Biden as the anti-Trump: a stabilizing unifier, a steady, experienced “centrist” hand familiar with both our domestic “democratic norms,” and the globalist, technocratic political order.