Today I discovered that the New York Times has an interview with Elizabeth Warren on “America’s Next Story,” which got me excited.  I am quite fond of the senator and was curious to see what she would have to say on the current story of America – what we should be encouraging as our current group meta-narrative. Who are we?  Where are we headed?  What is our common purpose?

Would Warren have something to offer as a counter to Trump’s rhetorical campaign for reinvigorating America’s “greatness”?

Unfortunately, no.  Warren’s interview stressed her long-time understanding that the American economy is “rigged” – if a family has a medical crisis, a long-term job loss, or a death or divorce, the game is pretty much up for them.  No matter how hard people work, it’s difficult to afford basic childcare, let alone buying a house.  America isn’t taking care of its people as well as many other countries do.

These are worthy goals, but it’s a missed opportunity for Warren.   The story she’s telling is not a group meta-narrative at all, and I think there’s an important point to be made here.

Two Types of Meta-Narratives

Warren is sketching a story for individuals in relation to their country.  This is a powerful type of individual meta-narrative:  Individuals are the protagonists, and the United States should play an important role in their life stories. As she puts it, “we’ve got to make this country work better for working families, so that we have an economy where a family can work hard, play by the rules and build real financial security and the promise that their kids can do better than they did.”  There are important strategic reasons for proposing a story along these lines – for one thing, most Americans across party lines can agree it would be good, and many are coming to believe that the Trump administration is falling short of these goals.

But that’s different from a societal meta-narrative, the type I’ve dedicated this blog to talking about.  The kind of story I was expecting from Warren was a story with America as the protagonist.  What is America’s purpose, its role in the world?  How is America falling short now, and what should America be doing instead?

Warren’s story is about individual Americans and what their government should be doing for them.  That’s not the same as suggesting the next step in the story of America itself.

Part of a Group

The key difference is whether the people in the story are treated as category members or as essential elements in a group, the group that comprises our country.  There’s a vital difference between parts of our identities that are the categories we fit into, and the parts of our identities that tell us we’re part of something bigger than ourselves.  Being left-handed, or especially tidy, or able to play the piano are categories.  Being a Catholic, or a university student, or a lifelong resident of Montana makes you a part of a group.  Sometimes you can ignore the groupness and just go about your day; at other times it can be vitally important to you.

There’s this great word that’s hard to pronounce correctly that means groupness: “entitativity.”  Six syllables!  I confess I’ve written it as “entitivity” more than once, but no, it’s “entity” plus “-ativity.”

If you’re in a category that hasn’t yet started to think of itself as a group, it’s easy for the mainstream to pick on you.  Often category members are relatively isolated and easy targets for the power of the main group to treat them poorly.  Many social movements, like Black Lives Matter and its civil rights predecessors, along with earlier movements to promote women’s rights, gay rights, farm workers’ rights etc., have arisen when a few brave souls inspired members of a category to start seeing themselves as members of a group.

The 2016 Story

Warren’s strategy, addressing us as individuals who happen to fall into the category of “Americans,” is a lot like Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.  Remember the leaked e-mails?  They told us that at one point the campaign was considering 85 different slogans… and every single one of them addresses the voter as an individual.  “Stronger together” – “You’ve earned a fair chance” – “She’s got your back” – “Making America work for you” – “A stronger America one family at a time” – “Progress for the rest of us” – “It’s about time… and it’s about you.”

Contrast that with making America “great again.”  With Trump’s slogan, the country is the hero.  Maybe it’s fallen on hard times, but with Trump, in theory, we could get it back on track.  It’s implied that if America is great, its people are happy and better off, but the point is that if you’re behind the MAGA campaign, you’re part of something bigger than your individual life.  You can have a noble purpose:  The restoration of the United States.

(I’m in Trump’s target category – very white, ancestors on this continent since 1620.  However, although I was raised Republican, I was also raised “cosmopolitan” rather than “tribal” and with plenty of social studies classes impressing the value of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights into my psyche. Both of those factors pretty well inoculated me against MAGA.  I will note, too, that when I was a child, Oregon was famous for its progressive Republicans who were national leaders in environmentalism (Tom McCall), women’s rights (Bob Packwood), civil rights (Wayne Morse, who later changed parties), and even pacifism (Mark Hatfield).)

The Power of Group Stories

Group meta-narratives are potentially very powerful, both in motivating people to identify with the group and in making sweeping social changes.  Because they’re so powerful, anyone promoting such stories (ways to think about the world and our place in it) must be very careful to ensure their stories are ethically sound.  Woodrow Wilson’s “Make the world safe for democracy” could be an ethical goal, depending on how we go about it.  Manifest Destiny, the meta-narrative entitling those of us with European ancestors to displace the Native people and claim the entire breadth of the continent for ourselves, was clearly not ethically sound.  “Give [us] your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” is a reasonable ethical message for a rich country that can afford to share its wealth and prospects with the rest of the world, although a case can certainly be made for due process.  Going to war against the Japan when its government chose to bomb Pearl Harbor may have been an ethical choice; treating our own citizens of Japanese ancestry as criminals was surely not.

With meta-narratives, it’s very much a question of ends and means.  An end may be worthwhile and highly motivating, but when the means involve harming innocents, the end cannot be justified.  Unfortunately, the process of creating groups out of categories makes it all too easy to set up an in-group versus an out-group, and the out-group becomes vulnerable.  The social movements of recent years have often had to focus on reminding the in-group that is America that we are all in it together – the very phrase “Black Lives Matter” is to remind us that Black people are part of the in-group, part of “us” and not an out-group at all.

What kind of group meta-narrative could the Democrat leaders offer?  Frankly, Trump is making it easy for them.  The United States created by the Founding Fathers was intended to be a land of justice, fairness, opportunity, due process of law, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly – a land where everyone has a say in the laws that govern us, and the confidence that those laws will be honored and apply to everyone fairly.  This vision, based on principles admired around the world, is what many of us were raised to understand as America’s true greatness.

It’s reasonable for political parties to have different beliefs about the relative importance of, say, national security versus individual opportunities, or whether the most vulnerable among us should be supported by all of us collectively or by private charities.  Personally, I’m looking forward to the day that we can return to taking our basic American values for granted and start focusing again on debating topics like these.

Now is when we need a Restoration meta-narrative, far more than in 2016.