Trickster Spider God

How much do you know about Anansi? Is it a name you’ve heard before?

Anansi (or Ananse) is a godlike trickster spider figure in West African folklore. His stories spread to the Americas from Ghana via the Atlantic slave trade. He is often characterized as a kind of mediator between the divine and human worlds, but his real strength lies in his cleverness, his wisdom, and his storytelling.

It is immensely sad to me that more people don’t know Anansi. He is a figure of resistance and survival, and we could all do with more of that right about now. And stories — we need stories. Or I guess more accurately, we need better stories. In every sense of the word.

I am not the only one who thinks this. Reed Howard, Chief Strategy & Public Affairs Officer at Future Caucus, recently posted on LinkedIn that “politics is downstream of culture.” Bridge Entertainment Labs believes the same thing. This is also the framework that Breitbart News, the Drudge Report, and HuffPost follow, which is no surprise given that the same man left his fingerprints on all three outlets.

So let’s talk about messaging and narrative. Storytelling. All that arts and humanities nonsense that our country has been devaluing and undermining for the last several decades.

One of the longstanding knocks against Democrats is that they’re too intellectual, too theoretical, too esoteric. There is some truth to that. Democrats are not good at storytelling. It is the foundational reason Republicans continue to claim support from the middle and working classes — when Americans vote for GOP hardliners, most of them are voting against their own interests. They just don’t know it, because that’s not the story they’ve been fed.

Look at everything happening right now and how people are talking about it. Even some of the most vocal activists and advocates are getting it flat-out wrong. If more than half the country is reeling from inflation and a cost-of-living crisis and is being told by our current administration that the problem is how much money we spend helping non-Americans, then shouting at them that actually the USAID budget only accounts for less than one percent of federal spending or that we only spent $40B on foreign aid is not going to change their minds. Both of those facts are true, of course, but that won’t matter to someone forming opinions based on emotions and feelings (which by the way is all of us). A percentage means nothing, and any cash-strapped American is going to tune out as soon as you drop the word “biilion” on them.

To be clear, I am not saying that facts don’t matter or that people don’t care about the truth because they’re dumb or ignorant. Some are, but what I really mean here is that facts alone just don’t change anyone’s mind. It’s actually the inverse of that infamous Ben Shapiro quote: Feelings don’t care about your facts.

I am also not advocating for a Mad Men-esque spin on the world. That benefits nobody except the people selling you something. But there are ways to tell real stories that do not abuse and misrepresent and otherwise warp reality to fit corporate or political schemes.

This is remarkably simple, or at least it should be. Telling good stories is how AOC keeps winning in her New York district, how Fetterman won his deeply purple state over before a stroke made him conservative. You don’t need to be Frank Luntz or George Lakoff or David Axelrod or any other kind of brainbox political savant to understand that we as humans are hardwired to understand and respond to stories, and the emotions they bring. If you want someone to believe you, to buy into your stories, then you need to do your absolute best to connect the dots for them. You have to make them understand why your ideas matter to them in a real way, a tangible way, or they will lose interest.

Instead of telling someone that spending on foreign assistance accounts for less than one percent of the USAID budget, maybe ask them how much they spend at coffee shops each month. If you could save someone’s life for the price of just one of those lattes, wouldn’t you? How guilty would you feel if you decided not to help someone in need on the street just because you wanted your house drip? Because that’s the real cost of USAID to the average American — one latte a month. And emphasizing that fact is just one example of the way we can tell stories that connect with people, that actually mean something to the average person with immediate day-to-day concerns and problems and things to think about. We have to think about what other people want to hear, not just what we want them to hear.

And even that example I just gave likely doesn’t go far enough. It is the tip of the iceberg. Because I do see Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries posting about how the Trump-Vance administration is making life more expensive for Americans, or how gutting all of these different agencies is the opening gambit in a play that ends with you losing your Medicaid and/or Social Security benefits — I don’t think Democrats do this particularly well or often enough, but they do try to do it. The larger issue at hand is that these quick breaths of fresh air are exceptions to the rule and come as standalone messages. They never tie back into a larger narrative or story being told by the party about the state of America and how Republicans are degenerating and cheapening the very foundations of democracy to fill their own pockets.

Think about how popular Bernie Sanders continues to be to this day. Does he slip in little PSAs to his consituents between puffed-up political manuevering and campaigning? No. He is authentically himself and has made his version of the story of America his entire political identity. And it works. People are drawn to him from both sides of the aisle, not because he has better ideas or is a better politician than anyone else, but because he knows how to tell his story.

And yes, there are of course academic studies to this effect that together constitute a cornerstone of my formal education. The backfire effect, belief perseverance, a bunch of other theoretical frameworks that I won’t bore you with because it would run directly counter to the point I’m trying to make here.

Hearts and minds. That’s what matters, in politics as much as in popular culture. If we want to restore some level of sanity to our federal landscape, if we want to address polarization at the root level, then we need to change the way people feel and understand the issues that matter. And that starts with storytelling.

Wholly unrelated: I’m selling shirts now. Not sure how long I’ll keep them up but I think they’re fun and have already ordered one or two for myself. If you’re interested, they’re available here for you to check out.