The death of the liberal story

Actor Ralph Fiennes has apparently said recently that he attributed Trump’s win in the United States presidential election to having a better story.

It seems he thinks that Make America Great Again (MAGA) was able to capture people’s spirit and imaginations in a way that liberal progressivism wasn’t.

I’m no expert in American politics, but I can see his point about the liberal story. The ‘progressive’ side doesn’t really have a story any more. Liberalism used to – it triumphed originally largely because of the incredibly powerful narrative of humanity growing up, becoming mature, becoming enlightened and responsible for itself; growing past the juvenile stage of believing what it was told, believing in superstitions and so on. The story was of free thought and human autonomy flourishing in humanity’s new state of independent adulthood, having grown away from the foolishness of childish thinking.

A story without power

But that story, while it is still frequently told, has lost a great deal of its power. It was, after all, deliberately deconstructed by postmodernism with its denial of metanarratives. It has also been falsified by the ways in which life is not so much better, or powerful, or rational in so many ways. We actually see anxiety and uncertainty, and a great many negative effects of the technology and new inventions that were supposed to make life so much better. The way in which progressivism itself is so contested from within, now, even from those who were until recently the hard edge of liberal thought, puts a dent in the narrative.

But perhaps most powerfully the story of autonomy has reached a kind of natural dead end. For if you have reached the stage of having such autonomy that you are able to entirely invent your own identity, totally independent of a given framework, free to reject anything you were born to, be entirely self-invented, dependent on no outside reality –

– that is profoundly lonely. And humans were not made to be lonely. It doesn’t work.

A better story

There’s another American story of freedom, independence, and self-reliance. It’s one we’re all familiar with. But it’s a different kind of freedom. It’s the freedom of the pioneer, the homestead. It’s the narrative of a self-sufficiency which is not actually self-sufficiency, but a reliance on family and community, people coming together to raise barns and work the fields. It is about making one’s way in the world by dealing with the world that is there.

It is a narrative of freedom, in many ways just as much an invention, but its narrative evokes images of humans working together in creation as it is, creating a life that will be passed down and that will build society.

If that American story was used, it would likely have a far greater resonance. There is a given truth to the world, to how we were created, and a story of freedom that is in line with that truth is much more powerful. We are not self-identifying, entirely independent individuals. That story just doesn’t have much to say.

Of course, the best story is the Christian one; the one that offers genuine freedom, genuine identity, genuine understanding of reality and the true way to live as mature human beings. That’s the story we really want people to resonate with. How we long for the day when that will happen.