Twilight of the Tropes

This is about how Republicans lost the plot.

by Frank A. Spring

We understand our world - including our politics - through narrative, and when your audience understands your characters - what they want; why they are in conflict; and why that matters -  you are armed with a strong, appealing narrative and are ready to persuade and motivate your voters.

Republicans used to be great at that. Not anymore. We saw evidence of that decline in what it has become very clear was an historic underperformance in the 2022 midterms. The key to understanding the result is in how Republicans lost their tropes.

A trope, for narrative purposes, is a familiar character, image, or other storytelling mechanic that the audience will recognize. Tropes provide context that immediately orients the audience. For example, if a storyteller introduces us to a character by having that person emerge from a beat-up pickup truck onto slushy road in a pine forest, wearing a badge on their flannel shirt, scuffed cowboy boots under dirty jeans, and carrying a cup of gas-station coffee in a weathered hand, we’re being given immediate clues about where and when the story takes place, and invited to make assumptions about that character (which the storyteller can later confirm or confound, as they please).

Tropes are neither good nor bad; they are simply familiar. To violently reduce decades of study on neurocognition, social science, and behavioral psychology: Humans crave context for information. We can’t evaluate and analyze everything we see, hear, or read as unique and new; the effort would be debilitating. We can learn new things, of course, and do - constantly. But learning takes energy. Tropes get us around that. Quickly.

That’s why they’re so important in political narratives, where most audiences begin with limited time and patience for the story and its storyteller. A good political narrative must be instantly comprehensible and prominently feature at least a few familiar elements - tropes - right from the jump. Done right, a political narrative helps voters make sense of the world around them: How did we get here? What do we do next?

The GOP’s advantage in political narrative began forty years ago. Effective politicians use tropes regularly, and Ronald Reagan was extraordinarily effective. He understood his audience. He told stories stocked with tropes. Voters understood.

He was especially good with villain tropes. That his villains either didn’t exist in the way that he characterized them or didn’t exist at all, period, didn’t make them any less effective or memorable. The Inept and Inefficient Bureaucrat, who imposed unfair and nonsensical burdens on ordinary working Americans. The Welfare Queen, who stole from honest, hard-working citizens by tricking the inept government. The Soft-Headed Hippie, whose naive worldview and doubtful loyalty endangered everyone. The right and true way to confound this villainous trifecta, of course, was Small Government, Low Taxes, and Strong National Defense.

Reagan used these narrative miscreants, and others, to so thoroughly dominate American politics that they defined not only his party’s story but the opposing party’s, this last to such an extent that, more than four decades later, a visible portion of the Democratic Party leadership is still fixated on convincing voters that they, too, find Inept Bureaucrats and Welfare Queens abhorrent.

Which is grimly ironic, given that the power of that narrative has been eroding steadily, within the Republican Party and without, for better than 10 years. It is still a potent framework, alive and well in parts around the country, but in general the Iraq War devastated the political currency of the Softheaded Hippie trope, while the relevance of the Inept Bureaucrat and Welfare Queen essentially withered on the vine.

You see that erosion in public sentiment research, where the GOP’s advantage on the deficit; taxation; entitlement reform; and national security have all eroded, or where their edge remains but the voting public no longer especially cares about the issue (in many cases both!). 

And you see it in their candidates. Could a candid mind review the slate of Republicans standing for office in 2022 and honestly contend that this is a party devoted to Fiscal Discipline and Muscular Foreign Policy? Even Low Taxes, the most enduring element of Reagan’s legacy, is no longer the unquestioned and unquestionable God Emperor of Republican politics, as portions of the GOP become, if not tax-and-spend liberals, at least tax-curious.

Much has been written (books! articles! transcripts of thousands of podcasts!) about what the current GOP stands for and how it got here. Part of the explanation for this transformation, it seems to me, might be as simple as the idea that Reagan’s politics declined because people actually lived through the reality of them. What is manifestly true is that the GOP went from a party with a familiar, powerful narrative frame to something less cogent, as well as far darker and meaner, the same way the guy went broke: slowly at first and then all at once.

Donald Trump is both a result and an accelerant of this shift, in the same way that faulty wiring can lead to a fire, at which point you have two fire hazards: the wiring and the, uh, fire. He didn’t start the GOP on its path to a politics oriented entirely around grievance and cruelty, but he pushed it there faster than anyone else could have. How things change! At the start of one decade your party leaders are po-faced Chamber of Commerce types in blazers piously admonishing us about how we can’t pay ourselves more than we make, and at its end they’re a carnival of replacement-level weathermen and TV grifters for whom a failed political assassination is actually quite a funny joke the punchline to which is that an old man was brutally beaten with a clawhammer. 

The candidates of this new GOP probably believe in some remembered version of Reagan’s politics and can recite its tenets reflexively, in the same way that a lapsed Catholic can still claim belief and even make it through the liturgy, but more out of habit than zeal. What they cannot do is stick to that narrative and its familiar tropes, because their politics compels them to denounce other, more immediately relevant and nefarious villains.

This is how a party with a huge advantage in fundamentals - an unpopular president; inflation; high gas prices; the sheer brutality of thermostatic politics - squanders its opportunity. You could see elements of the GOP try to trot out the old politics to meet the moment: Inept Bureaucrats have brought on this inflation by paying modern Welfare Queens stimulus money and forgiving their student loans! It’s not clear how much farther the GOP can get on warmed-over Reaganism, but the opportunity this year was surely there. 

The voters even sort of expected it; Republicans did better on the generic ballot polling question than they did in reality almost across the board because voters were imagining generic Republicans, who would talk to them about Inept Bureaucrats etc. 

Instead, Republican candidates asked voters to learn an entirely new story, populated by tropes known only to conservative loyalists: School administrators who let children pee in litter boxes because they claim to be cats. Teachers who practically force students to get unwanted and unnecessary gender-affirming surgery. Local election officials who steal or change or make up ballots. Democrats who murder Republicans for their political beliefs. These characters have enormous currency in digital right-wing fever-swamps, but they are mostly or totally unfamiliar to normal people because they do not exist. 

This is how a party with a huge advantage in fundamentals squanders its opportunity.

Neither did Reagan’s tropes, of course. The difference is that Reagan’s tropes were at least distantly and obliquely rooted in real experiences, in a slowing economy and a changing society and an ongoing Cold War. Contrast with today, when sentiment on public education has been remarkably stable for more than a decade and three-quarters of American parents are happy with their children’s school and their teachers. When only 15% of Americans went into this cycle worried that there would be a concerted attempt at election fraud where they live (15% too high, but hardly the stuff of a potent narrative). And when lethal political violence in the country is almost exclusively a right-on-left affair.

The current GOP’s paranoid reality was substantially confirmed for them during the frantic, too-online years of 2020 and 2021 - schools are bad places doing bad things; election fraud is happening; the government and left are trying to kill us - and their candidates burst onto the scene absolutely confident that shouting their truth would bring only victory.

What kind of candidate wants to tell a story like that? At the Senate level: an obviously muddled deadbeat father who flashes a toy badge on the debate stage; a daytime television charlatan who obviously lives in a different state and tells voters that the choice to have an abortion is between a woman, her doctor, and the county assessor; a ghoulish, uncanny figure who makes himself appealing and relatable by firing a silenced Walther PPK at nothing at all in the desert outside of Tucson like some kind of rejected character from an unusually harrowing Coen Brothers movie. 

A generic story requires familiar tropes. Generic Republicans, telling the same old generic story with the same familiar characters, might have won this year. Instead, the GOP asked voters to learn a completely new story, told in a strange language that those voters do not understand, by storytellers who were as incoherent as they were repellant. They’re lucky the results weren’t worse.

Subscribe to The Experiment to discover new writers such as Frank Spring. Check out Frank’s previous contributions to The Experiment which include “Neither Gone Nor Forgotten,” “Oh, DaveBro,” and “In Praise of Gold Leaf.” Follow him on Twitter at @frankspring.

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