States Forum Journal | Audio Essay: Marshall Kosloff on "The Missing Liberal Story"

Now on to the actual essay.

The Missing Liberal Story.

A void has opened in American political consciousness.

It's time to abandon cautious messaging and develop an authentic narrative that voters can believe in.

Presidential elections offer the winner a chance to implement a new vision and set the country on a different course.

With Donald Trump's victory in twenty sixteen, the MAGA movement created a more participatory ecosystem and a politics that leveraged influencers and alternative media to give voters a new way of making sense of their world.

At the same time, the more technocratic center left struggled to tell a cohesive story about liberalism, one grounded in common sense and a shared understanding of the country.

Both parties are shaping their respective narratives within a new political reality, a void that grew out of the mismatch between what people have been told they should believe about our institutions and governance and their actual lived experiences.

The key to successful post-twenty sixteen politics is the ability to tell an authentic, compelling story about America.

Facing an anti-status quo electorate, winning candidates and movements are in a position to articulate what's gone wrong, where we've been, and where we're going.

These stories can feature a wide cast of characters, broadly resonant themes, and clearly identifiable heroes and villains, and, like interactive theater, they welcome audience participation.

But until a candidate, movement, or party can tell that story in a way that not only wins backlash elections but successfully governs to the point of re-election and consensus, the political void that defines the second quarter of the twenty-first century will remain open.

The opportunity to fill it or prevent your opponent from doing so is at the root of the existing political reality we now find ourselves in.

Nowhere in this essay will a reader find an exact articulation of what the liberal story should be.

That is very much by design.

As the host of the Realignment podcast, I've spent the past ten years embedded in left and right populous spaces.

Especially in the post-twenty sixteen early days, populous were less concerned with any one person's specific answer and more interested in attracting participants to their project and asking the right questions.

Over the years, unifying stories, ideas, and election outcomes built upon themselves to the point that something comprehensive was on offer in the twenty twenties.

My main argument is that the interested parties should recognize that story is an underemphasized aspect of liberal politics and shift attention and resources away from purely tactical topics and questions, which received outside attention in twenty twenty-five.

Now is the time for the left to gather narrative strands into a cohesive plan of action.

The narrativization of politics.