The war with Iran that never really ended is back on. Like everybody else, including the Trump administration and the Iranian regime, I have no idea how it will end. But it eventually will, and how it will be remembered will matter enormously.
Politics is about many things, but whether you call it “spin,” “framing” or “narrative competition,” storytelling is never far from the heart of it. As the philosopher Richard Rorty observed, “Competition for political leadership is in part a competition between differing stories about a nation’s self-identity, and between differing symbols of its greatness.”
Sometimes the story itself is the point, like the recent clashes over the American founding — 1619 vs. 1776 — and sometimes the story is a means to some other political end, like winning an election or passing controversial legislation. If people believe the spin that elections are routinely stolen thanks to votes by illegal immigrants, then passing the SAVE Act makes sense. If they don’t believe that story — perhaps because it’s not true — but do believe that the bill is another chapter in the story of President Trump’s goal of undermining confidence in elections, then passing it doesn’t make sense.
Very often the story is more lastingly important than the facts.
Take the New Deal. Save for the Founding and the Civil War, I’m hard-pressed to think of a story that shaped American politics more. The modern Democratic Party was defined by it. And in many ways, so was the GOP.
For decades, the reigning view was that President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was a huge success. To deny this was — and often still is — dismissed as nuttery. According to legend, the New Deal unified the country, defeated the Great Depression and proved that politicians and experts could plan the economy for the benefit of all Americans. Hence the unceasing progressive quest for a “new New Deal.”
This story has facts in its favor. It also has facts heavily weighted against it. The economy didn’t really recover until well after the New Deal was over. The 1930s was no period of “we’re all in together” unity. Instead it was a time of significant domestic upheaval: the Harlem Riots and labor unrest — “the Uprising of 1934” alone was one the largest industrial strikes in American history — and hundreds of unemployment protests.
Nor was the New Deal a coherent, uniformly successful plan. FDR made stuff up as he went.
“To look upon these programs as the result of a unified plan,” wrote Raymond Moley, FDR’s right-hand man during much of the New Deal, “was to believe that the accumulation of stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter’s tools, geometry books, and chemistry sets in a boy’s bedroom could have been put there by an interior decorator.”
In 1940, when Alvin Hansen, an economic advisor to FDR, was asked if the principle of the New Deal was “economically sound,” Hansen replied, “I really do not know what the basic principle of the New Deal is.”
My aim isn’t to relitigate a very lost cause, but simply to note that the triumphant narrative of the New Deal swamped all others, and shaped domestic politics and policy for generations.
Which brings me, finally, to the war. I think it’s obvious that once Trump realized his little war in Iran wasn’t going to repeat the “success” of his little war in Venezuela, he had no idea or plan for what to do next. He’s been improvising ever since. His strategy looks more like the boy’s messy bedroom Moley described than a successful work of interior design.
But what if the war ends successfully? A lot of the president’s critics assume that’s impossible. They shouldn’t. It’s true that Trump misread the Iranians, but that doesn’t mean the Iranians aren’t misreading Trump. Indeed, hostilities resumed last week precisely because the Iranians got greedy, launching fresh attacks in the Strait of Hormuz.
The Iranian regime could still fall. Europe, fed up with the chaos and disruption, could get over its well-earned frustration with Trump and join the fray, helping to secure the strait. I’m not saying this is likely, just that it is quite possible.
What then? You can be sure people will have very different stories to tell about this war. Many opponents of “forever wars,” on the left and right, will still pronounce it a failure no matter what. Some supporters will argue that Trump merely lucked out. Many others will claim this was the “chess master’s” plan all along.
Some story will prevail, and that story — accurate or not — will shape American foreign policy for years to come.
X: @JonahDispatch