Last Friday when I began this blog series, I asked the question “When do we speak?” I maintain that for too long, Progressives have remained politely silent in the face of public challenges to our beliefs, our values, and our president. Today, I want to extend that argument by suggesting that the question that must define us for foreseeable future is “What do we say?”

This week the big news is the midterm election and there are two competing narratives worth examining. Today, in advance of the vote, I want to use my ethnographic and rhetorical training by loosely applying to them Clifford Geertz’s textual methods for uncovering organizing principles in cultural stories and Walter Fisher’s well-worn criteria for evaluating narratives, namely, do they “hang together” and do they “ring true?”

“They had an enormous opportunity to bring about change and they failed, and I don’t say that harshly,” he said, adding: “They really are left-wing elitists and they really thought the country didn’t get it, and, therefore, it was their job to give the country the government that they thought the country needed, even if they didn’t want it.” – Newt Gringich, on the morning after the midterms in 1994

In Permanence and Change, Kenneth Burke introduces the idea that “motives are shorthand terms for situations.” When someone—say, a political commentator—names something as a “motive” for an outcome, what she or he is also doing is associating that motive with an outcome without discussing the complex mix of contributing factors, all of which add up to an understanding of the situation. The assumption is that the audience—let’s say voters—will fill in the details with what they already know. Or, as was the case last night, with what they didn’t care to know because it might have contradicted what they already believed, which was largely incorrect.

“I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’

if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”

--Alastair MacIntyre, On Virtue

For those of us who study narratives there is no easy agreement about what, in fact, a “narrative” is. Academics disagree, so do practitioners. Academics disagree because humanistic and social science scholars use separate sets of theoretical and historical references to define the term and because our diverse definitions are contextually employed differently to define a particular event or inform a particular research purpose. Hence, it matters a lot to the individual researcher whether “narrative” refers to data drawn from someone’s account of something that they claim happened, or whether it refers to an historical text disconnected from the present that may be interpreted by readers in any number of ways.

Disagreements about definitions duly noted, the word “narrative” is very popular these days. It was, according to one study, the most popular buzzword in politics for 2010. Certainly it was one of the most overused, given that “narrative,” in all of its rhetorical splendor made to mean all kinds of things, was attached to such a wide array of imperatives—from campaign slogans to speeches to takes on American history and culture. In practice outside academic culture, it would seem to be the case it isn’t so much important what narratives “are”—meaning how they are defined—as it is what narratives “do.” It’s their influence that matters.

One of the lessons from the successful (so far) revolution in Egypt is the importance of voice in creating and keeping a democracy.  I say that with some obvious bias, of course, as I am a communication scholar.  But you don’t need a Ph.D. in my field to recognize that one reason Mubarak remained in power so long was because he cultivated a tyranny of silence that controlled the speech of citizens and suppressed the media. It is that same kind of fear that has characterized America since 9/11.

I don’t think it is possible to overstate my case.  From my first blog back in October I have explored this fear of speaking out against tyranny, whether the tyrant was a blowhard right-winger parroting Rush Limbaugh in a parking lot or a politician on television calling for second amendment solutions or a former president reconstructing a past through fabrications and fantasies that go largely unchallenged, we have been numbed into silence by the rich and the dumb.  And, as brutal prison guards and Rupert Murdoch know so well, a people quieted by fear for so long lose the will and the ability to speak.