We on the small team assembled to get the project off the ground were ready to get to work and eager to see the conclusion of a long and dispiriting U.S. presidential election season. Less than two weeks after the announcement of the Narrative Initiative, however, the world shifted under our feet. Overnight, the issues we had thought would top our to-do list in 2017 changed drastically. The new political landscape, in the United States and abroad, was both shocking and sobering. Political theater, of course, has always been an amalgam of the rhetorical and the real, a careful and calculated balance of hope and fear. But the power of narrative and the weaponization of language had rarely been leveraged so effectively by a candidate and a campaign, and the aftermath of the election demanded we step back and take stock.

The interventions we envisioned required recalibration in light of new conditions, trends and realities revealed by the 2016 election, including:

The evolving use of data and social media. The profusion of digital communications tools, mediums and platforms have made it even easier for memes — in both the evolutionary biology and social media senses — to spread and gain traction. There is no doubt that symbols can succeed over substance in the new public square. Combined with increasingly sophisticated harnessing of big data, psychometrics and profiling, and “fake news,” the 2016 election saw techniques of meaning-making and technologies of influencing behavior in ways previously unseen. As Jeremy Heimans from Purpose and Peter Koechley from Upworthy told us, the coordination of these capacities into contemporary “full stack media movements” demand increased attention.

The vulnerability of democratic institutions, both young and old. Under the weight of right-wing populism, established democracies on both sides of the Atlantic buckled, as they did in countries like Brazil and South Africa, with more nascent experiments in this system of governance. Many conditions are variable — political party resilience and reaction, the role and relationship of civil society and social movements — but the similarities are striking. Common threads are stitching together populist narratives — xenophobia and racism fueled by migration and demographic change, disaffection with economic liberalism and market fundamentalism, and disenchantment with establishment political parties.

A reminder of the particular power of political campaigns and candidates to shape narratives, especially ones that realign constituencies and redefine the “we.” Of course, campaigns that contest for national identity are not new, even when they aren’t always remembered that way. In 1981, only a couple years after the Tories ascended to power in the UK, Margaret Thatcher offered this self-reflection in an interview: “[I]t isn’t that I set out on economic policies; it’s that I set out really to change the approach, and changing the economics is the means of changing that approach. If you change the approach you really are after the heart and soul of the nation. Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.” Given the contemporary iterations of this project, what is the role and responsibility of civil society and social movements?

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