I think in general that what you write on here is excellent, but this may be looking in the wrong direction here.

The Right didn’t plan the ’stab in the back’ narrative, and then force people to believe it. It really did just happen. People are prone to believing what they want to believe (bolstered by the fact that the media also likes to tell people what they want to hear). Most of all they do not want to hear blame being placed upon themselves or people they identify with. This is how a whole slab of right wing narratives emerge. For my money, it’s what makes those narratives identifiably right wing in the first place.

Right wingers in America, like most nationalists in most countries, have an unshakable faith that (among other things) America’s military is both morally perfect and physically undefeatable. Therefore they cannot tolerate any explanation of an event which suggests otherwise, and need a narrative to provide an alternative explanation – and to provide a scapegoat for the problem.

In Vietnam, the military was defeated in a straight fight, and there remain serious moral questions about both the reasons for the war and its conduct. This cannot be squared with their absolutist faith in the military, and therefore a myth is required. It need not stand up to scientific scrutiny, or even in some cases make basic logical sense. The point about it is not its truth, but its patriotic value, and the provision of a scapegoat (liberals). The stab-in-the-back myth is ideal for these purposes.

Similarly, I’d suggest the narrative about the terrible threat from Islam (which barely existed pre-2001) has been generated almost entirely by the same process. There was a need to square the belief in the moral perfectness of America with the torture and killing of civilians arising from the Iraq war, a war which really cannot be justified logically as retaliation for anything, or as preventing terrorism. Declaring all Muslims to be inherently terrorists in a single stroke both solves the problem of the torture and killing, and redefines the war in such a way that it has a purpose – and to boot it provides Muslim immigrants as a readily available local scapegoat for the resulting problems. The US military is therefore again made infallible, and all blame for the shortcomings of reality is diverted to people identified as being outside the group.

You can find the same pattern in the right wing responses to global warming, especially in the attempts to divert blame onto third world population growth or some motiveless academic conspiracy, although a consistent myth has yet to be arrived at here. You can find the same pattern in right wing Serbian responses to the defeat in Bosnia. I could go on.

The left wing (at least the liberal left) cannot invent and sustain these narratives, even if they were a good idea, since the left is far more concerned about truth than patriotic value or finding scapegoats to deflect blame. The liberal left’s narrative really should be the truth, not a myth. The real challenge is to make it understandable and accessible for everyone.

I didn’t know I had criteria, except that everyone’s supposed to fill in an email address. My spam filter must be having a bad day.

Translation: The George McGovern myth informs the writer that Democrats are “peaceniks” who will not defend America…. the writer doesn’t feel a need to justify his claim that Democrats can’t be trusted to handle national security. He just evokes McGovern”

Hit the nail on the head.

I used to buy into the myths too but eventually the disconnect between the myth and what I actually was seeing hit me.

Its frustrating to deal with those who can’t seem to break out of it.

http://www.amconmag.com/2006/2006_11_20/cover.html

This may have been linked here before, but it seemed relevant to this discussion.

You gotta hold your mouth just right…

Given his argument about why the administration’s approach won, nakes me wonder if a certain form of the jeremiad (emphasized because remember, at its most extreme it gets into Ward Churchill (for the farfringe left) or Jerry Falwell (for the xtianist right) territory) might provide one proper narrative?
- But I’m also start thinking of Mike the Mad Biologist’s post on Four Words that Distinguish Liberals from Conservatives (our version is “Because it can be better.” as opposed to ) – or as I’ve been dimly and platitidinally thinking, the politics of hope vs. fear. Or are these two things more two sides of a coin? We are lost – in a senseless war, in a land of broken levees and collapsing bridges and children who die because they don’t have health care – but we can be found?

. . .I wonder if the apropriate theological analogy here is less puritan jeremiads and more related to renewal and rebirth?

____

Anyway, the Philly Inquirer has a fine example of the mythomania discussed in the post, an opinion piece on A fine American forced out – about how the great Alberto Gonzales, who worked so hard to protect us from danger, is really a victim of lefties whose unhinged hatred for Bush leads them to try to destroy anyone loyal to “[him] and our nation”.

One can see it as a good example, perhaps, at how fear & insecurity (the terrorists!) leads some folks veering off to a place (if not there already) where they need (and create, in their minds), these idealized, strong, perfectly good and right parent-protectors (I mean, look, he’s putting Gonzales on a pedestal, ignoring how one of the few areas of bipartisan agreement is how it was way past time for him to go), so that the only possible explanation for disagreement is hate-crazed treachery

There is an unfortunately high number of people who are not convinced of Bush’s evil. Beside, harping on evil without stating why only sounds like an ad hominem attack. Success will not come from adoption of conservative tactics and stressing evil makes no dent in others who otherwise might be made more acutely aware of dismal failures. Bush’s works speak for themselves and he has a long history of failing then blaming other’s for his failures. The gross disparity between his words and deeds are there for all to see.

Given his acts others will make their decision based upon their personal concept of evil. people don’t like having morality stuffed down their throat by simply declaring “evil”. It is something entirely different to juxtapose Bush’s stated intent against results then pointing at the suffering it caused and the utter lack of works that beared nothing humane or just.

Some will call that failure and others will call it evil but people don’t like morality stuffed down their throats from the left any more than we’ve liked it from the religious right.

#21 wrote:Unlike most Bush opponents I think the Dems should attack them on their incompetent handling of the war and not just the fact that they started it to begin with….their miserable failures at every step and the misery they’ve caused by their acts, their benign neglect and their proactive grinding down of the middle and lower classes. Yup, that people know. That resonates.

My moral bean counting calls that evil but it wouldn’t be my greatest source of strength in any rhetoric.

The “Daisy” ad may have done more to defeat Goldwater than any political speak ever could. Would election of Goldwater – the defeat of Johnson – really have resulted in a nuclear war? The ad was a Dem myth.

Then there’s “Harry and Louise” a myth which probably did more to defeat health care reform than anything else. If someone had come along with an ad which conveyed the opposite of H&L’s they would have ended up in the bathroom waste-basket.