I may be a political junkie, but this book was absolutely fascinating and quite timely. Glad I found the book and highly recommend it.

Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience

A fascinating look at post-truth politics, how political battle lines are drawn by the stories woven around them. Thanks NetGalley!

There is going to be a problem with any "ripped from the headlines" piece of political theory when the headlines move on so rapidly. The Art Of Political Storytelling takes us almost up to the UK election last year, and is (as ever with books like this) primarily interested in US and UK politics. Why does politicians lie and how do we let them get away with it. I was hoping, expecting, something deep and profound - but instead the book is more of a synthesis of the story (seductive as stories are) that had slowly built up over the last ten years. People prefer narrative to fact, people want their political stories to fit certain narrative arcs and a good storyteller (liar) can do a lot for there campaign by fitting their story to a well known hero's journey than muddle people with policy and fact. And the book is - like much of civil society - pretty much at a loss to how to handle it.

So we get the greatest hits of the Trump campaign and Brexit. Future politics students in the English speaking West will be sick of these examples (and the terrible conclusions that come from them), and sometimes in the breakneck overview of what is going on here we lose sight of some broader issues. Late stage capitalism, bloated empires past their prime. Where has storytelling populism failed. All the way to Marshall McCluhan - the medium is the message and TV is a medium of stories. Do facts mean nothing in a medium which rarely deals well with facts (no-one expects a biopic to be accurate, everyone expects a biography to be).

SO this is better as a primer bringing these ideas together than as either a how to manual (it is not Machiavelli though you could easily reverse engineer this stuff), and solutions are few and far between. But it is interesting that during Covid, a tragedy where science and its pesky facts are pushed to the fore, that some of these techniques crumble. Whilst we have seen Trump tell stories, the more farfetched the better, they didn't always stick. So there is another method - which is alluded to here but not quite articulated. If people feel they are part of a narrative, who gets to shape it. The US response (and latterly UK it seems) to Covid is to say that as a story, we are past the middle and into the end - the bit where we all survived. The governmental consensus is that either we are, in which case they are right, or we are not, in which case they can lie and spin the story to blame others, or just deny. This UK/US/Brazil/Russia technique is currently mid flow and is testing the power of the political storytellers - its a story they haven't had to tell before. Seargeant has a lot of ideas about how this might work, but writing before Covid this yet again feels a little like a remnant from another age. It may still be right, but populist political storytelling has its toughest test right now.

[NetGalley ARC]

Lots here to enjoy, and get frustrated and angry about, here. Seargeant offers an interesting account of storytelling in politics, focusing extensively on Brexit and the rise of Trump. It is also very timely in the time of the pandemic, when politicians' lying has much more serious consequences and I imagine a second edition would provide a very interesting account of what we're going through. Seargeant is good on how stories are constructed, how this plays out in political contexts and how language has increasingly been used to obscure, rather than offer, meaning. Interesting.

This is a timely and useful book, examining the ways in which politicians exploit storytelling in order to connect with ordinary people and gain power. Seargeant outlines the basics of narrative, and then takes an in-depth look at a few concepts that have made their way into mainstream politics in the past couple of decades.

Obviously Trump is the archetypal figure in terms of exploiting storytelling techniques, but he's certainly not alone. It seems fairly clear that the right of the political sphere, in its various forms, has been much more adept at this than the left, at least in the UK and the US.

And political storytelling isn't limited to those in power. Concepts such as fake news and tools such as astroturfing are being weaponised with varying levels of success to delegitimise some ideologies and even facts in favour of others (alternative facts, don't you know).

I would have liked to see a more nuanced investigation of the media's role in all this. The fact that politics is a spectacle is due in very large part to the way the media portrays it - journalists are our filter through which the rest of us view events. When Seargeant mentions the media at all, he seems to see journalists as beleaguered upholders of the truth, cut down and vilified by Trump and his ilk. This is certainly true to some extent. Journalists are as beholden to their employers as anyone else in our current capitalist society. The media as a whole, though, certainly bears some responsibility for what has happened in recent years.

The mainstream media survives by pretending to be unbiased. In many cases this is a lightly worn fiction - few people would say the Daily Mail, for example, is unbiased, and many people would also say the Guardian is biased in a different direction. But publications in between these two are also biased to various degrees, according to their owners' demands, the need to make money and their journalists' beliefs and world views. They (and journalists as individuals) also play to what they think are the public’s biases. The media is constantly triangulating: how much outrage can “story x” subsist on, and what should be their take on, say, Trump’s latest tweet or Dominic Cummings’s decision to ignore lockdown rules? Is Cummings a hero of the resistance or an unelected idiot? Unfortunately, in media storytelling, there is not much room for nuance beyond these two classifications.

The omission of the media’s role in our current post-truth society aside, I think this book will be helpful to anyone thinking about political storytelling at the moment. In essence what it says may not come as a surprise to anyone paying attention to the world right now, but I think the level of detail and attention will be useful. For me personally, it also helped nail down some terms – such as astroturfing, a word I’d seen thrown around without really understanding what it meant.

Thank you to the publisher for an advance copy of this book.

Very disappointed. Promised one thing and I read something completely different. I am not sure who to blame. The writer of the book of the people who wrote the bkurb.

DJT == AOC. Yes, that is actually a point Seargeant makes in this book - and no, it isn't for the reasons some of my fellow Libertarians/ Anarchists like to point out. (Which are accurate in their own way, but I digress.) No, here the point Seargeant makes is that both of these seemingly diametrically opposed candidates have actually embraced the same narrative archetype to tell their stories. Overall, the book is an excellent examination of just how storytelling - and in particular, a few of the classic archetypal stories/ heroic journeys - has completely reshaped at least American and British politics of the last few years. Reason seemingly no longer matters so much as narrative, so it is important to know these narratives, how they are structured, and how these structures play into political messaging in order to more effectively play both offense and defense in the political arena. Masterful work that makes a few missteps here and there when it deviates from its central premise at times, and thus the reduction of one star. Still much recommended.

Is Donald Trump a new phenomenon? Is he breaking new ground with his modus operandi? Philip Seargeant says no in The Art of Political Storytelling by showing what is at work behind it all. He traces the principles of storytelling and especially political storytelling not just back as far as Chaucer and Plato, but also in fundamental structures and appeals. The result is both enlightening and entertaining.

It turns out world leaders have a tendency to be storytellers; they love fiction. Many have published novels. Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Boris Johnson, Saddam Hussein (4), Francisco Franco, Benito Mussolini, and Benjamin Disraeli are all novelists you might recognize. Reagan and Trump appeared in films, with Trump appearing in a softcore porn film as well as professional wrestling. Is it any wonder they can play fast and loose with truth and facts?

There are certain things that appeal to the human psyche. Stories make it easier to associate with aspects of the state of life and the nation. Seargeant cites Paul Ricoeur’s emphasis on “the necessity and the strength of narratives, … in that events of all kinds become visible and intelligible only as told through stories.” A politician who only recites the stats and the facts will fail. One who tells a story (Make America Great Again) will grab all the attention. In his analysis, Seargeant shows the same keywords show up in slogans time and again, as politicians seek to implant a story in voters’ minds, using just a handful of easy words. Sloganeering is well trodden ground; there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

There are really only seven or eight basic stories, and everything else flows from them. Christopher Booker is the most famous authority on this, claiming there are just seven. Before that, Kurt Vonnegut demonstrated there were eight - in his academic thesis. And Joseph Campbell described the universal hero’s journey that every action and comic book hero film follows, pretty much to the letter.

And there must be a conflict. The hero must be called into action, usually reluctantly, often alone or anonymously (at first) to deal with the evil that plagues the neighborhood, city, country or planet. After several setbacks, s/he finds the fatal flaw and exploits it to win the day. Risking all, and peppered with near death experiences, the hero saves the day. Only Trump can save this country, you might have heard ad nauseam. It is straight out of the storytelling manual.

Stories (narratives) need to be character-driven. Action drives the development of character. Trump is forever praising himself, demanding credit for everything from the level of the stock market to bringing mass manufacturing and coal mining jobs back to the USA. His bluster, shooting from the lip, vulgarity and continual lying define his action-oriented character to his base. It’s what makes him legendary in their minds.

In the story of overcoming evil, there is a basic storyline they all follow. Seargeant sums it up this way:
“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark (or Washington, or Westminster). To stop the rot – or drain the swamp – an outsider needs to step up. Someone untainted by the cronyism of the halls of power and armed with unconventional methods. Someone who can take the fight to the complacent, self-serving political establishment – and in doing so, bring about a change both in the system itself and the lives of the millions of everyday people who look to him or her as their champion.” We are living a novel.

I particularly appreciated the downside that Seargeant examines, all too briefly. All the lying eventually becomes its own truth, like an internet fact some troll posted and got away with. In the American case, it drives the authenticity of disinformation, as Trump harps on his various fictions to avoid admitting lack of comprehension, lack of action and lack of accomplishment. While it works as a diversion, it has the tendency to make governing difficult, as the fiction cannot actually be dealt with as real. For example, Trump spent a great deal of time pushing the Justice Department to conduct a full inquiry into “busloads” of illegal immigrants brought from state to state to fraudulently vote – against him – on election day. Or there was the birther fiction he propounded all through the Obama administration. When it was finally laid to rest, he attributed it to Hillary Clinton, sealing one lie with another.

In another example, the Brexit Conservatives spent their time getting the public to “Take Control Back” as if it were that easy to break off relations. It has of course not even begun, four years later, as yet another delay has been agreed to by the EU. Similarly, all the lies about the money Britain would be sloshing in when it no longer had to work with Europe has yet to make an appearance, and austerity is still the Conservative mantra.

The only objection I have to Seargeant’s analysis is that it unintentionally makes it seem that Trump knows all this. That he has sharpened these tools and applied them in innovative ways. That he is not just clever but refined in his application of political storytelling. Nothing could be further from the truth. Trump often does not know what will come from his mouth. He constantly contradicts himself. He makes up lies to cover for lies, as if no one would be able to discover it. And when they do, he calls them insulting names.

The history of political storytelling is important to know and understand, and this book lays it out delightfully. But Trump would deny it all if he ever read it. To him, he’s an original.

David Wineberg