People Need Simple Narratives

Sometime last fall a Bad Faith Times reader – someone who had supported my career in all its iterations – ripped into me for failing to see what was coming in American politics. 

This BFT reader, who had read my football writing and listened to my politics and mostly backed my politics over the years, said the first American leader to create an acceptable narrative for aggrieved Americans would win the day, and perhaps the era. This reader pointed to health care as an example: This leader – president, I suppose – would blame the health insurance companies for the miserable state of American health care and promise vengeance against these companies and their CEOs. This president would use the entire force of the federal government to crush these insurance companies that exist to profit off the suffering of Americans and the people would love him for it. It would put Dear Leader on the side of the people, an essential maneuver since all effective political messaging is strictly black and white. Get that gray shit out of here.

Thanks to all those who support BFT. Consider subscribing for $3 or $5 a month, or leaving a tip!

Positioning oneself as the people’s champion while using power to persecute the powerful accomplishes two goals: It demonstrates a willingness to push back against powerful interests and it creates a palatable and easily understood narrative for the average American voter, who would most accurately be described not as low-information, but as no-information. 

Everyone loves a good story. Even better if it’s easily understood. 

Which brings me to a development that I only support in theory, not in action. Certainly I reject the premise of the idea. Put as simply as possible, Donald Trump wants to create a free accredited university using funds taken from elite institutions, particularly Ivy League schools. Trump announced this policy back in November 2023 as student protests roiled college campuses across the United States and conservatives both within universities and in Congress sought to punish any student or faculty member who would use their basic First Amendment rights to protest Israel’s war in Gaza. 

Any real desire to create a free university – dubbed by Trump as the American Academy – would have nothing to do with bolstering access to qualify higher education in the United States. The right has no interest in creating paths to affordable education for working people; this hardly even needs to be said. This higher ed program would be created for all the wrong reasons: To launch an institution of higher learning steeped in fascist propaganda, to capture the minds of young people for whom fascism has become normalized, and to bleed resources from universities that might open students’ eyes to the evil of the ascendant international fascist movement. This higher education project would be done in complete and total bad faith.

The details of how this American Academy would be implemented are as impossibly vague and detached from reality as anything else Trump and his lackeys have proposed or will propose in the coming years. I suppose you're not shocked by this.

Under the plan I’m announcing today, we will take the billions and billions of dollars that we will collect by taxing, fining, and suing excessively large private university endowments, and we will then use that money to endow a new institution called the American Academy.   Its mission will be to make a truly world-class education available to every American, free of charge, and do it without adding a single dime to the federal debt. This institution will gather an entire universe of the highest quality educational content, covering the full spectrum of human knowledge and skills, and make that material available to every American citizen online for free.   Whether you want lectures or an ancient history or an introduction to financial accounting, or training in a skilled trade, the goal will be to deliver it and get it done properly, using study groups, mentors, industry partnerships, and the latest breakthrough in computing. This will be a truly top-tier education option for the people.   It will be strictly non-political, and there will be no wokeness or jihadism allowed—none of that's going to be allowed.  Most importantly, the American Academy will compete directly with the existing and very costly four-year university system by granting students degree credentials that the U.S. government and all federal contractors will henceforth recognize. The Academy will award the full and complete equivalent of a bachelor's degree.

That the American Academy will not come to fruition doesn’t really matter. The intent is there: To take from the elite institutions working people have grown to loathe and create something free and accessible that would, in theory, improve your material conditions. Call it national socialism if you’d like. Whatever you call it, know that middle and working class Americans would pledge their undying fealty to Dear Leader if he were to go through with these plans (which again, he won’t). 

This proposal is exactly the kind of political confrontation Democrats – and liberals generally – are dead set on avoiding. As a deeply, almost neurotically nonconfrontational person, I get it, though I don't condone it. Whereas Trump and his hangers on are keen to leverage the public’s hatred and resentment of (some) elite institutions for political gain, Democrats are determined to maintain an impossible balancing act to ensure Everyone Gets Along just enough every four years to hold back the fascists banging down the castle doors. Democrats pray the center will hold. Sometimes, like last Tuesday, that prayer goes unanswered and we are left to boil in a lake of fire.

My Dad’s Right-Wing Bubble Was Popped

“I thought blue states had banned the pledge of allegiance,” he said. “Because they hate the country.”

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

Reading through Trump's half-baked proposal for a free American university called to mind a quote from political philosopher Noam Chomsky that I have desperately tried to forget over the past decade and a half. As much as anyone predicted Trump's rise to the head of the American empire, Chomsky did so in a 2010 interview with journalist Chris Hedges.

“The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen. Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer, we have an enemy’? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don’t think all this is very far away.

Americans' fury with the status quo was going to be used one way or another. It could not be contained or ignored forever, like so many mainline Democrats have hoped. Offered no coherent story or solution to the problems created by late-stage capitalist excesses, the people's pot of hatred and anger was boiling over in the second and third decade of the 21st century, and in Trump came to leverage it for his own gain, and perhaps to remake the country – and the world – in his image. So it goes.

They Refused To Let Kamala Cook

You don’t have to reach into the distant past to come up with examples of the center-left’s refusal to confront powerful corporate interests. Kamala Harris, in her failed bid for the White House, was instructed by the biggest losers alive (Democratic consultants) to stop talking about her ideas for using federal power to halt corporate price gouging. Much of the inflation we saw in the years after COVID was explained by corporations hiking up prices for no reason other than using a killer pandemic as an excuse to maximize profits. The media is telling people prices are exploding, so let’s give them exploding prices, the thinking went. And it worked. Corporations padded the bottom line with the millions of COVID dead worldwide. It was another day at the office, and a successful one at that. 

Before Democratic Party consultants tragically transformed her into Leslie Knope, Harris proposed a series of measures that would crack down on price gouging. The Harris campaign promised to “go after bad actors to bring down Americans’ grocery costs and keep inflation in check.” Her administration would score one for the Little Guy with an easy-to-understand, worker-friendly policy.

But no. Consultants told Harris that she was upsetting her Wall Street funders with all this talk of helping American families afford their groceries. You’re scaring the wolves of Wall Street, they told her. So she stopped talking about the one clear way she could help voters in their everyday lives after years of inflationary pressures creating a terribly hostile political environment for Democrats nationwide. It was a strategic blunder without equal in 2024. Harris was not allowed to be confrontational with the interests American workers despise. Her handlers, seemingly committed to plunging us into the fascist void with the blandest and most tepid policies imaginable, didn’t let Kamala cook. And now we’re here, with an incoming administration primed to sink its vampire fangs into every last labor gain American workers made under the Biden administration, the most labor-friendly government since FDR. Good work, consultants, good effort. You fucked us once again.

A Harris campaign economic message centered on putting an end to price gouging would have allowed the Harris campaign to craft a simple narrative: Bad Guys are gouging your family for every last red fucking cent, and we’re here to stop it, to say no more, and to defend your interests in the face of such obscene greed. Americans like these stories. They need good guys and bad guys, and if you don’t give them precisely that, they’ll make up their own narrative or ingest the narrative offered by the opposition – in this case, an openly fascist candidate whose main campaign promise was to end American self governance. 

How might this confrontational style of politics look in the higher education realm? How might the left flip the tables and propose a free university built with resources taken from bad actors? The federal government and a bunch of state governments sued the shit out of fraudulent for-profit colleges in the 2010s and won significant sums after these fake schools bled students dry of their federally-guaranteed student loans and saddled young folks with back-breaking debt that all but guarantees they will never own a home or build any wealth. 

The hundreds of millions seized in these lawsuits against grifter schools might have been used to establish a free, high quality education – the kind that Trump proposes but has no intention of delivering. It would have been a simple and compelling narrative: The government takes from frauds who robbed college students of their money and futures and established a legitimate higher education institution for everyone. I’m not suggesting this would be an easy lift – the opposition from Republicans would be as vicious as it was during the creation of the Affordable Care Act – but it would be worth it in earning voters’ trust through a nice and neat story of good versus bad. In a country obsessed with the simplistic narratives of superhero movies, nothing could be more appealing or politically salient. 

The Biden administration, for all its many political failings, was quietly confrontational with corporate interests. That might explain why the billionaire class rallied around Trump’s fledgling campaign 90 days before Election Day to get him over the line and roll back every worker gain of the past four years. Biden never gave Americans a story to hold on to. His administration sided with workers more often than any other in recent history and Biden became the first U.S. president to join a labor union picket line, but voters went to the polls in November without any understanding of how the president and his agency heads had helped them during what could have been an historically awful economic period. 

Let Trump’s dumbass American Academy serve as a lesson to be learned by Democrats and the abject failures who make up their consultant class. The left doesn’t have to engage in the bad faith politics favored by the right wing to shape a narrative that captures people’s political imagination. This can be done in good faith. And it must be done if we are ever to wrestle the national narrative from the right wing and leverage public anger for good. 

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @cdcarter13.bsky.social