A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

First of all, there's this idea that the facts are the narrative.

Well, the idea that all you have to do is explain facts to people and they'll work out the narrative for themselves.

Narratives are always moral, in the sense of promoting certain kinds of behaviour and discouraging others. But where the Left attacks very specific behaviours, the Right works by promoting feelings first and then adding a narrative wrapper around them.

It's literally Pavlovian conditioning. Make people scared about their jobs and tell them immigrants are coming to take them from them, and in no time you'll have people who hate immigrants.

It's like I said yesterday about 'show don't tell.' It's not just the bedrock of fiction, it's the bedrock of all story-telling, which makes it the bedrock of all politics and economics too.

The mistake the Left makes is putting the feelings last. That's why most campaigns are so ineffective - campaigners feel the outrage, but it's rarely communicated in a way that people who aren't already persuaded can get personally excited about.

That's because "the left" actually believes in the enlightenment narrative of facts and consistency.

The enlightenment project was always an affair of the  middle class. It was most influential at those times when this class composed the majority of the electorate. As the franchise was extended to those lower down the ladder the enlightenment narrative became less compelling. In the USA Freemasons served to convey many of these values to emerging members of the middle class.  However the majority of the population retained allegiance to "that old time religion." One of the reasons emerging members of the middle class found enlightenment values so attractive was that gave them a perspective on religion that enabled them to develop a relatively integrated, rational faculty, which is useful in business and public affairs--until the adherents of "that old time religion" figure it out and react.

It was elites who proclaimed in the famous 1960s issue of Time Magazine that "God Is Dead."  The right seized on this and rode the backlash into dominance in the 1980s.  What left there remains in the USA has been swimming against this "dark ages" undertow every since.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."