To be elected (or retained) on the basis of an open, competitive process, politicians must find favor with the electorate. This involves them with voters. Since doing so on a personal, one-on-one basis is not practical, they must connect with potential supporters through narratives (their own and those of the voters). Voters have a wide range of opinions and values, so a politician’s appeal to one set of narratives can run counter to those of others who do not share the same opinions and values. So, what is a candidate to do? How can they get a sense of what voters want? Which set of public narratives should they embrace?

Being a member of one of the major parties is a starting point, and for many voters, that’s all it takes. But it’s in the primaries where things get interesting. Primaries force candidates from the same party to look for support beyond what can be gained from party affiliation alone. The fly in the ointment is that two of the most significant but unexpressed motives for many politicians are the prestige of the office they seek and (gasp) the opportunities for personal gain those offices may provide. Clearly, politicians never say they want to get elected so they can be important or so they can line their pockets. Instead, they rely on intentionally empty but high-sounding rhetoric that usually boils down to saying they want to get elected (or stay in office) so they can “serve the American people.”

But what really happens? Politicians look to focus groups. Many of them listen carefully to the tropes and narratives generated by vocal segments of the public. Bear in mind that in the United States only about 10% of the adult users of Twitter generate roughly 92% of all tweets, and about 69% of that cohort identify as Democrats. Most of them are more to the left, and the narratives they generate and support do not represent the larger values of the majority of the adult population of either party.

When the individual narratives appear to form part of a larger whole, politicians may react by incorporating some version of those narratives into their own platform. The collective volume of these merged public narratives therefore acts as a narrowly focused form of distributed wisdom that can be attractive to both candidates and incumbents. In that way, collective narratives supporting policies dealing with far-left issues may drive candidates to set aside their genuine beliefs and values so they can adopt issues they hope will lead to success at the polls. Although their opponents may chastise them for “flip-flopping,” nothing comes of such complaints.

Many of these political narratives (especially those that are the greatest departure from traditional norms) combine narrowly articulated demands supported by exaggerated claims of victimization. These demands and claims are delivered with insistence for acceptance by the candidate. They are summed up in abstract terms used to justify policies that offer vague or even outrageous remedies to what are actually badly defined or even nonexistent problems. Not surprisingly, the solutions demanded can result in actions that don’t really pass the sniff test for people who are devoted to facts.

The demand for social change by vocal groups actually has less to do with the change and more to do with the power they crave. This includes power to influence change and power to extort money from commercial “supporters” who are afraid of being labeled as “racists,” beneficiaries of “white privilege,” or some other socially undesirable stigma. One result is that sometimes these narratives (like Black Lives Matter, defunding the police, and abolishing ICE for example) take on a lives of their own. Criticism of their demands is categorically forbidden. Through the sheer volume of repetition they drown out the rational center of both parties and become self-licking lollipops that capture the political moment.