In an email to Felix Salmon of Reuters, Rebecca Hamilton observes the following:

To build a mass movement quickly, it helps to have an over-simplified, emotive narrative with a single demand. It also helps to tells people that by doing easy tasks – sharing a link on Facebook, buying a bracelet — they can save lives. Central to the formula is that the agency of local actors gets downplayed to hype up the importance of action by outsiders. But all those ingredients inevitably lead to eventual failure when the simple solutions can’t fix the complex reality. The movement walks away, disillusioned. And in the meantime untold resources have been expended on solutions that have been out of step with what local activists need.

This strikes me as a pretty astute description of the near-permanent collective disillusionment that defines contemporary politics in the advanced market democracies.

It also reminds me of a conversation I overheard a few weeks ago. After an energetic discussion of immigration reform, a few journalists described how difficult it is to find sympathetic stories of unauthorized immigrants in distress. As one of the interlocutors explained, life is complicated, and not every deportee has an entirely unproblematic life story that would tug at the heartstrings of readers or viewers. But it was important to find such stories in order to advance more humane policies. I found this exchange troubling, as it seemed transparently manipulative. Yet I imagine the journalists in question believe that, like Mike Daisey, they intended to express a deeper truth by focusing on unusually uncomplicated stories and suggesting that they were representative or routine.

Compelling personal narratives, however unrepresentative or misleading, are often how political arguments are won, as Hamilton suggests. My own preference is to cut in the opposite direction. That is, I like to make the case for a particular policy by focusing on the least sympathetic potential beneficiaries and working backwards from there, but there is a reason this strategy isn’t terribly popular.