In discussions on Italy, Brexit, Trump there’s one issue that bothers me and stands out: Narrative wins against nuance. Almost every time. (Thread. In fact, I might have to do this for two days...)
This thread is not meant to point at any person/class of persons, but rather to show how developments combine to create a danger that seems to be hard to confront.
Let’s begin with a concrete example: this tweet
That tweet contains a compelling story line. It combines “technically allowed” and “outrageous”. Sounds like what happened in Italy, right?
Let’s tackle the tweet as a comparative constitutional lawyer. The comparator chosen is the US Presidential electon. In which voters vote for a single person. Technically, though, this is done through the intermediary of the (arcane) electoral college.
While it is technically conceivable for the electoral college to vote against the instructions (I won’t go into the technical issue of members being bound to vote for a candidate), it would be an outrage.
So what happened in Italy? The President disapproved of the minister of economics. The Prime Minister (translating terminology here) then decided to step down.
The Italian system, however, is a parliamentary democracy. Voters do not elect a person as such.
In fact, Conte, the PM proposed by the two populist parties, was NOT elected. Ironically, President Mattarella reportedly explicitly questioned whether the PM shouldn’t be more... political.
The minister of economics was even less directly elected. But the comparison fails on another count: there’s no example of the electoral college voting for a surprise candidate in living memory, there’s 3 examples of Italian presidents rejecting ministers in the last 30 years
As a matter of nuance, legal comparative correctness, the tweet is a straight F. As a matter of narrative... it was shared more than 3000 times. And written by a peerson whose profile says ‘journalist’
Which brings me to the next ingredient of desaster. Journalism is changing. We are on a 24h internet cycle. News is often free. Journalists have to sell. This is not their fault, it is where reality is going.
You need people to klick. They don’t for nuance. They do for edgyness. Hence you need a cool title, a clear, simple message. Enter the example of Oettinger...
Oettinger spoke about financial markets, Italy, populism. Oettinger is German and an EU commissioner. You see where this is going...
The topic is a recipe for disaster and disaster ensued. Here’s the article by DW, where he gave the interview dw.com/de/günther-oet…
However, what’s interesting is that the journalist interviewing Oettinger felt the need to make the interview even edgier. His erroneous translation/summary caused furore. He withdrew it and apologized
Yet the wrong wording that the markets will teach Italian voters a lesson, is still omnipresent, cited by journalists everywhere
What’s the nuance here? I guess we all agree that financial markets have the world in a stranglehold, limit choices, restrict political freedom to act.
But this is one of the abstractions we have created. The money there is our pension money or the money of the bank that holds our savings. We want that money to be save. So AAA. Right? Is it us, who limit political freedom?
But all too often underpaid journalists have to get their article written (quick, be the first) get it published (not like this: too boring and complex) and spread. Narrative wins.
This is also true for quotes in articles. It is the age of the edgy soundbite. Nuanced quotes by experts rarely make the cut - which brings me to the incentives for scholars
We also need to sell. Show that you have impact (do that edgy soundbite), get that funding.
So your work that actually marginally improves our understanding of how a chemical works on the organism will be ‘essential research to cure cancer’
We live in a world in which scholars ask other scholars to summarise the thesis of their 400 page book in two sentences.
And yes, saying ‘If I could do that, I wouldn’t have had to write 400 pages’ does get you laughs, but it doesn’t get you funding, invites to conferences etc.
In fact, there, too, we now often search the radical, the edgy, to ‘have an interesting debate’.
All of this also explains, why everyone in this world currently seems to be anxious and scared, with the certainty that everything will collapse.
Italians do have an economic crisis, but Brits, Germans, Americans - we all feel impending doom, a mood that seems to say we are in a Great Depression. When we are not. Yes, there are problems. But a world without problems never existed.
This, by the way, is also the reason everyone knows Farage, few people know @catherinemep and @Jude_KD . The former squeezes the world into a simplified ideology and doesn’t do real-life work. The latter do real-life work, trying to solve complex problems
