Lost Narratives

Day 3,135, 18:50 Published in USA USA by Israel Stevens


Losing Control of the Narrative

This is not meant as a criticism of anyone specific, and as a President, it is certainly something that I have fell into before. But I’ve had a few beers, and this article has been brewing in my head for a bit. So time to put fingers to keyboard and bring it home.

One of the many problems that we as a country have, is that our leadership frequently loses control of the narrative of not just the country, but of their own agenda.

We have a group of roughly 25-35 people that are involved in the highest levels of government at any time. Most of them are part of the President’s Cabinet, plus a few other high ranking Congresspeople that get to know stuff. Add in the people that always know what’s going on, and you get to that 25-35 number.

The problem is, that the highest levels of government become highly insulated to whatever is happening on the outside. The plans that they are making, and the agenda that they are pushing make sense, and (in my opinion) are usually the right one. But they do such a terrible job of conveying their plans and ideas to the masses, that their idea ends up being some bastardization of what they originally wanted.

They don’t spend enough time getting the message out so that they could receive the broad support of the public that they get from their cabinet. There is too much time spent bantering with their fellow cabinet members, and assuming that a three sentence blurb in the WHPR will be enough.

It’s not.




Even worse, is when their adversary, whether foreign, domestic or political is able to hijack the narrative for their own. We see this frequently in insurgent parties and groups. Whether it’s SFP or the former AFA, or iNCi or any number of other groups that have held varying levels of power in our history.

We have often seen the establishment government get beaten to the punch when it comes time to release details to the public. When this happens, they lose control of the narrative, and they are forced to play catch up. Whatever they publish or post looks like it is in response, and that they’re scrambling to recover.

What should have been an easy sell to the public, turns into a bumbling affair, and occasionally a full blown eRep Scandal (those are my favorite, btw).

There is no need for it, truthfully. And if our leaders were doing their jobs, this would be a rare occurrence. But it’s not, and we see it every few months where a good idea goes astray because it gets pushed out too quickly by the wrong people. Or, is simply used to further the opposite political goal.




Some of this can be attributed to laziness, and some to RL problems.

But in my opinion, most of this falls at the feet of those aforementioned 25-35 people that are so wrapped up in running the country, that they forget that there is an actual country beyond the walls of their high castle. They forget that there are people playing the game that aren’t in Congress or the Executive. That there are actually people out there that don’t understand the finer points of a DoD reorganization or our foreign policy towards Moldova.

It’s arrogance on their part, that the country will fall in line with whatever they want, simply because they are in charge.




So what can be done?

The answer is simply more articles from our direct leaders.

I’m not calling for less secrecy, or even more transparency. Simply more communication from those that we elect to lead us. Whether it is the President directly, or their Vice President, or even a Secretary sharing their personal thoughts in a newspaper. Shorts bursts of information in the WHPR is not enough. We need to be hearing from our leaders directly.

A push for more articles, and holding our leaders accountable to those articles would help to solve this problem. And it would have the added benefit of making the agenda that our leaders want to push that much easier to get accomplished.