David Ricci’s Politics without Stories: The Liberal Predicament claims that, in the United States, liberals campaign at a chronic philosophical disadvantage. By Ricci’s account, liberals campaign by “string[ing] together one policy proposal after another” (p. 40) without recourse to an underlying philosophical perspective. Their philosophical scarcity is made particularly apparent by conservatives’ practice of campaigning with “stories,” specifically, alpha stories: those sweeping political claims that serve to organize conservative politics and policy. Ricci sets out first to explain this difference, describe its likely electoral consequences, and finally propose how liberals might address this disadvantage. He concludes that this imbalance has left liberals strategically impaired: voters can readily recount conservatives’ programs, whereas liberal candidates are perceived as adopting ad hoc proposals in response to events.
Ricci’s lively and meticulous monograph accounts for these ideological differences by describing different intellectual styles among those who produce liberal and conservative philosophies. He adopts an openly polemical approach, claiming the left’s electoral success as a key ambition. Although his analysis is compelling, he forgoes potentially fruitful opportunities to engage in the empirical literature in US politics. This literature might propose that Ricci’s philosophical differences are caused by compositional differences in the major political parties, or psychological differences in American partisans, or even the intrinsic political appeal of each party’s policy agenda.
Ricci’s argument turns on a tripartite categorization of political stories. At the highest level are “Uber Stories,” which are so fundamental as to define the very nature of political membership. Because these stories are fundamental and have such consensus support, they play no part in political competition. At the next level, “Alpha Stories,” is where Ricci finds ideological differences. Finally, there is a more ephemeral class of stories, typically referred to as “news,” which comprise the press’s attempts to sate the public’s appetite for novelty: sporting events, natural disasters, wars abroad, and the like. These stories are replaced by one another as quickly as they are introduced. Accordingly, they cannot convey political meaning and identity and are therefore not useful in political competition.
Among conservatives, Ricci notes three alpha stories: the Judeo-Christian tradition as a source of political values, the notion of free markets as natural and just, and the reign of tradition. He argues that these stories provide conservatives a durable set of policy recommendations. No comparably unifying vision can be found among liberals, Ricci claims, because liberal philosophers neglect to consider underlying philosophical rules. Instead, liberals are said to “typically and continually complain about an endless variety of difficulties and dangers in modern life” (p. 39). Put another way, conservative laments about modern life can all be traced to a single set of problems—an insufficient adherence to conservative principles. Liberals, conversely, find unrelated causes underpinning each social problem. Ricci recounts recent books by liberal philosophers, publicists, and office seekers to show that they describe an ever-changing collection of exigent problems, a situation he describes as a “list syndrome.” This results in liberal office seekers communicating novel solutions to unwanted pregnancies, racial inequality, pollution, and childhood obesity and so on, while conservatives provide succinct axioms, recurring across decades, which are internally consistent.
Ricci provides a number of reasons why liberals have been left philosophically disarmed. Liberalism is needlessly mired in jargon, as academic philosophers write for shrinking, technical audiences. Academic incentives require liberal philosophers to build a separate intellectual niche and then defend their turf from others. They are therefore more motivated by attempts to distinguish their contributions and to emphasize intellectual difference, rather than contributing to a common intellectual position. Liberals also venerate empirical induction, faithfully following arguments and evidence wherever they lead, whereas conservative philosophers are inclined to deduce new justifications for their existing preferences. Finally, liberal philosophers are disinclined to concede the necessity of political compromise.
Ricci highlights liberals’ predicament by ascribing to it great electoral consequence. An obvious test of this proposition would be to measure the ideological consensus on symbolic questions, thereby determining whether conservative survey respondents have achieved greater consensus in response to the philosophical imbalance. Symbolic attitudes were in fact measured on the 1996 and 2014 General Social Survey, as was the standard deviation of agreement within each ideological cohort (see Tom W. Smith, Michael Davern, Jeremy Freese, and Stephen Morgan, General Social Surveys, 1972–2018). On 80% of the issues, liberals have higher standard deviations on symbolic questions than do conservatives, vindicating Ricci. However, a more complicated picture emerges when inspecting the pattern on individual items. For instance, among these items, a very narrow range of symbols enjoy differing ideological consensus: specifically, general impressions of American superiority, values of US citizenship, and veneration for the English language. More specific items measuring national pride—the United States’ history of equitable treatment, its economic achievements, its scientific leadership, and its global political influence—see no ideological difference. Finally, the temporal instability in the estimates of ideological consensus challenges Ricci’s story. The putative strength of conservatives’ philosophical consistency is in its rhetorical stability: while liberals campaign on a fluctuating list of proposals, conservatives consistently advocate for the same ideas, imparting a widespread understanding of which conservative ideas go with which. However, some symbols subject to overwhelming conservative consensus in 2014 (the importance of speaking English, the value of US citizenship, having lived in the United States for life) saw no ideological differences in 1996. This pattern is consistent with the notion that, for the American public, the symbolic resonance of specific stories is a reflection of the most recent election, not the long-term accumulation of philosophical messaging.
Theories of the American party system also provide competing explanations for Ricci’s pattern of messaging. Matt Grossman and David A. Hopkins (“Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats,” Perspectives on Politics, 13 (1), 2015) argue that it is a mistake to regard the two major political parties as organizational mirror images or, most commonly, as two coalitions of politically motivated elites. Instead, they argue that the Republican Party is (for largely sociological and demographic reasons) motivated by advancing ideological purity, disciplined by purists in think tanks and conservative media. The Democratic Party, in contrast, comprises an ad hoc alliance between distinct social groups—racial minorities, labor unions, climate change activists, and so on. According to this account, Democratic elites might be incapable of adopting Ricci’s prescription, because they lack the institutional resources to achieve ideological discipline.
Theories of public opinion also complicate the Ricci account. Christopher Ellis and James A. Stimson (Ideology in America, 2012) find a fundamental ideological asymmetry among the US public. When Americans are asked to appraise a specific policy proposal, there is a persistent appetite for expanded government intervention and liberal policy answers. When asked an abstract question about the proper scope of government, without recourse to a specific policy, conservative symbols are favored. This aggregate paradox—that the US public prefers specific liberal policies and general conservative principles—is also apparent on an individual level (almost one-third of the US public has this bundle of preferences). This finding might reframe Ricci’s paradox as a rational response by elites to the strategic contours of US politics: liberals emphasize specific policies, and conservatives abstract symbols, because those are the strongest cards they have. Similarly, others find psychological differences along the ideological spectrum: conservatives are more inclined to symbolic enchantment, whereas liberals are more equipped for rationalism (J. Eric Oliver and Thomas Julian Wood, Enchanted America: How Intuition and Reason Divide Our Politics, 2018), or that incompatible values among liberals and conservatives preclude interchangeable political appeals (Mark Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler, Prius or Pickup? How the Answers to Four Simple Questions Explain America’s Great Divide, 2018).
Finally, a voluminous literature has abstracted away the details of specific political campaigns and instead posited that US presidential elections respond powerfully to prevailing economic circumstance. To the extent that Ricci intends to resolve the liberal predicament to improve their political prospects, this literature would suggest that styles of ideological appeal operate on the electoral margins, yielding only a modest difference on voters after the powerful effect of economics has been felt.
Ricci’s carefully researched and elegantly argued book provides a valuable contribution to students of US politics and to those interested in the electoral implications of philosophical debates. In an area dominated by those who use quantitative methods on survey data, Ricci’s focus on the intellectual style of competing philosophical schools is a vital and distinct contribution. It will surely prove an influential claim among those seeking to understand the sources of ideological differences in the US public.
