Have We Witnessed the President's "Negation of the Negation"?
Biden's debate debacle in story terms
Hi Everyone,
If you’re like me, Biden’s disastrous performance in the debate this week is making it almost impossible to focus on anything else. I’m struggling with panic and despair, pity and rage, and far too much fury aimed in too many different directions. Above all else, I’m trying to figure out whether we’ve hit bottom or just another turning point in the seemingly never-ending story of Joe Biden’s fight for the heart and soul of America.
Today on MSNBC my old friend and Biden biographer Chris Whipple advised against fantasizing about white knights and cavalries coming to the aid of the Democratic Party. Chris said, in effect, Biden’s been down before, and he always gets up again, as Ronald Reagan did after his disastrously geriatric first debate against Walter Mondale in 1984. Well, I can’t find much hope or comfort in this.
But I do think it’s instructive to look at this mess from a heroic angle. Just as the MAGAT has exploited his reality-TV celebrity to con 40% of Americans into believing he’s their Dear Leader, Joe Biden and the entire Democratic Party would benefit from a more strategic approach to storytelling.
This is not the first time I’ve come to this conclusion. I started looking at the Biden-Trump contest through a storyteller’s lens in 2020, in a post that I re-published here last year:
If this story delivers according to the laws of literary narrative, we will be rewarded with a surprising yet inevitable conclusion. Just, please, no deus ex machina. The acts of God that could derail this election and our nation are simply too terrifying to contemplate. They belong to a different genre entirely…
But as I watched the debate the other night, a particular phrase kept zinging through my mind. Could it be that we were witnessing Biden’s Negation of the Negation? And if so, did that mean we were doomed to a real-life tragedy?
To be clear, I’m writing this post primarily for the benefit of storytellers. But if any Biden advisors happen to be reading, I hope they will recognize that these same narrative lessons could play an essential role in the final phase of the 2024 campaign.
The Negation of the Negation?
It’s a term used by Hegel and Marx and mathematicians, but the Negation of the Negation that should interest writers is the narrative concept proposed by storytelling guru Robert McKee. Yes, McKee was deliciously lampooned in the film Adaptation, but his actual seminar taught me what I needed to save my first novel, Face, from the scrap heap when I was just learning to write fiction. (Face became a B&N Discover Great New Writers pick, btw.) Even though most of his narrative insight is drawn directly from Aristotle’s Poetics, McKee is easier to understand than Aristotle and uses far more familiar texts to illustrate his core principles. I’ve relied on these principles as a novelist and as a creative writing teacher. And as they swirled through my mind the other night during President Biden’s debate debacle, I wondered if the pain I was experiencing was the same anguish that literary novelists attempt to generate in the climax of dramatic stories.
That anguish is the direct result of the Negation of the Negation.
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