At a Loss for Words

In an age of soundbites and selfies, humanity is still guided by great stories – something the centre-right needs to re-learn.

In mid-2025, a little while after what was for the Coalition a pretty disastrous election outcome, I was talking to a senior Liberal who remarked that a difficulty for the centre-right in Australia and across the West was the lack of ‘pattern recognition’ in its pitch to voters.

Though familiar with the term in a very general way I was stumped for a moment; unclear what he was getting at. ‘Pattern recognition’ in the field of computing is defined as ‘the task of assigning a class to an observation based on patterns extracted from data’, and it took a bit of clarification to determine what he meant. Or should I say, to translate his words into the problem definition that had been on my mind: the inability of the Coalition parties to develop and project a compelling and appealing narrative. The more I looked into it, the greater my concern that the Liberal and National parties, whether together as the LNP in Queensland or separately via State divisions, were no longer even familiar with the nature of narrative, its importance, and the various forms it takes.

As humans we live by stories, we live by narratives.

I care because I believe in the power of ideas. I believe there are certain fundamental principles grounded in a conception of human dignity and freedom that properly applied produce unprecedented levels of human flourishing. I believe—like Churchill—that democracy is the best possible system after you’ve eliminated all the other systems that have been tried from time to time, but I also believe that democracy functions best when it enables a contest of ideas propagated by parties capable of both projecting those ideas and developing a program.

Therefore the lack of capacity in the Coalition regarding narratives imperils the entire freedom project, and is leading to a degeneration in the health of our democracy.

In developing this train of thought I had been assisted by reading The crisis of narration, by the German-Korean philosopher, Byung-Chul Han. It is very much in the tradition of the European philosophers I once studied in Social Theory classes as an undergraduate—sceptical of capitalism and modernity, prone to alluding to rather than making a point, and occasionally impenetrable. But there is something in the main line of argument that bears on the current problem.

The starting point is hard to contest: as humans we live by stories, we live by narratives. They help us make sense of the world, and of ourselves. Every great religion has at its foundation a series of stories. Jesus did not seek to persuade by exercises in formal logic, but by parables. Even his disciples struggled with them from time to time, but he knew what he was doing. They are still being examined and guiding the faithful 2,000 years later. Thus Han quotes Walter Benjamin: a (good) story …

Does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its energy and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.

The genius of Tolkien in creating The Lord of the Rings was to first of all create the pre-history of Middle Earth. The trilogy’s narrative is shadowed by all that has gone before, sometimes explicitly in the words, but always in the author’s mind, and oft times in the reader’s.

George Lucas, in creating Star Wars (1977), famously drew on The Hero’s Journey, one of the elemental and timeless archetypal stories summarised by Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1949).

Anthropologists help us see that our need for and use of narratives is integral to being human. Aboriginal Australians provided tremendous insights into what this looks like, stripped of the more recent superstructure of abstract reason. The legendary Australian anthropologist, W. E. Stanner (1905-1981), observed:

The Dreaming is many things in one. Among them, a kind of narrative to things that once happened; a kind of charter of things that still happen, and a kind of logos or principle of order transcending everything significant for Aboriginal man …custom is the reality, beliefs but the shadow which custom makes on the wall.

We talk of making sense of the world, but Han points out that even the word ‘sense’ is derived from a German/old English word that indicates direction. According to etymonline, it ‘probably is a figurative use of a literal meaning “find one’s way”’. That is, narratives when they help us make sense of what we perceive, necessarily imply a certain direction to take. The limitation of pure reason and logic is that they leave one stranded, able to analyse choices, but unable to make one.

A loss of direction is therefore an inevitable result of a digital age in which information has replaced stories. This has only been exacerbated by the age of screens. Even selfies are just moments in time, fragments which do not convey narratives. And videos of the TikTok form are even worse, supposedly conveying ‘stories’, but in reality just conveying information in a materialistic frame and devoid of a connection to any overarching narrative.

Beyond mere facts and stories, narratives have historically provided a sense of belonging, purpose, and direction. Han wonders whether, in our digital age, the collapse of sustained attention and extended narrative contributes to a fragmented sense of self. Individuals are lacking the coherent stories that once anchored identity, leading, in turn, to rising anxiety and widespread social dysfunction. And we see that post-modernism, particularly in its activist form, has explicitly aimed to deconstruct the historical narratives of religion and Western Civilisation.

Meanwhile, social media rots the brain and cycles between contexts so quickly users lose the ability to maintain their own sense of self. It is tempting to believe that the absence of a sustained narrative on the centre-right is simply one of the consequences of this degradation, as it no longer has the personnel who could rise above it.

Han’s concerns overlap somewhat with those of Jonathan Haidt, who since he co-wrote The Coddling of the American Mind (2018) has only become more concerned with the effects of screen culture on cognition, learning, and mental health. Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism—reviewed by Chris Berg in the IPA Review of August 2019—was critical of the tech platforms for deliberatively disrupting narratives in order to provide the sugar hit of emotion-laden hooks and associated likes.

That said, the digital arena has also enabled new entrants which in many ways revives the art of narrative: extended Podcasts, YouTube presentations, and more recently Substack as a vehicle for long form essays. The concerns of Han, Zuboff and Haidt are not enough to justify state censorship of social media nor the social ban for under 16s which has bipartisan support in Australia.

Don’t get me wrong, I am concerned at the effect it has on children. In the context of the problem I am currently examining, I am concerned that the people running Liberal Party campaigns are themselves children of the screen age, and actually lack the cognitive apparatus associated with narratives. They don’t produce them because they don’t even know what they are.

As I wrote before and after the election, this also bears on the more traditional ‘think-tank’ concern with policy development. It has been well documented that the Liberals had some kind of breakdown in their policy development process—policies were either not developed or, when developed, the campaign machine and leader could not or would not use them as the basis for persuading voters (see also the IPA’s Essays For Australia Vol 1 (2025)). Again, an emerging concern is there is a generation of Coalition staffers and campaign managers who when they speak of ‘policies’, have in mind what used to be called ‘announceables’: one line soundbites that provide instant gratification; that are designed as consumables to last no more than the 24 hours of a day in the life of a campaign, if that.

The ALP has had far less difficulty in maintaining narrative coherence.

This is inextricably linked to the crisis of narration. Without principles to guide thinking, themselves embedded in narratives, it is impossible to know in which direction to shape policies. What is the problem we are trying to solve? What is the good to which we seek to strive? An announceable—often just “$xxx taxpayer dollars to be splashed around the target audience”—is like a TikTok video of a cute puppy, which within minutes is forgotten. In this way are failures of narrative construction connected to failures of policy development.

In recent years the most notable attempt to (re-)construct a narrative for the centre-right has emerged from the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. Its slogan is literally ‘A Better Story’. This is a worthy endeavour, but the actual narrative it has developed is a heavily faith-based story, thus limiting its reach (as I discussed in the IPA Review of Autumn 2024).

The other great narrative building exercise of recent times is that of Donald J. Trump, who single-handedly created Make America Great Again as a narrative on which he could and did build a movement. Others fleshed out the detail and contributed sub-stories to the overarching narrative, but Trump did something singular.

The problem for Australian politicians is that MAGA by necessity does not map directly across to Australia. Even if you totally believe in it as the correct set of measures for the USA, those measures would not work here. The USA has the most power of all time, the greatest productive engine, and the world’s reserve currency. President Trump can, for instance, weave a credible narrative around using tariffs to fight trade wars, but it would be ludicrous for Australia to believe that access to its comparatively tiny domestic market would be leverage enough to wield against any conceivable adversary.

This reflects the wider truth: national conservative movements do not necessarily enable ‘pattern recognition’ across international borders, in the way traditional political ideologies do. National conservative leaders are weaving very particular narratives out of very particular cultural taproots and historical contingencies. Whatever the successes of Fidesz in Hungary or the Law and Justice Party in Poland, their models are difficult to replicate. They do not cross religious or cultural divides.

At worst conservativism is reduced to what the American liberal critic Lionel Trilling once called ‘a set of irritable mental gestures’. His backhander was accurate until the unsuccessful interruption of Barry Goldwater (1964), and ultimately the triumph of the Reagan era (1981-1989). Reagan had two things on his side. Firstly, he was drawing from the inexhaustible well of the literature and philosophy of freedom. “Neoliberalism”, as its detractors eventually dubbed it, put the individual to the fore both in an analytic and an ethical sense. It rejected collectivism, asserted the superiority of market mechanisms, and featured free speech as essential to democracy, the operation of markets, and indeed the dignity of the aforementioned individual.

Meanwhile the ALP has had far less difficulty in maintaining narrative coherence, although at times the Australian public hears a little too much of the interior monologues and rejects the project outright (think 2019). The ALP’s historic platform and the irrepressible array of interest groups that make up its current configuration means it is rarely short of preferred measures. And in the modern era objectives like ‘Net Zero by 2050’ sit comfortably with its historical preference for planning over markets, and government involvement in every facet of life. It makes heroes of speechwriters like Graham Freudenberg and Don Watson precisely because they overlay narrative form on otherwise prosaic pursuits (Freudenberg always thought Gough Whitlam spent way too much time talking about the need to sewer the outer suburbs).

Not surprisingly Byung-Chul Han in his slim volume is primarily concerned with the effects of ‘digital late modernity’ on the psyche of modern man, rather than the struggles of Peter Dutton in the Australian federal election. Following the existentialists, he believes man must ‘live or tell’; and it is only by telling that meaning is derived. His exemplar is Marcel Proust, who in Remembrance of Things Past wrote a million words on the memories recalled by dipping his small cake into a spoonful of tea, thus understanding his own life only through the telling. Sadly, says Han, screen culture is of the constant present, with time fragmented, and the mantra is ‘live or post’.

The centre-right parties of Australia will need to find leaders adept at narratives.

To balance Han with something even more obscure, I once came across the Russian version of the literary school of Formalism, the central tenet of which was defamiliarization. We need stories and narratives, and they follow certain immutable structures, but we can’t keep hearing them over and over in the same form without them losing their meaning. There has to be a creative process involved in telling old stories in new ways. Sort of the opposite of what Disney did when it took over Star Wars, and managed in Episodes 7-9 to strip out all the narrative structures and associated meaning that George Lucas had so painstakingly inserted.

The Renaissance in fifteenth century Italy was in many ways the rediscovery and retelling of the aesthetic and philosophical insights of the Ancient Greeks and the Romans. And look at the effect that had.

And so we must envisage the path forward for the centre-right in Australia. Cultural symbols of our nation—the flag, Australia Day, secure borders, literature, character, and music—are all elements of the narrative there to be built. IPA research and the success of Tony Abbott’s history of Australia just reinforce their appeal to Australians. Meanwhile, better education including a focus on character development rather than social media bans could rebuild shattered psyches, as could a move towards faith, enabling an alternative and historically proven path to meaning and direction.

As for the rest, it is hard to see how ‘pattern recognition’ can be achieved without some kind of reboot of ideas of freedom. That the left has successfully demonised these for 25 years is truly remarkable, given how successfully they created the greatest multi-decade surge in prosperity and national pride Australia had seen since the nineteenth century, perhaps ever. The virulence with which the left attacks neoliberalism is perhaps a sign of how fearful it is that it may yet have a renaissance.

It certainly would help if there was an international resurgence such as we saw in the age that ultimately produced Thatcher and Reagan, but it would be idle and destructive to simply wait for something to turn up. Javier Milei in Argentina has shown that even a country mired in collectivist ideology can pull itself up by its own bootstraps.

To develop such a program the centre-right parties of Australia will need to find leaders adept at narratives, whether they are those of cultural conservatives or neoliberalism. Ideally, they would be grounded in a least one of those strands. And they should only employ in their core teams those who are similarly qualified, and perhaps even more so, just as John Howard for speechwriting drew upon the unique constellation of thought and style embodied in Christopher Pearson; when campaigns were run by people like Federal Director Brian Loughnane, who understood both tactics and ideas. Then perhaps voters will at last achieve some ‘pattern recognition’, and the battle of ideas will once again be joined.

This article from the Summer 2025 edition of the IPA Review is written by IPA Executive Director, Scott Hargreaves.