One of the reasons Top Gear (www.topgear.com) is much, much more than a show about cars is its insistence on storytelling.  It’s not enough to coolly review a motor home (“caravan” to the Brits) or drily sum up the plusses and minuses of motor home vacations; Clarkson, Hammond and May have to go caravanning themselves, their disdain turning to hatred and strained friendships as they veer from inconvenience to boredom to disaster (Clarkson winds up torching the RV while cooking).  And why simply rate off-road vehicles when you can make one the prey in a fox chase, evading the hounds and their masters through muck, stream and bramble?  Reviews become adventures:  a race across Japan between the bullet train and a Nissan GTR; a pilgrimage from San Francisco to the salt flats of Bonneville in a Cadillac, a Dodge Challenger, and a Corvette.  

 

I could go on for quite a while but the point is that Top Gear doesn’t treat cars as mere pieces of engineering.  They’re catalysts for adventure and friendship.  And that makes them meaningful.

 

Stories grip the imagination, letting people see how things that might otherwise be written off as arcane can affect their own lives, for good and bad.  Nobody uses stories to illustrate otherwise-daunting issues of economics and science better than Robert Krulwich, who plies his trade for NPR and for ABC News.  And last year, Krulwich gave a remarkable graduation speech at the California Institute of Technology (http://blogs.wnyc.org/radiolab/2008/07/29/tell-me-a-story/) in which he implored graduates not just to show some respect for the non-quantified, non-objective, non-scientific art of storytelling, but to embrace it.

 

The reason, Krulwich argued, was that outside the labs and outside the academy, a war was (and is) raging between proponents of science and its enemies.  Proponents believe in progress through rigorous analysis, objective understanding, and constant challenges to conventional wisdom.  Opponents, he suggested, don’t.  But the opponents do believe in the power of stories, and they are using stories to win their fight in the hearts and minds of those still making up their minds all across the world.  It’s not enough to retreat behind condescension and smugness, he told the graduates.  To defend science, you have to assert the values of science, and that means telling stories — using the power of narrative to make the case instead of charts and graphs.

 

I bring this up because the same urgent need for storytelling goes for good old free market economics.  Free markets, open trade, respect for private property and a fundamental belief in the power of imagination and initiative to make a better world have, in fact, worked since the Reagan Revolution unleashed them in the 1980s.  Things that were once luxuries are now common, diseases that once ravaged entire populations are either curable or manageable, and life is on the whole richer and more promising than anyone could have imagined a mere generation ago.  We are freer to realize our individual hopes, talents, and aspirations than ever before, prosperity is making more progress around the world than ever before, and the scourges of disease, starvation, and military armagedon are less threatening (North Korea and terrorism not withstanding) than ever before.  Those are facts.  Have there been excesses?  Absolutely, and they’ve been appalling.  In the U.S., not enough has been done to expand opportunity for all, and from time to time government has confused helping capitalism with helping capitalists.  But overall, it’s been a remarkable ride.

 

Yet free market economics is on the defensive, particularly in its two home countries.  In the UK, Conservatives are almost apologizing for Margaret Thatcher, and David Cameron seems, if anything, to be more skeptical of free markets than Gordon Brown.  In the U.S., government is actually taking over the auto industry, and might wind up doing much the same to the health and financial services sector.  The harm that free markets do to individual constituencies is trumping the tremendous good done for the whole.  It’s a shame, and if it continues it won’t end well.

 

Which means that those who believe in free markets — which means most Republicans — need to start embracing the glorious art of narrative.  They haven’t so far.  Instead, they’ve been branding Democrats as Socialists, retreating into insular groups and vying against each other in contests of ideological purity.  We’ve seen talking points warning of catastrophe should the Democrats get their way, charts and graphs outlining the increased burdens  individual groups will bear under the Democrats’ proposals, and the occasional burst of outrage.  But we haven’t heard the kind of stories that are real, true to experience, and powerful enough to change peoples’ minds.

 

And they’re everywhere.  Judge Sonia Sotomayor rose from the streets of the Bronx through Princeton, Yale Law School, and then private legal practice in Manhattan to most likely the most revered institution in the land because in a free market society, talent and initiative can defy origins.  Children are alive today because of medical innovations which can only happen where the incentives and protections of a free market system have taken hold.  And when the economy recovers, the new jobs that it will generate will be more meaningful, challenging, and rewarding — though certainly more stressful and possibly more disorienting, like all change — than those that were lost, because that’s what a free market system dictates.

 

And they can reach into the future as well.  If we’re to improve the environment, make lives longer and happier, bring greater stability and freedom into the world, it will have to happen through free markets, because no other way has ever worked.  Progress is being made on all these fronts, but few know because their stories aren’t being told by those who have the platforms to do it.  It’s easier to fan fear than to inspire promise.

 

So — as Krulwich exorted Cal Tech’s class of 2008 — it’s time for conservatives who currently feel under fire and underappreciated to put down the talking points, the poll-tested messages, the policy alternatives.  In a tit-for-tat debate, they’re losing.  What they can do is learn from Top Gear, from Krulwich, from Churchill, from Reagan, from everybody who has ever led meaningful change.  Start telling stories — about how the bright, shiny and promising world we live in has come about, and how we can make it better tomorrow.