Image credit: Maura Losch & Axios
May 2026
I was recently asked to describe the U.S. Right’s general narrative and explain why it has been effective. Here’s an excerpt from what I said:
At the heart of it, the Right’s narrative is mobilizing fear and resentment. Many of us are understandably preoccupied with the fact that their story is generally factually untrue. But the often overlooked part is actually the mobilizing part. They are telling a story with both urgency and agency.
Two big reasons that I think their whole approach is effective. First, The Right understands and prioritizes narrative power. If narrative power is a new or murky concept, you can check out some of my other short pieces on the topic here or here. The Right pushes a narrative-first strategy, meaning that they invest in popularizing big narratives that propagate a specific worldview and then they situate their priority issues within those narratives. Their audience doesn’t need to understand the nuance of policy or the complexity of governing, just that the fight is at hand.
Their strategy is doing exactly what anyone who wants to align and mobilize large political blocs needs to do, which is to “narrate change” by providing shared frames that help people interpret the bigger trends they are already seeing around them. The Right is amplifying and repeating again and again a few big interconnected narratives that offer explanatory models for what people are experiencing in real life.
Like the so-called “Great Replacement Theory” which they have elevated from fringe racist conspiracy theory to a go-to excuse for every failing of our current system. The idea of a coordinated strategy to replace the white population offers a “permission structure” – an emotional and psychological justification that supports behavior change– for both scapegoating immigrants for any and all problems and for seeing Democrats not just as political opponents but as actual traitors with a secret agenda to destroy America. They do the same thing with the “woke-mind virus,” climate denial, or what they like to call “energy dominance” and even their central, and incredibly vague idea of “Making America Great Again.”
Weaponizing Transgression
The Right is constantly in attack mode and even pre-empting their critics by “projecting” their motives and techniques onto their opponents. As the saying goes: “every accusation is a confession.” Like how the Right has long used the spectre of “voter fraud” as an excuse to try and steal elections themselves even to the point that their more ambitious recent efforts to subvert electoral democracy, the SAVE Act is framed around safeguarding elections. Spectacle trumps (pun intended) substance as a way to monopolize attention and make it appear that their ideas have far more popular support than they actually do.
Trump himself, if not the architect of this style of politics is clearly its embodiment. He never concedes anything to his critics, not even the most objectively factual criticisms. Instead he just fills the air waves with counter-accusations and tries to monopolize all the attention. He is often not trying to persuade, rather just trying to overpower.
Another horrifying but fascinating phenomenon at the center of the Trump appeal is his ability to mobilize his base by transgressing social and political norms. Transgression, first harnessed by the so-called alt-right of the twenty teens [check out Angela Nagle’s account of this phenomenon in her 2017 book Kill All Normies], has become one of Trump’s core political approaches. Since 2015 when he descended the escalator and launched his Presidential campaign by spewing racist attacks, he has convinced his supporters that his overt bigotry should be understood as “tell-it-like-it-is” authenticity.
Trump breaks discursive norms and in so doing he signals that his followers no longer need to follow the norms. As with all his politics, Trump’s approach to race is narrative first. As many have observed, he has forsaken conservatism’s coded language about race and turned racist dog whistles into air raid sirens. This approach is at the core of Trump’s evil genius for attracting attention. It has allowed him to harness racialized grievance into an explosive political force which he has used to undermine generations of hard-won progress challenging overt bigotry and ongoing structural racism.
If You Have Lots Of Enemies You Must be a Victim, Right?
The Right is always naming enemies and they’ve got lots of them: it’s Democrats, liberals, trans people, immigrants, the woke-mind virus… and everything is a threat. For the Right the conflict is always existential: the fight for the survival of not only the nation but their supporters’ very way of life. Dems and their “Globalist” allies (note the antisemetic dog whistle) are opening the borders in order to steal elections so they can confiscate guns, ban hamburgers and brainwash children with their woke ideology. All the blatant exaggeration encourages their base to demonize and “other” anyone who disagrees with them.
The Right is constantly generating resentment and using outrage as a mobilizing tool by casting their base as the victims. They are disrespected by the elites, who it turns out are not the billionaire industrialists or Wall Street bankers who actually destroyed our economy, but rather Hollywood liberals and condescending professors. You are unemployed not because corporate America shipped their factories to foreign countries with more exploitable work forces but because of critical race theory!
Perhaps most sinister among their reality-distorting narratives is how they have so rapidly shifted the discourse on racial discrimination. Trump’s skill for packaging transgression as anti-establishment truth telling has created a permission structure for overt racism and white supremacy. The universal moral appeal of the Black Lives Matter movements has been misrepresented as anti-Americanism that is a thinly veiled effort to legalize “reverse discrimination.” In fact the real racism, we are told, is the accusations against white MAGA supporters for being racist. It’s Orwellian, and not necessarily persuasive to audiences who don’t already share Trump’s underlying assumptions but it shows the critical role of narrative strategy in legitimizing real world power grabs.
Controlling the Mode of Communication
The second reason the Right’s narrative strategy is effective might be even more important, because well-designed narrative alone doesn’t magically equate to power. The force multiplier for narrative power is the ability to communicate at scale and over the past 50 years they have built the infrastructure necessary to win this larger Battle of the Story.
The Right’s strategy of making massive investments in idea production through the funding of right wing think tanks is well known but it’s important to distinguish between idea generation and shifting the discourse to normalize those previously fringe ideas. From their original creation of direct mail in the 1970s, initial investments into AM radio in the 1980s and then cable news in the 1990s, the Right has been engaged in mass political education designed to shape worldviews and drag the Overton window to the Right. With the Democrats refusing to be an opposition party and instead embracing much of the same neoliberal, pro-empire, fossil-fueled vision of the country, the dominant discourse in the US is largely shaped by right-wing assumptions.
And of course it is that context we should all be working to change. First and foremost through our organizing but also through the narratives we base that organizing in. The Right wants to trap us in their fake version of a left-right framework where they rebrand corporate centrists like Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer as socialist agitators. But a better narrative for enabling the politics we need to overthrow an oligarchy is top versus bottom: the billionaires and their bought-and-paid for political lackeys versus the rest of us. As great resources like the Race-Class Narrative show, we can reject the elite effort to divide people and unite a multiracial majority around economic and racial justice.
Trump is Just the Symptom. We Need to Change the Rules
So if we’re looking for how we can “narrate change” towards a more just and hopeful future, helping people understand the role of wealthy elites in undercutting democracy is one important place to start. Because the truth is that Trump is just the symptom. The rules have always been rigged in favor of the wealthy in America, but it’s gotten much worse recently.
In the past few decades organized labor has been sidelined and a bipartisan “donor class” now shapes political policy for both parties. The country has passed a tipping point into elite rule. The rapidly growing billionaire class undid many of the restraints designed to prevent the rich from translating their money directly into political power. Perhaps the best known of these is the Supreme Court’s infamous 2010 Citizens United case which expanded previous (absurd) rulings casting money as a form of protected speech and opened the flood gates of electoral corruption.
This chart shows the sharp increase in spending after the 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision legalized so-called “Super PACs” that allow unlimited anonymous donations to be channelled into the political process.
Now we live inside the system that legalized political bribery has created and we can’t get out without making sweeping changes to our current 2 party, “pay-to-play” electoral system. Our job as organizers is to help more people reject the Right’s scapegoating that “punches down” at already marginalized constituencies and instead join us in “punching up” at the people and institutions really running our system.
Our movements are already building the capacity and infrastructure to mobilize millions of people newly radicalized by Trump’s authoritarianism. As these new constituencies join in the collective actions spreading across America, it is disrupting the right-wing echo chamber. We CAN redirect mass outrage towards the economic elites who are actually causing our collective pain, and we MUST. There is no other way to move down the long, bumpy road towards America becoming a functioning multiracial democracy.