To stop losing the story to authoritarians, the Left must stop treating comms as an afterthought and start building a shared narrative infrastructure—here’s the radical strategy to do it.
Right now, we have an opportunity to define a compelling story that moves beyond resistance, sets the terms for what comes next, and distinguishes us from the Democratic Party and the broader political establishment. We have an opportunity to invoke a future that is irresistible.
This means, radical communicators must be today’s strategists—bricklayers, orators, griots, and futurists—because narrative isn’t just how people interpret events, it’s how they interpret themselves.
Narrative workers are uniquely positioned to help weave stories together and to reorient the whole conversation about what freedom means. But effective resistance takes more than aligning hashtags. The internet made it easier for us to publish, but it has also facilitated the spread of disinformation, the flourishing of propaganda, and the fragmentation of realities. And while our opponents are building disinfo ecosystems, too often our movements are still treating comms like an afterthought. We need a shared narrative infrastructure so our stories reinforce each other’s, rather than compete for airtime.
First, we must confront a sobering reality: the Left has been outmaneuvered, out-resourced, and forced into a defensive posture as oppositional forces rapidly, and often unconstitutionally, advance a fascist agenda. The consequence is political loss and material harm to millions of people. Our people.
Authoritarians offer a clear, emotionally compelling narrative: a return to “law and order,” a scapegoat for every crisis, a vision of power and domination.
In contrast, The Left often struggles to articulate a bold, unified alternative, falling into reactive, defensive, or utopian messaging that fails to connect with the daily struggles of working-class people—even when we are those working people.
We cannot afford to remain on the defensive. Seventy percent of the globe is living under some sort of authoritarianism. Our task is to ground ourselves, to link arms, and to answer the call. We must do everything we can to stop the intimidation, violence, and harm; to disrupt their aim to annihilate immigrants, Black people, people with disabilities, queer people, and trans folks.
Too often, we face a false choice between pragmatism and radicalism, between incremental wins and transformative demands. We reject this binary. Our task is not to water down our vision but to make it irresistible.
The question is how?
Since the 2024 elections, the Left has been under a microscope. Some say we’re siloed, elitist, and navel-gazing. Others argue we should mirror the Right—vertically integrated, ideologically aligned. Even more critique our reach, our digital presence, or our lack of ground game.
These critiques aren’t without merit, and honest self-assessment is vital. But critique must live alongside strategy.
Because the truth is: we have receipts.
For decades, we haven’t just resisted—we’ve reauthored reality.
- We’ve exposed the war on terror as a racist machine of surveillance and control, and we’ve linked it to the occupation of Palestine, building solidarity from Gaza to Guantánamo.
- We’ve insisted the violence isn’t coming from our communities; it’s coming from the state.
- We’ve made the case that environmental justice is racial justice, reparations are not charity, and Indigenous sovereignty is law.
- We’ve reimagined survivor justice beyond carceral logic. We’ve fought anti-trans legislation with unapologetic truth-telling.
- We’ve said that relief must include all or none of us.
- We’ve moved the healthcare debate from “who deserves care” to “care is a right.”
- We’ve made fat liberation, long-COVID, and HIV visibility not just health issues, but narrative terrain.
- We’ve shifted abortion from shame to power, from legality to love.
- We’ve brought Wall Street to its knees and made the Fight for $15 a household phrase.
- We’ve redefined what democracy could look like and then pushed policy, data, and organizing to make it real.
- We’ve turned visuals into weapons and made culture irresistible. Turned influencers into organizers, and vice versa.
- We’ve occupied streets from Lagos to Liverpool to São Paulo, knowing that fascism is global—and so is our fight.
This is not the story of failure. It’s the story of strategic, intentional disruption. And it’s still unfolding. But the terrain is shifting. Fast.
We are living through the end of U.S. unipolar dominance. A multipolar world is emerging, one in which China and other BRICS nations are challenging U.S. supremacy. Neoliberalism’s promises no longer fool younger generations. We are in a moment of imperial decline, but the empire doesn’t fall quietly. It lashes out through book bans, surveillance, censorship, manufactured culture wars, and open repression. This is the terrain of reactionary politics.
Reactionary politics is a political stance that seeks to return society to a previous state, often idealized or mythologized, as a way to resist or reverse progressive change. It is fundamentally backward-looking, opposing movements that expand rights, democratize power, or challenge existing hierarchies. Reactionaries often support authoritarian leadership to “restore order” and preserve traditional structures of dominance, such as white supremacy, patriarchy, or nationalism. They frequently use cultural nostalgia—like calls to “make things great again”—to justify exclusionary or oppressive policies.
From post-Civil War Jim Crow laws to today’s efforts to ban books, restrict gender-affirming care, or criminalize protest, reactionary politics relies on fear, repression, and a romanticized past to maintain power in the face of social transformation.
Because of those reactionary politics, we are living in a time of rupture. And for those of us committed to narrative power, that rupture is not unexpected—it’s what happens when old myths crack under the weight of their own lies.
Collapse doesn’t guarantee freedom, though. It only guarantees possibility. What comes next will depend on who is ready to narrate it.
We are ready.
The future will be won on the terrain of meaning, and radical communicators will be on the frontlines of that fight. As narrative workers, we harness and direct the energy of culture, organizing, policy, litigation, protest, direct action, and more. We are building new common sense in real time:
We must disrupt, delegitimize, defect, and disseminate.
- Disrupt dominant narratives of fear, scarcity, division;
- Delegitimize authoritarian actors, billionaire technocrats, and corporate control;
- Defect and compel moderate and skeptical audiences away from reactionary alignment; and
- Disseminate content that is bold, joyful, and unapologetically rooted in radical, progressive, liberatory values and visions.
We must do this with every sector of society, from teachers and nurses to postal workers and grocery clerks, scriptwriters and musicians, journalists and academics, and the millions of workers who make this country run.
Our movements aren’t just resisting systems—we are rehearsing new worlds. We are a decentralized yet deeply aligned, youth-led, elder-guided, and ancestor-backed organization.
From the maroon communities that defied empire to the ACT UP activists who reframed public health to the Movement for Black Lives redefining Black power and life, movements have taught us that the future belongs to those who narrate it.
In the 1950s, during the Montgomery Bus Boycotts, leaders like MLK went into hiding after white supremacist and police threats—until Bayard Rustin organized them to channel their fear. They emerged from hiding, marched down to the police station, and demanded to be arrested. They made a spectacle of repression and violence to reclaim their power and the narrative.
If we don’t provide a story that makes sense of this collapse, someone else will, someone who will sell fear instead of freedom. We know that political education that roots our people in power analysis, not just outrage, sustains us. Narrative discipline that clarifies, not flattens, our differences and cultural strategy that moves emotions faster than policy memos ever could, also sustains us. So do story arcs that reach beyond the urgency of the now and offer glimpses of a more radical, livable tomorrow.
Building a radical tomorrow means investing in narrative power today. That means training radical communicators like we train organizers, building independent media and cultural ecosystems, and treating narrative work not as “messaging,” but as a movement strategy.
That’s why we’re not just here to win the next news cycle but to shape the next century.
As our brilliant comrades, Jen Soriano and Malkia Devich Cyril, wrote in the foreword for Liberation Stories and remind us again in this special issue of The Forge:
Radical Communicators are “orators, griots, and futurists.” We are the narrators of this era. We are the architects of new mythologies. We are the stewards of political memory and collective imagination.
The stories we tell today determine what’s imaginable tomorrow. The empire will try to write the ending.
We will make sure they don’t get the last word.
Our future is rising.
