If the Right has the “Great Replacement,” what’s our equivalent story to win the reality war? This article argues the Left must master the art of narrative warfare to counter MAGA’s assault on reality.
From the Overton Window to the Overton Sliding Door
If the 20th century taught the world about the dangers of fascism, the 21st century shows that those lessons can all too easily be distorted and erased. Imagine historians of the future (if there are any) reflecting on this era and how weaponized make-believe, aka blatant lies, fueled the rapid rise of U.S. authoritarianism. It might sound something like this:
21st-century American society saw the culmination of long-standing trends in inequality, ecological disruption, and increased oligarchic control. Driven by centuries of elite-mandated normalization of racial hierarchies, imperial expansion, and the intensification of psychologically manipulative advertising, public discourse crossed a tipping point. Commercialized media and communication systems became primary vehicles for ideological realignment through partisan propaganda and immersive disinformation campaigns. Like gasoline hit with a spark, the Reality Wars had begun.
It sounds like boilerplate science fiction, but that is one of the easiest ways to describe how the authoritarian strategy to take over the US is fundamentally a fight over what is real. Are masked government agents kidnapping non-white people off the streets in an attack on multiracial democracy, or in an essential step to save the nation from out-of-control illegal immigration? Is climate change an existential threat or a hoax? Is the Palestinian solidarity movement the forefront of the fight against a horrific genocide or an antisemitic conspiracy?
The Right has long understood that, since narrative is how we humans create shared belief, it is itself a form of power and a critical arena of contestation. While the centrist and left establishments are oriented towards governing and policy, the extremists who have led the Right’s rise to power see politics through the lens of reality war: a zero-sum assault on status quo narratives while promoting their own carefully designed authoritarian vision.
Media theorists often refer to the range of ideas and discourse that is considered politically reasonable as the Overton Window. One of the most explicit expressions of narrative power is the ability to shift this conceptual window, making previously marginal ideas accepted as legitimate. Turns out all it took was some right-wing billionaires investing heavily in their own “news” businesses to move the Overton Window so far it might be more accurately called the Overton Sliding Door. Illegally dismantling government agencies, openly promoting white nationalism, and sending literal stormtroopers to occupy U.S. cities is now all packaged as everyday politics.
Weaponizing Make-Believe: Fascism Is First And Foremost An Attack On Reality
It’s easy to dismiss Trump as a poorly scripted conman who wears his narcissism on his sleeve. But if this era proves anything, it’s that something can be simultaneously absurd and incredibly dangerous. Trump is so famous for his endless firehose of blatant lies that much of the media no longer considers it even newsworthy. But “lying” is too small a term to capture the grandiose ambition of the regime’s campaign of systematic deceit. It can be better understood as a concerted attack to rapidly shift what is politically possible by challenging reality itself.
The Make America Great Again narrative is a mass psychological operation (Psy-Op) unleashed on the civilian population. In Psy-Ops missions, military personnel use information and influence to shape perceptions, emotions, and behaviors to achieve their objectives. The Trump regime is weaponizing make-believe, manufacturing fake crises to manipulate their base and, in the process, disrupt any shared public consensus of what is actually happening. American politics has been transformed into an information battlefield so immersive that it is best described as a reality war.
This is not new. Historically, fascism has been first and foremost an attack on reality. As Italian antifascist Ignazio Silone famously wrote in 1938, “Fascism is a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place.” Trump is using the same playbook. By weaponizing lies about election outcomes and immigrants and the real causes of systemic inequality in America, he is constructing an alternate reality—one where he is defending the “true America” against hordes of impure, dark-skinned invaders and stopping an imaginary revolution of “radical left socialist Democrats.”
To beat MAGA fascism and win a transition towards a more just and ecologically sane future, the Left needs to develop our own version of how the Right has integrated narrative power into movement-building approaches. The Left excels at analyzing and understanding material conditions—the real-world circumstances of money, work, and power—that shape how people live and relate to one another. We have got the facts on our side, but if facts were enough to win a reality war, we’d have already won. We need to translate our analysis into bigger, more compelling narratives that can build mass support for positive system change.
Harnessing Psychic Breaks and Narrating Change
Fascist reality war provides cover stories for their assaults on vulnerable communities, democratic institutions, and the livability of the planet itself. In Trump’s case, these stories serve as explanations for the deep changes his base is already feeling. The world they once understood as stable is changing. Those shifts aren’t random. The systems that extract wealth and resources—extractive capitalism—are creating crises that affect daily life: extreme weather caused by fossil-fueled climate change, job instability caused by disruptive technologies, while rising fear and alienation are exploited by corporations and political groups for profit and power. In this turbulence, fascist narratives offer simple villains and false comfort, diverting attention from the economic and ecological forces driving the chaos.
These disruptions don’t just impact the physical world; they also impact our narratives and mental models, creating “psychic breaks,” where status quo narratives are no longer adequate to explain unfolding events. In these circumstances, when many people are seeking answers, those with the ability to “narrate change” can offer explanations and frame the implications for future action. Having the strategic orientation and infrastructure to “narrate change” is a critical part of aligning different constituencies around a shared agenda and maintaining cohesiveness inside large political blocs.
Now the Left––and everyone who cares about a livable future––needs to build these capacities to harness psychic breaks and narrate change so that we can help people understand unfolding events in a way that builds the broadest antifascist front possible. Our narrative strategies must undercut MAGA’s framing by exposing the real villains and centering the collective agency to hold them accountable: immigrants didn’t steal your job, billionaires did!
What Can We Learn From The Right’s Narrative-First Approach?
This type of expansive approach to narrative does not come instinctively to Left movements. The time-tested methodologies of Alinsky-style community organizing center on expressions of tangible, shared self-interest. Helping people realize that their experiences are connected to larger structures of power requires doing the patient work of slowly connecting the visible symptoms of injustice to the broader—and often hidden—systems that create injustice. So, when the Left leads with big systemic narratives, we risk coming off as abstract and off-putting.
Times have changed, and our models must adapt to them. We’re organizing in an unravelling political system amidst rapid technological shifts and corporate consolidation of our communication platforms. Long-term crises like racism, economic precarity, and ecological disruption have escalated to unignorable levels. In this political moment, when the system’s failings are becoming self-evident, we need to lead with visionary and materially grounded narratives that can provide alternatives to MAGA authoritarianism at scale. The best response to the Right’s punch-down populism is to popularize our own punch-up populism. If we don’t tell the bigger stories of transformative possibility, the Right’s lies go uncontested.
We can learn from the Right’s narrative-first strategies without replicating their reliance on bigotry or fear-mongering. One simple learning is to “narrate change”—prioritize amplifying a few big narratives which offer explanatory models for our current world then use these to frame our local struggles and campaigns. This has been the Right’s successful model—to treat local issues as “hooks” that reinforce their larger worldview.
Take the so-called Great Replacement, which the Right has elevated from fringe racist conspiracy theory into mainstream Republican talking point. The Great Replacement connects the dots between various propaganda campaigns to offer a holistic picture that enrages and directs its base. “Traitorous” Democrats are attempting to destroy American democracy by using mass illegal immigration to fuel an epidemic of “voter fraud.” This is pure fantasy, but it shows how, in this case, they are using an overarching narrative to legitimize xenophobia, demonize Democrats, and create the excuse to roll back voting rights.
The Right is in constant attack mode, pushing framing designed to fuel outrage and make it appear that their ideas have far more support than they actually do. They apply a narrative power analysis to target vulnerabilities in dominant stories and derail their appeal. In a few short years, they were able to turn “woke”—an early 20th-century concept Black people use to urge one another to be vigilant in the face of anti-Black violence—from the language of racial justice into a linguistic landmine that blows up in the face of common-sense acknowledgement of historic systems of oppression.
Not only did being “anti-woke” provide a convenient permission structure for their base to counter the universal moral appeal of the Black Lives Matter movement, but it grew into a general way to discredit and even dehumanize a wide range of their opponents. The “woke mind virus” is a broadly applicable narrative that can be used to attack anything from trans rights to multiracial democracy to climate science. By leading with narrative they provide the meaning-making context for a whole authoritarian worldview that pre-organizes their base on a wide range of issues.
What is the Left’s Version of the Great Replacement?
Of course, the Left has the deep analysis to deconstruct all this, but we are lacking the narratives to make this analysis come alive in ordinary people’s lives. Analysis is critical for determining what needs to be done, but narrative is what enables us to persuade others. We must continually develop people’s analysis through organizing and political education, but this is not a replacement for a movement-wide narrative strategy.
So what’s the Left’s version of Great Replacement? Why aren’t we countering their immigration conspiracies with a story about the Great Displacement to help people understand migration in terms of economic dislocation and climate disruption? After decades of the absurd “trickle down” myth, why haven’t we created our own catchphrase like “Trickle Up Economics”? Or popularized common sense demands like “making polluters pay” for wrecking the environment, or that healthcare is a human right?
There are plenty of strategic narratives floating around on the Left. The reason this article isn’t focused on highlighting more of them is that the issue isn’t just one of content but of collective meaning-making. We need different constituencies to craft narrative together in a way that reflects their identities and shared interests. Then as different organizers actually apply the narratives in their various issues and place-based struggles the transformative power to shape our collective reality is unleashed from the bottom up.
Weaving narrative strategy into our organizing also helps address the problem of scale. We need to expand the reach and capacity of our various media and narrative institutions (like The Forge!), but that doesn’t mean we need to replicate the Right’s centralized, top-down approach. We will never compete on the same budgetary scale as our opponents. In the spirit of the classic organizing dichotomy between “money vs. people,” we need people-powered narrative strategies. Rather than try to clone Fox News and the right-wing media ecosystem, we need to create our own grassroots echo effect: amplifying one another and applying shared frames in our organizing.
As cultural theorist Raymond Williams said: “To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.” Hope doesn’t grow out of denial. So, in order to be honest about the magnitude of the threats, we need to have a comparably big vision and compelling narratives that makes it believable for people. That’s where threat and opportunity meet in these urgent, dangerous, radical times. Because the stronger movements and sharper narratives that will help us to beat MAGA fascism are also precisely what we need to build a better future for people and planet.
