No Story Left to Believe

How Narrative Collapse Is Driving Institutional Breakdown

Editor’s Preface

Martin’s piece arrives at precisely the right moment. It explores a set of ideas I’ve long circled around but never articulated as clearly—or as courageously—as he does here. This is a constructivist argument at its core, one that blends epistemology, semiotics, identity formation, and political decay into a quiet tour de force. In some ways, it’s maddening—I wish I’d written it. But more than that, I’m grateful he did.

Martin pushes the conversation forward by drawing on Wendt and Finnemore’s intellectual architecture, Horkheimer and Adorno’s narrative pessimism, and even a few frameworks I’ve explored in previous issues. The result is a compelling synthesis of ideas—and a new frame that helps explain the disorienting fracture we’re living through.

We often forget: stories don’t just describe the world; they construct it. The stories we believe about ourselves, our institutions, and our shared future define what’s possible and permissible. When those stories collapse, reality follows.

Martin’s contribution is both philosophical and practical. It’s about the war of stories now underway: a battle not just between parties or ideologies, but between incompatible meanings of democracy, freedom, and truth. Narrative A and Narrative B are not merely rhetorical devices but existential forks in the road. And one of them is winning.

This piece doesn’t offer comfort. It doesn’t pretend we can rewind to some prior consensus or restore a broken order with incremental change. Instead, it persuasively argues that the old scaffolding has already fallen, and we need a radically new narrative to take its place.

I look for writers who have solid ideas and then attempt to push them into writing something beyond emotions, thoughts, and rants. This piece reflects that process, and I’m grateful to Martin for agreeing to it. I’m proud to publish Martin’s work in The Long Memo. It’s the kind of thinking we need more of: unflinching, rigorous, and unafraid to name the stakes. That’s what I hope will make TLM’s legacy.

Make sure to visit his Substack at Literal Mayhem; there’s plenty more where this came from. :D

—William Finnegan

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Generally speaking, the stories we hold move our actions in the real world. And the stories at the heart of individual identity weave together to form the stories that define our social fabric and shared reality. But understanding the full sweep of the stories playing out on the stage of real life often requires a moment of stepping back and rethinking.

At the moment, the defining feature of our shared reality is what one could call “narrative warfare.” The world is breaking apart, in large part because old narratives have failed. The stories around which we have organized modern Western civilization—e.g., the purpose and role of government, the desirability of democracy, the immutability of economic laws, notions of equality, and even the very definition of “humanity” (i.e., what it is, and who has it)—are no longer holding.

We’re desperately trying to find new stories that will preserve our humanity in a post-trust, post-truth, post-industrial world that is becoming increasingly less human-centric.

Here in the U.S., narrative warfare is playing out as a pitched battle between two completely different ways of explaining the radical breakage we’re seeing daily—one from the autocratic right (Narrative A) and one from a pro-pluralism coalition that includes just about everyone else (Narrative B).

• Narrative A: Government is a tyranny against individual liberty, and the Trump administration is finally giving America a long-overdue and much-needed radical realignment of priorities, streamlined decision making, and shrinking of government to make it more efficient and accountable. Government is too big, too bloated, too tyrannical, and this administration is fixing it all by removing bureaucratic obstacles and entrenched interests that want to enforce their out-of-touch, anti-American ideology on everyday Americans. The administration also prioritizes American interests over international interests that cost too much and return too little. They’re using the nation’s political and economic power to get more for the American taxpayer. They are championing individual liberty here at home and refocusing the agencies of law and order to hold to account those who have misused the government to launch “woke,” radical, racialist attacks on political foes, free expression, and individual and religious liberty. And they are going to bat for American business, aiming to power growth and innovation by reducing the heavy hand of regulation and fighting anti-competitive behavior of other nations. This is the beginning of an American resurgence that gets our nation back on the right (i.e., conservative) track toward personal and economic liberty.

• Narrative B: The Trump administration is gutting American democracy in an unprecedented autocratic power grab. They are removing all obstacles to authoritarian control by gutting independent offices of accountability (e.g., Inspectors General, Boards of Governors, Joint Chiefs, etc,) defanging critical media, and attacking and defunding educational institutions. They are assaulting the separation of powers, as well as trying to control and intimidate the judiciary, in a naked effort to centralize state power in the person of the executive. They are purging apolitical career civil servants to install political loyalists answerable to the executive, rather than to American citizens and the Constitution—destroying essential capabilities and expertise that have taken decades to build. They are instituting Orwellian “newspeak” and memory-holing critical data and information, especially scientific information: holding truth hostage to ideology. Their tactics include criminalizing dissent and intimidating private businesses that oppose their unconstitutional aims and tactics. They are intentionally creating chaos to distract from their autocratic attacks, and they’re on the verge of leaving tens of millions of Americans destitute to deliver more wealth and economic/political power to wealthy and corporate benefactors. This is a crisis moment, in which a lying power-hungry elite is seizing control of the most powerful democracy on Earth, supplanting the will of the people for their benefit, to install themselves as a permanent kleptocratic oligarchy.

Is there a middle ground? There used to be, but not so much anymore. Are there kernels of truth within Narrative A? Sure. But Narrative B runs much closer to the objective truth of our current moment.

Stubborn Dems Won’t Admit Reality.

For the moment, Narrative A is the hands-down winner. Trump’s backers (the ones who matter) got their way, and now they’re using their government-is-tyranny narrative as a justification for giving us exactly what they’ve been promising for decades: a complete dismantling of the old order.

Meanwhile, the pluralist, pro-democracy, anti-autocracy coalition arguing Narrative B is stumbling badly and struggling to respond effectively. Why?

They are stuck in the past.

Like when Tim Walz claimed that, “If we had won the election, we wouldn’t be in this mess.” Good grief. Since the 1990s, sequential waves of right-wing discontent have been tearing at the stability of public governance—each wave bigger and more damaging than the last.

The bottom has been “falling out” for decades.

Yet the Democrats act like once the GOP self-immolates, voters will naturally come back and beg them to restore what the GOP has broken. But that strategy didn’t work the first time they tried it in 2017, and it won’t work this time either.

This leads us to the Democrats' biggest delusion (an erroneous assumption that most commentators don’t discuss and often buy into themselves): their underlying narrative that the previous order can be restored is completely wrong.

NEWSFLASH: THERE. IS. NO. GOING. BACK.

That old world is done. Kaput. Its civic foundations have been eroded and washed away. As Noah Smith wrote recently:

I believe that what we’re seeing today truly is the end of an era, an epochal overturning of the world as we knew it, and that the full import and implications of this haven’t really struck us yet.

Devastating? Yes, when our fundamental assumptions are obliterated, it’s devastating. The prescient 2019 British TV series Years and Years gives us a beautiful, sad monologue from a family matriarch, as the UK descends into fascistic autocracy. She laments her foolishness in assuming that the ideology of the mid-20th century had it all figured out:

Ten thousand days is the blink of an eye. Ten thousand days ago I was here in this house… and I thought, ‘Here we are. We’ve done it. Nice little world. Well done, the West. We’ve made it. We’ve survived.’

What an idiot. What a stupid little idiot I was. But I didn’t see all the clowns and monsters heading our way, tumbling over each other, grinning. Dear God what a carnival. And that’s all it took. Ten thousand days…

Ultimately, she blames our collective failure to accept an economic order that is exploitative and dehumanizing in many ways. One might quibble with her particular complaint against automation, but the overall spirit of her criticism is hard to refute.

We buy into that system for life.

We can sit here all day blaming other people. We blame the economy. We blame Europe. The opposition. The weather. And then we blame these vast sweeping tides of history like they’re out of our control, like we’re so helpless and little and small. But it’s still OUR FAULT. This is the world WE built. Congratulations. Cheers, all.

(It’s very much worth watching the heartbreaking, 6-minute clip. And yes, the entire series is a revelation.)

The Dems’ Conservative Allies Are Trapped in the Same Nostalgia

Right-leaning commentators on cable news all give some version of the line that they look forward to getting back to boring stuff like debating marginal income tax rates.

This piece in The Bulwark admits “aimlessly doing the same old thing does not rise to the moment.” But their solution is to let a third party compete and win red states, primarily by “Being tough on the border, moderate-to-conservative on cultural issues, but populist on economics.”

But what does being “populist on economics” even mean?

• Higher corporate taxes? Not happening.

• Higher taxes on the wealthy? Not happening.

• Supporting union power? Not happening.

• Investments in training and education? Not happening.

• Blue-collar jobs in infrastructure? Not happening. (And those workers with good, Bidenomics infrastructure jobs voted for Trump.)

• Domestic investment in manufacturing that empowers workers rather than high-tech and industrial monopolies? Not happening.

• Empowering gig workers, “creators,” and tipped workers? Not happening.

• Pulling back on the financialization of everything? Not happening.

The ultra-right now in control the Republican Party has never been a friend to “populist economics.” And their anti-government, buzzword lingo has poisoned the soil of voter sentiment against all the reasonable tools that populist economics might bring to bear.

Desperate Belief Doesn’t Make it So.

An entire worldview that held for generations is collapsing all at once. And yes, it’s preferable to self-soothe with a belief that in just a few years we can all go back to the consensus, bi-partisan, give-and-take, pluralist world that held for decades before this disturbing upheaval.

Yet, here is the truth, and it’s a hard pill to swallow: Our fundamentalist faith in the durability of the old order was wrong. And it’s proving just as untrue overseas as it is here at home, as right-wing parties climb the ladders of power all over the world. Even if, by some miracle, the pre-existing order could be restored temporarily, it has proven itself inherently unstable and unsustainable: economically, politically, and most important, narratively. It had a great 80-year run, but it’s over, and it’s time we got right with the idea that we need replace it with something entirely new.

The current step-change in the operating system of the world is permanent, and there are several reasons why we’re never going back.

Why It’s Over #1: Faith Has Been Demolished.

TechDirt, a site I love, issued a stunning wake-up call that the site is “now a democracy blog (whether we like it or not),” saying:

Unlike typical policy fights where we can disagree on the details while working within the system, this attack aims to demolish the system itself.

What they fail to see: the system has already been demolished because faith in the system has been demolished. It’s only a matter of time before reality catches up.

Americans’ civic faith has been demolished by a metastasizing belief on the right that government itself is a tyranny against individual liberty.

Everyday people have lost faith that they have any route to a viable economic future.

Demolished alliances have led Europe to lose faith in America, recoiling in a “fool me twice shame on me” kind of way; what France’s Europe Minister referred to as “a whole portion of Europeans waking up after refusing to see the reality of things.”

Canada the same, as expressed by its new PM: “These are dark days brought on by a country we can no longer trust. We are getting over the shock, but let us never forget the lessons: we have to look after ourselves and we have to look out for each other.”

None of this shattering of faith is reversible.

Why It’s Over #2: The Narrative is Dead.

Over the past seven decades, the forces of radical conservatism have been honing their message, building their media apparatus, step by step co-opting the Republican Party, and sowing populist seeds of hatred for the very idea of government.

(For an in-depth review of that seven-decade project see LiteralMayhem’s “BIG Big Lie” series.)

In this effort, they are corrupt storytellers: manipulating public sentiment with misinformation, disinformation, misrepresentation, and freighted, dishonest buzzwords like: “religious liberty” and “government tyranny” and “faceless bureaucracy” and “unelected judges” and “weaponized government.”

But the opposition is now hemmed in narratively.

Rebuilding a decimated federal bureaucracy won’t just be logistically impossible, but also narratively impossible. The “government tyranny” and “woke bureaucrat” narratives are too well entrenched on the right to allow for it.

So, if the Dems and their allies want to win over any persuadable Trump voters in swing states, arguing for a reconstitution of the federal bureaucracy in its exact previous form and authority, would be one of the surest narrative paths to defeat.

The ultra-right’s autocratic narrative on “What is government?” is being institutionalized not just logistically, but also narratively in poplar parlance and in the minds of the public. The old pluralist narrative on “What is government?” lies bleeding with a stake through its heart.

Why It’s Over #3: The Structure is Dead.

A supreme irony of the MAGA movement is its use of the word “again.” Nobody will put an exact date on when America was great, a period to reclaim.

One might legitimately presume they’re talking about the mid-century, post-WWII period, as their language harkens back to a thriving middle class, limitless upward mobility, a gender-normative, single-income nuclear family, and America astride the world. (Some argue that MAGA’s “again” refers to the pre-WWI period, but that doesn’t work because the average MAGA voter doesn’t know enough history to know what that era was.)

America’s success in the post-WWII era, however, was driven by the very things conservatives spent decades demonizing and trying to dismantle: high taxes, high public spending, strong antitrust enforcement, strong financial regulation, big infrastructure programs, and expansive social programs that the right derisively calls “social engineering.”

The post-war period was also, as The Long Memo put it recently the “golden age of capitalism.” But as William Finnegan observes:

The same business elites forced to accept these regulations never stopped trying to undo them.

> They hated high taxes.

> They hated powerful unions.

> They hated financial regulations.

The Reagan-Thatcher years brought a “neoliberal” revolution based on Milton Friedman's ideas. Friedman argued that corporations exist solely to make money for shareholders and that any impingement on the private economy is akin to moral heresy.

Democrats, cornered and out of power, struck a “neoliberal compromise” with Bill Clinton, making a deliberate triangulation: “You let us keep much of our government spending and expansive social programs, and we’ll give you your low taxes, reduced regulation, and a massive liberalization of capital markets and trade. We’ll sell it as the best of both worlds.”

It worked a bit, enabling Clinton to turn budget deficits into surpluses. But in the long run, that compromise sparked a decades-long shift toward concentrated market and political power among a small group of wealthy elites and giant corporations.

The editor of this publication has cited some of the primary results of the neoliberal agenda’s dominance for decades: stagnant wages, dominating corporate monopolies, squelched competition, and the labor exploitation of a gig economy. On a larger scale, we are also contending with:

• Regional wealth inequality that drives immigration pressure and destabilizing backlash politics in developed economies, especially in Europe.

• Economic practices that are crashing through planetary boundaries in terms of species extinction, ecosystem collapse, endemic chemical pollution, and climate change.

• The dehumanizing financialization of everything: professional investors and huge, monopolistic businesses are consolidating and squeezing return out of everything from rental housing, to your local doctor’s office, to the local lakeside boat dock, to vending machines everywhere, right down to our attention span and social relationships.

The neoliberal compromise's structure was great for business: it provided high labor mobility, expanded international trade, and deep, liquid, transparent capital markets.

But it delivered devastating social outcomes: discontent and dislocation, increasing economic hardship and inequality, and a frustrated, angry politics that seeks increasingly extreme solutions to people’s pain.

The marketplace of ideas, as consistently expressed through “protest voting” on the right and left over the past two decades, has rendered its final determination. The jig is up.

The Forces of War Are Not Slowing Down

One has to take to heart Yascha Mounk’s caution that Anyone Who Knows What's About to Happen Is Lying. But in the short term, there’s plenty of directional data to indicate that conflict drivers that are still gaining momentum:

1. The information ecosystem has been thoroughly “enshittified,” and that’s not changing. If anything, it will get worse as unregulated AI is released into the wild and the power of tech oligarchs continues to grow. A recent poll showed that GOP voters believe the opposite of what’s true on almost all the key issues they claim to care about.

2. The anti-democracy disinformation and propaganda campaigns of foreign enemies are going nowhere. (Enabled by tech oligarchs, see above.)

3. Never underestimate the staying power of autocracies even if they deliver terrible outcomes for citizens—e.g., on 3/16 protests against hard-right governments “swept” eastern Europe, including Hungary, but two days later, on 3/18, a lopsided majority in the Hungarian parliament (137-27) voted to outlaw public LGBT pride celebrations as a “child protection” measure.

4. The underlying economic and immigration pressures driving right-wing success are not going anywhere.

5. Trump’s core base has consistently bought into his propaganda and blamed others for his failures. That pattern will not change; the pain he causes could even cleave his base more closely to him, rather than breaking from him.

6. The GOP bureaucracy has proven it will never turn on Trump no matter how much political pain he causes them. There’s no shortage of Rubios in the world who know exactly what they’re doing and will do the autocrat’s dirty work anyway.

7. The institutions of potential resistance are collapsing like Jenga blocks: Big Law, Higher Ed, and Big Media.

8. New ideas take time to root: We have yet to see the emergence of any radically new idea in political-economics that’s equitable, sustainable, and capable of dislodging the autocratic narrative now gripping the right. Even if one emerged tomorrow, radically new storylines can take generations to flower fully. Just as fringe conservatives in the 1950s planted narrative seeds that are only now blossoming into a sudden, global restructuring.

In Permanent Warfare, Victories Will Be Fleeting

This haunted-house ride is just getting started. Having crossed the age of 60, I am confident this narrative warfare will not be resolved within my lifetime. Perhaps not in yours either:

· populist and nationalist grassroots movements all over the world – from Italy to India – are furiously attached to some version of the “make us great again” narrative; and

• The structural issues that gave rise to those movements are going nowhere; and

• The full destructive impact of the changes we’re seeing today in the U.S. will take decades to fully manifest.

In the near term, if the pain gets bad enough, will that create a power vacuum that the Dems and their allies can fill?

Maybe. But not if they go about it like they’re doing now. While Gavin Newsom is dumping his woke baggage and trying his version of triangulation, the Democratic leadership is touting centrist candidates like Andy Beshear of Kentucky.

Could that work? It might help them win 2028 by 30K votes in Pennsylvania, but it won’t be the convincing, world-changing, reset they want, or need.

What the Dems and their allies keep failing to learn is that protest voting isn’t a move to the middle; it’s a tail event. Protest voters want radical change.

Witness Bernie and AOC attracting huge crowds at rallies nationwide. About 12% of Sanders voters went for Trump in 2016, and in 2024 Bernie voters flocked to Trump, particularly young men—a constituency that the Dems lost badly and need to win back.

There’s a much better case for pursuing Trump-Bernie voters than Trump-Beshear voters.

But let’s do a thought experiment where a Sanders-esque candidate wins. What would we get? That lefty agenda looks pretty much like a retread of the Great Society priorities conservatives hate (labor-focused, high-taxation, anti-corporate, heavily antitrust, equality-centric, etc.)

Also remember: even if a Sanders-type candidate wins (or even a Beshear-type candidate), those rabidly anti-government, minoritarian conservatives aren’t going anywhere. Neither is their animating mythology. And neither are their libertarian, techno-elitist billionaire backers, who upon winning their next swing of the pendulum, would tear down whatever temporary Liberal progress was made, and faster.

Our default state is now warfare, not equilibrium.

Moisés Naím provides a realistic view of where we’re headed in his book The Revenge of Power:

No automatic mechanism guarantees that populist parties' failure will herald a return to politics as we used to know it. Just the opposite… Countries can become entrenched deeper and deeper in a pattern of protest voting that brings an increasingly strange cast of characters to the corridors of power, making stability and good government a distant memory.

We’re Drowning in Dead Narratives

In a few short years, we will be 100 years out from the Great Depression, and look at us: we’ve been through cycles of spending and austerity, regulation and deregulation, and wealth redistribution and concentration, and we’re still fighting about the same issues.

Each faction in America’s permanent narrative war is arguing some form of restoration story:

• The libertarian- and Christian-autocratic right yearns for a pre-welfare-state Gilded Age.

• MAGA rank and file yearn for the gender, racial, and economic norms of an America portrayed in 1950s black-and-white TV shows.

• Super lefties yearn for some wonkified, 21^st-century version of the Great Society.

• Democratic triangulators want a reboot of the neoliberal compromise.

All of those narratives have already failed.

Meanwhile, other narrative tides sweep across the Earth, stories like “globalization” and “demographics are destiny.”

For example, as China has industrialized and become more expensive, its economic growth has been dropping; China’s greenfield investments overseas now seek access to cheaper labor, while aiming to knee-cap a young and rapidly industrializing India. If India follows a similar pattern, in another 30 years it will be India doing the same to other frontier economies.

If those frontier markets follow suit (and why wouldn’t they, Africa is already a hotbed of tech, fintech, and green energy innovation), in about 100-ish years the availability of cheap, unindustrialized labor will have been mostly exhausted. Assuming the planet can support 100 years more of industrial development, which is a big “if.”

But, what then?

Demographics are destiny? What happens when the Global South is wealthy enough to make migration unnecessary? What happens when the entire world is “industrialized” and birthrates are falling everywhere—as they tend to do in industrialized nations? What will drive economic growth then?

Where will the resources come from? If the entire world is both industrialized and organized according to an economics of growth, how do we sustain that without eating and digging the planet out from under ourselves?

Will technology change the entire picture and make human-led growth obsolete? Will it stall economic growth and industrialization for the developing world before it starts?

Help Wanted: A Radically New Narrative of the Possible

None of those are academic questions: 100 years is the blink of an eye. Merely the lifespan of one blue-zone super-ager.

If democracy is going to survive into a radically different world, and if the human-centric world is to survive at all, we need better political-economic approaches than the ones we’ve come up with so far.

We need a revolutionary “Darwin moment” or a “relativity moment” or a “moonshot moment”: a discovery and/or radical reframing that resets our belief system and opens vast new horizons for what’s possible in the world—and we pretty much need it right now.

Why right now? Because such radically news ideas need time to take root; grassroots movements take decades to build; and the popular imagination needs time to rethink and reacclimate.

• Degrowth? It’s a controversial idea for the here and now, but could it be a promising concept for a world of declining populations and dwindling resources?

• Middle-out economics? Venture capitalist Nick Hanauer’s idea got walloped at the voting booth in 2024, but does it offer the seeds of a long-term solution?

• A wholesale rethinking of our materialist existence? The research of Dr. Tim Kasser offers fascinating insights into human behavior via the psychological framework of materialism. (Materialistic Values & Goals, Annual Reviews in Psychology, 2016.67:489-514)

I don’t have enough expertise in such disciplines to know what will work and what won’t. But from a narrative perspective, here’s what WON’T work: living within the boundaries of what we currently believe to be possible.

As Nick Hanauer says, “If we want a more equitable, more just society, we need new economic beliefs.” (Full article in Democracy Journal)

Today, we have no choice but to accept that the fundamental narrative binding our world together for generations is irreparably broken—even if our nostalgia and fear don’t want to let us admit it. Worse, we have to admit that our current tools are not up to the task of fixing it. In fact, the policy tools of the past several decades, and the stories in which they are rooted, are exactly what got us here.

If we want to restore “small-d” democratic freedom and pluralism, in a more stable and sustainable form—if we don’t want to live in some transhuman, techno-feudalist, autocratic hellscape—then sticking with different iterations of what we already know is woefully insufficient.

The economics and political science professions need to put on their big-people pants, get to work, and give us some revolutionary way forward. Because the autocratic revolution currently being foisted on us, powered by the finance and technology professions, is eating the democratic, humanist world alive.

We need a new way out, because the old world is dead. The way is shut.

There’s no going back.

Editor’s Note: I’m pleased to bring Martin’s piece to TLM subscribers. Readers or outside contributors who wish to contribute to TLM may contact me at editor@thelongmemo.com or via direct messaging on Substack. We hope you enjoyed this guest article. Your support makes this work possible. If you’re not already, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Be sure to visit Martin’s substack at Literal Mayhem, plenty of good things to be found there as well.