From “What If?” to “This Must Be!”: Patrick Reinsborough on Building Narrative Power
Why the stories we tell matter, and how to tell better ones.
More than two decades ago, upon accepting her Nobel Peace Prize, the prolific Toni Morrison declared that “narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.”
Her words are timeless, but coming across this sentence in a moment of creeping fascism and disconcertingly thin institutional opposition to it, they struck me with particular force. As deputy director of democratic institutions at Roosevelt Forward, I’ve spent the past few years steeped in the daily news cycle covering the manifold attacks on our democracy. And like millions of other young Americans, I have often felt deeply anxious, unsure of what to do as we descend deeper and deeper into authoritarianism, overwhelmed by all I should be doing, and at times convinced that nothing I do could ever be enough. And most dangerous of all, I—and I’m sure many readers can relate—have felt disillusioned, all too often tempted to throw my hands up and give up hope altogether.
In these moments of despair, Morrison’s words remind me of the power and potential of sensemaking. With so much brutality and destruction unfolding before our eyes, it is vital to have a clear sense of what is happening, who is responsible for it, who can propel us toward a bright and just future, and where we fit into that picture.
To understand all of this better, I spoke with narrative strategist Patrick Reinsborough. In 2002, Patrick cofounded the Center for Story-based Strategy, a national strategy center dedicated to harnessing the power of narrative to accelerate transformative movement building. More recently, he served as the US Organizing Director for 350.org. Throughout his career, he’s helped organize and support numerous campaigns, including the youth-led global climate strikes in 2019, demonstrations against the US war on Iraq, and the historic shutdown of the Seattle World Trade Organization meeting in 1999. He is also the coauthor of the strategy manual Re:Imagining Change: How to Use Story-based Strategy to Win Campaigns, Build Movements & Change the World. You can follow Patrick on BlueSky @GiantWhispers.
In our conversation, Patrick defines narrative power and unpacks the strategic importance of telling a compelling Left story at scale.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Shahrzad Shams: A lot of your work is concerned with understanding narrative power and how we can build it on the Left. Can you start by explaining what you mean by that term and its significance to social movements?
Patrick Reinsborough: Philosopher Bertrand Russell described power as “the ability to produce intended effects.” From there, we can understand narrative power as the way that effects are produced through storytelling, which is one of the primary processes for collective meaning-making. Because for almost anything to happen—whether it’s harvesting crops or declaring war—some sort of story has to be told that helps harness the collective will and resources to make it happen. More specifically, we can call narrative power the narrative component of existing relationships of power.
Humans are narrative animals. We constantly create social constructions that structure every aspect of our societies, interactions, and identities. Over time, as these narratives are repeated and spread, they solidify into their own form of power. I’m talking about the types of narrative that legitimize the status quo, making it seem as if it were the only way things could be. Narrative power expresses itself as conventional wisdom and defines the boundaries of what is politically acceptable. The human capacity for narrative appears to be fundamental to our evolution, from coordinating hunts to cave paintings to the emergence of hierarchy and religion. But I think the rise of mass communications technologies has made narrative power even more central to both exercising control and making change.
Narrative is always central to the work of organizing and building power, both in the fight for the world we wish to create and in the fight against the world authoritarians are seeking to materialize. Organizers help people come together to share their stories and find commonality in their experience. People then create a shared story about the problems they are facing and, more importantly, about what it will take to solve them. A shared narrative that connects lots of people across space and time is one of the defining components of any social movement.
Shahrzad: How does narrative power differ from traditional messaging efforts?
Patrick: If narrative power is the whole multifaceted, fluid realm of how humans create and contest meaning, then messaging is a specific tactic of how to build narrative power by using language effectively. Many readers will no doubt be familiar with the concept of “framing” and how we structure our messages to be more persuasive and activate the existing perspectives of our audiences. That’s a good example of exercising narrative power.
But messaging on its own, without a deeper analysis of the underlying narratives shaping the discourse, often doesn’t produce the results we want. Too often, strategists think that the way to persuade people is to just come up with the right message, which usually means trying to fill people’s brains with facts. Now of course facts are important, but if having the facts on our side was enough to win, we’d have won a more equitable and democratic economy a long time ago. What a narrative power analysis helps us understand is that although what people don’t know is an obstacle, the bigger problem is what they do know; everyone already has existing narratives about the world (aka “worldviews”) that filter out incompatible messages, regardless of whether those messages are factually true. Understanding narrative power helps us go deeper by challenging us to grapple with why our audience holds certain beliefs. Once we do that, we can go beyond just telling better stories to actually changing the stories that shape people’s lives.
Shahrzad: The Right has been extraordinarily effective at making its base feel like active participants in a larger story, positioning them as patriots, truth-tellers, defenders of a civilization under siege by “illegal aliens” and the “woke-mind virus.” Some parts of the Left, by contrast, seem to believe people will be persuaded by appeals to pocketbook issues alone—an approach that lacks narrative scaffolding and treats people as passive beneficiaries of good policy. To the extent the Left does offer a broader narrative, it tends to portray people as victims of a rigged system—which, however accurate, is ultimately disempowering because it offers no active role for the hero.
What do you think a better, more compelling progressive story might look like?
Patrick: I get asked this question a lot, and my response is rarely the answer people want to hear from me, but I think it’s the answer we all need to grapple with. The issue is less the content of the narrative itself—there are tons of smart progressive communicators who can and do produce effective storytelling on their issues—and more the underlying political process of building an aligned political vision across different issues and constituencies so that we can tell larger shared stories.
Effective narrative is important, but there isn’t some magic story that will blast open the minds of the unconvinced. That’s not how meaning-making operates. Over the past few decades of working on narrative and movement-building, I’ve seen people take exactly the wrong lesson from observing the Right’s narrative power. We all experience the Right’s deployment of highly distilled frames as magic words. Take “big government” as a perennial example: Through decades-long narrative power-building efforts, “big government” has become a quick shorthand that invokes the inherent wastefulness of government and bolstered arguments for tax cuts or privatization, or most recently, thanks to DOGE, the wholesale dismantling of government agencies.
So, naturally, institutions opposed to these efforts want their own magic words and hire consultants and pollsters to try and create them. But this misses the whole point of where the magic in the Right’s framing language actually came from. There isn’t some inherent quality or secret force that is unleashed when the two words “big” and “government” are put together. Instead, the magic comes from the preceding decades of right-wing organizing that created a shared meaning around those words—a meaning that influences political discourse enough that sadly even some center-left politicians have reinforced it over the years. Powerful frames—at least the ones that survive in our fast-paced, novelty-oriented media ecosystem and have an ongoing impact on political discourse—are usually the end result of an organizing process. We take shortcuts and jump to the conclusion without doing the hard work of organizing and sensemaking at our own risk.
So the bigger issue is less content and more strategy, specifically shared strategy. Whereas the Right has an entire media distribution system, our movements do not. We have to transform the media ecosystem. Obviously democratizing private media is a big priority, but we also need to build scalable progressive media infrastructure. That doesn’t mean we need to replicate the Right’s centralized, top-down approach, but we do need to create more of an echo effect, meaning that progressive institutions are aligned and coordinating enough to amplify each other’s narrative. I often think of this as a shared melody with different harmonies for specific issues or audiences—a unity that doesn’t compromise our diversity. But that requires mass alliance building and political alignment, which is why, if we are serious about building narrative power, we need to invest in the processes to build it.
There isn’t some inherent quality or secret force that is unleashed when the two words “big” and “government” are put together. Instead, the magic comes from the preceding decades of right-wing organizing that created a shared meaning around those words.
So the question evolves from “What is the winning progressive story?” to “How do we get all of our diverse and fractious stakeholders and constituencies to cocreate that story?”
That said, I can’t resist sharing three general aspects of a more effective narrative strategy. One obvious thing is to stop operating from within our opponents’ narrative. This is the fallacy of moderation, where certain political actors will try to carve out a position that is not as extreme as the regime’s, but still acknowledges some of their argument. Regardless of whether this is good for people’s careers, it’s a terrible narrative strategy because it actually reinforces the original, extreme worldview.
Look at President Trump’s signature issue, immigration. The right-wing narrative dehumanizes immigrants and frames immigration as an existential crisis that has more in common with a zombie invasion narrative than with the historic realities of human migration. Yet far too many critics of the administration’s tactics start by agreeing with the premise that immigration is a big problem. Advocating for a less unconstitutional version of the same crackdown ends up reinforcing the core assumptions of Trump’s policies.
Instead, we have to polarize by offering a different story with equal explanatory power. Polarization often gets a bad rap. But social movement researchers like Frances Fox Piven and Gene Sharp have shown that polarization is a critical mechanism for forcing the broader public to pick a side on an issue. So I would argue our problem is we are not polarized enough. The Right currently controls the debate and drags our entire window of discourse along with it. We need to offer our audience sharp moral choices about the issues of our times by polarizing against unjust policies.
To come back to immigration, this type of polarization is exactly the narrative that many immigrant rights groups have long-promoted: In a nation of immigrants, our diversity makes us strong. Immigration isn’t a problem, but a solution. By completely rejecting Trump’s narrative premise, it opens space for a counternarrative—one that shows that he is scapegoating immigrants to create an artificial crisis that provides an excuse for him to terrorize people into accepting his authoritarian takeover.
We need to offer our audience sharp moral choices about the issues of our times by polarizing against unjust policies.
Second, we need to do better at “narrating change,” especially given the realities of our fast-moving information landscape. This means explaining why things are happening, naming villains (banish the passive voice!), exposing the deeper agenda, and showing people that we have the agency to make different choices.
Finally, we need bigger narratives that build bridges between the limited political space we have now and actual progressive system change. In recent years, the Green New Deal played this role for many progressives. But the power of the narrative is tied to audiences beyond our base accepting the vision as plausible. This is the “believability horizon” that any big social change narrative must successfully navigate. If our narrative stays on the credible side of that horizon, regardless of how far away it may seem, our vision will inspire the audience to follow us in taking the first steps toward that distant shared goal. But if our vision falls on the wrong side on the believability horizon, then it seems impossible or crazy. More effective progressive storytelling has to expand the “believability horizon” by helping more people see pathways toward meaningful system change.
Shahrzad: You’ve argued that narrative power matters more than policy in shaping political reality—a lesson that the Right has certainly embraced while centrist and Left establishments continue focusing the bulk of their attention on governing and policy. A lot of policy shops are built around research, legislative strategy, and traditional communications, and aren’t structured to do the kind of narrative work you talk about.
How can progressives go about challenging this internal culture, which over-indexes on technical expertise and good policy design? And how might our approach to policy look different if narrative power were taken more seriously?
Patrick: I don’t run a policy institution, so I don’t want to pretend I have more insight than I do. But I suspect the first step is simply getting people to recognize narrative as a key arena of struggle and calling attention to the internal culture that holds technical expertise and policy design out as the most important dimensions of political power. We need to change the incentive structure of the progressive establishment, which is still focused around a flawed model of persuasion centering facts, nuance, and expertise. We still buy into the economist myth that humans are rational actors—a blatantly untrue story that nevertheless continues to be accepted as conventional wisdom. Facts are indispensable to effective analysis. But they are not useful on their own for the kind of persuasion and mobilization that builds political power. Analysis and narrative are different, and our entire movement, not just policymakers, needs to stop conflating them.
Having good ideas is important, but it doesn’t mean much without creating the mandate—the collective power—to implement those ideas. The sharpest policies in the world won’t materialize if people don’t buy into the larger worldview those policies were crafted in service of. It is also worth remembering that our current unjust global system did not come about because it won in some mythical “marketplace of ideas” and outcompeted all the various other lifeways that were present in the world. Rather, it came about through organized violence, through colonialism, mass enslavement, and genocide, and through a bipartisan policy apparatus that legislated in its service. Organized people power may have overcome many of the worst abuses, but we are still largely living within the architecture created through these histories and actions.
If folks in policy start taking narrative power seriously, the walls between issue silos become less important than the ability to articulate the larger connections that bind policies together under an overarching narrative that shapes worldviews. This doesn’t mean leaving issues behind—at least not issues that have actual constituencies fighting for them—as much as developing viable umbrella narratives that incorporate them into larger stories of values and change. Policy proposals are often an effective soapbox for launching new narratives, and if we can shift the narrative landscape, it makes everything more winnable.
The sharpest policies in the world won’t materialize if people don’t buy into the larger worldview those policies were crafted in service of.
The design of the narrative should shape the policy, or at least the way we walk about it. Our framing of our policies should be attention-grabbing, polarizing, and boundary-pushing, and our proposals should expose the interconnected, systemic problems we must confront. For example: At a time when our current economic model is driving us toward fascism and ecological collapse, it is imperative that we establish democratic control over our economy, so that principles beyond short-term profiteering begin to shape decision-making. That means challenging the free market mythology that has provided cover for the consolidation of oligarchic wealth and power.
Which brings me to what I believe should be a through line in all progressive narratives: casting billionaires as villains. By this, I don’t just mean singling out particular morally despicable billionaires, but making the very existence of billionaires a symbol of our failing system. In a system where wealth equates directly to political power, we cannot have billionaire levels of wealth and pretend to have a functioning democracy, particularly when those billionaires are buying off politicians and buying up media platforms to control what the public gets to know.
So what does that mean for the policy? I’ll leave the nuts and bolts to our movement’s actual policy experts (which, yes, we do still need!). But I’ll push for us to frame those efforts under the umbrella of #BanTheBillionaire policy, despite the fact that a literal application would presumably be a nonstarter under our current legal system. But that is the transformative beauty of narrative as a form of power: It’s not bound by material limitations or current political realities. Effective narratives offer us compelling alternative visions and help create the collective belief that can make them real. Narrative power helps the spark of “what if?” grow into the conflagration of “this must be!” And that is what helps us get to the more just, democratic, and ecologically sane future we are all working to create.
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