The Story That Replaced Democracy
How the Far-right filled the vacuum left by neoliberalism with a narrative of grievance—and what it will take to rebuild the cultural foundations of public life.:
James B. Greenberg
Jul 23, 2025
Democracies don’t collapse in silence. They collapse in stories—told over decades, repeated until they feel like common sense. In the United States, the Far-right didn’t just attack public institutions. They replaced the very idea of the public with a narrative of betrayal.
The Far-right didn’t just defund, deregulate, and dismantle. They redefined legitimacy. What they couldn’t capture, they undermined. What they couldn’t dismantle, they discredited. And they always gave people a story.
And it worked.
From an anthropological perspective, we are not simply witnessing a political realignment, but a cultural transformation. The meaning of democracy itself has been recast—not as collective governance, but as a zero-sum contest of grievance. The Far-right tapped into alienation, humiliation, and distrust. These weren’t new feelings, but they were newly organized into a coherent worldview. That worldview wasn’t argued. It was built—through repetition, symbolism, and meaning systems that turned frustration into identity and identity into politics.
The story they told was simple: the real America—the hard-working, God-fearing, taxpaying heartland—was being stolen. Government no longer served the people, but elites, foreigners, and freeloaders. Public schools indoctrinated. Taxes funded tyranny. Regulation strangled freedom. Elections were rigged. Only a strongman could set things right.
Truth was beside the point. Familiarity gave the story power. For decades, right-wing media had laid the groundwork—portraying public workers as parasites, government as wasteful, and collective programs as theft. What began as neoliberal suspicion of the state became a populist assault on the very idea of the common good. Public discourse turned performative. Trust became weakness. Outrage became truth.
Before the Far-right sold a story of siege, neoliberalism sold a story of abandonment. Institutions weren’t attacked outright—they were hollowed out. Their functions outsourced. Their failures normalized. Even liberal reformers accepted the logic that markets were more efficient and that public life should behave like a business. The result wasn’t just policy failure, but the collapse of belief in collective solutions.
The corrosion was not only structural. It was symbolic. As civic relationships unraveled, a vacuum opened—not just political, but cultural and ecological. Where people once saw themselves as flawed participants in a shared world, they became atomized spectators of a system they were told to hate. Into that vacuum stepped a movement ready with a story.
These losses weren’t abstract. In underfunded towns, libraries close early, emergency rooms overflow, and families boil their water because no one fixes the pipes. People lose more than services. They lose the sense that anyone is responsible. In that absence, isolation becomes normal. Distrust becomes culture.
The Left, for its part, has offered policies, data, and good intentions. But rarely a coherent story about what democracy is for—or why it’s worth defending. Too often, liberal politics speaks in facts, not meanings. It mistakes explanation for purpose. But no one fights for a spreadsheet.
People fight for stories that tell them who they are and what they’re part of.
The Right understood this. It built a moral universe with a hero—the forgotten American. A villain—the bureaucrat, the immigrant, the intellectual. A plot—betrayal by a corrupt elite. A redemption—return to greatness. Every crisis, every insult, every policy was legible inside that frame. It didn’t need proof. It only needed resonance.
The response is not to mimic that structure, but to meet it with a story of our own—one grounded in solidarity, not fear, and in repair, not vengeance.
We need to say this—clearly, publicly, and often:
America belongs to all of us—not just the powerful, the wealthy, or the loudest voice in the room. For too long, the rules have been rigged by those who want you to believe government is the problem—so they can sell it off, piece by piece, to their donors and cronies. But public institutions are the tools we build together to solve problems no one can face alone. Clean water, safe food, fair wages, equal rights—none of that came from billionaires or cable pundits. It came from people organizing, demanding change, and making democracy real.
The Far-right wants you to hate your own power. They want you to think your vote doesn’t matter, your voice doesn’t count, and your government can’t help you. Because if you believe that, they win. But we have another story: one where we invest in each other, where truth matters, and where freedom isn’t just for the rich. We fight—not for dominance, but for dignity. It’s time to stop retreating from the public square. It’s time to rebuild it.
This isn’t nostalgia. It’s recognition. The culture of democracy has been systematically dismantled. What’s been lost isn’t just trust in government—but trust in one another. And no society survives without that.
Political ecology reminds us that institutions aren’t just bureaucracies. They are how we manage risk, share burdens, and plan for a future. When public life collapses, so does our ability to adapt—to drought, disease, displacement, and disaster. Climate resilience and social protection depend on institutions people believe in and help sustain. Undermining them doesn’t just threaten democracy. It threatens survival.
Yet the story we need still lives. It’s in teachers defending public schools. Nurses striking for safety. Farmworkers organizing for dignity. It lives in transit systems, clinics, libraries, and unions. These aren’t relics. They’re seeds.
Reclaiming the story isn’t just about the message. It’s about the work. It means defending the commons not just rhetorically, but through action. That means forming cooperatives, walking picket lines, showing up for schools and clinics, resisting privatization, and building new institutions where the old ones fail. Democracy is not a brand. It’s a way of life.
The Far-right sold a story of siege. We need a story of belonging—not as a slogan, but as a foundation. The work of politics isn’t just to win elections. It is to rebuild the symbolic and material infrastructure of democratic life.
That starts with reclaiming the story—and the people who still believe it’s worth telling.
Suggested Readings
Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books, 2015.
Cramer, Katherine J. The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New York: The New Press, 2016.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press, 2001 [1944].
Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos G. The Rise of Necro/Narco-Citizenship: Belonging and Dying in the National Borderlands. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2025.
