The Story War

Let's seize back the narrative

THE WAR BETWEEN THE STORIES

The rift between Red and Blue America is in part a clash of competing mythologies, with each side drawing on different stories about American identity and history to rationalize its values.

MAGA has weaponized traditional myths—the Frontier, the Founding Fathers, and the South's “Lost Cause”—to bolster a delusional sense of empowerment rooted in American exceptionalism, white supremacy, and resistance to change, while transforming shared symbols into tools of division.

Meanwhile, the Left and Center-Left have been unable to tell a coherent, unifying myth that a majority of Americans embrace. That's in part because of the Left’s ideological and demographic diversity. But it’s also because their more nuanced and complex story is hard for the mass media to neatly package and sell to its audience.

We Progressives do reference historical movements like the New Deal and Civil Rights, but our story is not as easily translated into memes and talking points as MAGA's simplistic, sterile cartoons. And again, the media prefer the cartoons because they generate a bigger readership and greater profits.

But here's the good news: Progressives and liberals could most definitely forge an entertaining, digestible, and unifying story. How? By acknowledging America’s history of injustice as they also celebrate our tradition of steadily expanding justice, fairness, and inclusion—linking this stirring legacy to current crusades for economic and racial equality.

America’s crisis is a war of stories. Unless the Left can muster a compelling overarching myth that's graspable and salable by the mass media, the right’s ridiculous, reductionist myth will persist.

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The ideas I name above are in part inspired by an essay by cultural historian Richard Slotkin. You can read it here: https://tinyurl.com/MAGAcartoons

The Story We Haven't Yet Told: A Progressive American Myth

While MAGA slobbers its absurd "Make America Great Again," Progressives have been writing policy papers. While the toxic trump cult has been waving Confederate flags and sputtering witless fables of lost glory, we on the Left have been fact-checking and issuing corrections.

But their idiot tales can’t be defeated by our facts and evidence alone. They can only be rendered irrelevant by our rousing, true, and well-told stories.

MAGA's strength lies in its superficial and barren but easy-to-grasp story. Its adherents rally around a shallow shared hallucination that they have concocted from distorted misunderstandings of American history.

The Left has not fully registered the fact that we need to tell bigger, better, bolder stories than the right. Here’s the truth: Our stories are far truer than theirs. Our stories are more authentically sacred, liberating, and nourishing. Our stories include the high adventures of people who have refused to bow to tyranny, who have enlarged freedom, who have fought and sacrificed so that the circle of "We the People" might grow ever wider.

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The River of Struggle

From the beginning, America has been two things at once: a project of domination and a project of liberation. Slaveholders wrote "all men are created equal," even as abolitionists began their long campaign to make that phrase true.

Railroad tycoons cruelly exploited workers in the name of profit, even as immigrant miners and women textile workers birthed the labor movement. Native peoples were displaced, yet their descendants still fight fiercely for land, water, and treaty rights.

In the early United States, only 6% of Americans had the right to vote. Eligibility was mostly limited to white male property owners or taxpayers. The long fight to expand voting rights in America had two major climaxes: the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, granting women the right to vote, and the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, dismantling barriers for racial minorities.

If MAGA clings to the fictitious legend of innocence—that America was once whole and pure, and can be made so again—the Progressive story rests on the narrative of our enlightened struggle, our compassionate zest for life, and our yearning for everyone, not just a few, to wield the freedom to fulfill their soul’s calling.

This is the river that runs through American history. It’s not the sanitized stream of one-dimensional patriotism, but the rushing current of people who have refused to accept the lie that freedom had reached its limits.

Our glory is not that we were perfect, but that generation after generation of ordinary people has risen up to perfect us.

We aren’t defined by the cruelty of our past but by the abolitionists who risked their lives to end slavery; by the suffragists who were jailed for demanding votes for women; and by countless others, including the union organizers who won a wide array of rights for workers: the 40-hour work week, an end to child labor, sick leave, minimum wage laws, time-and-a-half overtime pay, health and safety regulations in the workplace, unemployment insurance and Social Security benefits, the right to collectively bargain, legal protections against discrimination, and employer-provided healthcare and pension plans.

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A People of Many

The unifying myth of the Left begins with this recognition: America has always been many. From the Iroquois confederacies that inspired the Founders' ideas of federalism, to the Black and Brown workers who built our railroads, tilled our fields, and created America’s great wealth, to the waves of immigrants who carried languages and rituals across oceans: America's strength is its pluralism. We are the nation that, at our best, has turned strangers into kin.

That pluralism isn't chaos. It's covenant: an ever-renewed vow that we belong to each other, not because we share bloodlines, but because we share the task of generating more and more freedom.

This is the deeper inheritance of the "new birth of freedom" that Lincoln envisioned at Gettysburg, the "Second Founding" that Reconstruction promised, and the dream Martin Luther King Jr. carried across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Heroes of the Common Good

Every national myth needs heroes. The Progressive pantheon is overflowing:

Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery to become a leading abolitionist, eloquent orator, and influential writer, advocating for the rights and equality of African Americans in 19th-century America. His accomplishments include inspiring the abolitionist movement with his bestselling autobiography, advising presidents, supporting women's suffrage, and holding numerous government offices.

Harriet Tubman, who escaped enslavement and strode back into danger again and again to lead others to freedom.

Mother Jones and César Chávez, who proved that labor solidarity could break the grip of industrial barons.

Ida B. Wells, who wielded her voice against lynching.

Fannie Lou Hamer, who recruited, trained, and supported women of all races who sought election to government offices.

Alice Paul, who chained herself to the White House gates and chose prison over silence as she fought to win women the right to vote.

Rachel Carson, who showed us that the earth deserves defense and protection.

These are not the hypocritical icons of MAGA's founding myths. They are resilient Americans who made democracy real. They proved that freedom is not handed down from the powerful but won, again and again, through persistence and ingenuity.

This tradition lives today in the teachers striking for their students and the young climate activists facing down fossil fuel giants. It lives in the essential workers who kept society running during a pandemic, and in the voting-rights advocates who protect democracy from sabotage. And it burns in the journalists and librarians refusing censorship, the artists and comedians who keep speaking dangerous truths, the lawyers and community organizers who challenge voter suppression and authoritarian overreach, the migrants and their allies resisting cruelty at the border, and the millions of ordinary Americans marching, striking, donating, voting, and refusing to be cowed by the authoritarian creep of the Trumpocalypse.

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The Good Fight, the Good Future

The Progressive story reaches into the future by extending its through-line: America is most itself when it expands rights, when it protects the vulnerable, when it tames concentrated power in the name of the common good.

That's why the New Deal and Great Society are essential triumphs in the progressive story—not as relics of policy but as symbols of what happens when a people believe they can bend the state toward justice.

That's why the climate movement and the renewed energy of labor unions matter—not only as issue campaigns but as proof that the struggle continues, that the myth lives.

The MAGA vision tells Americans they are losing their country. The Progressive vision must tell Americans they are still building their country. The work is unfinished, and that’s our pride.

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The Stakes of Story

Without this story, we cede the flag, the founding, and the future to those who would narrow America's promise.

We seem to be permanent critics rather than inheritors of an inspiring tradition we helped create.

We let others define patriotism as nostalgia instead of claiming it as the courage to perfect an imperfect union.

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The New American Myth

Our myth is this: We are a nation of strugglers, dreamers, and liberators. We are descendants not just of the 6% of white male property owners who could vote in 1796, but of every abolitionist, suffragist, striker, marcher, and organizer who widened the horizon of freedom.

We honor our past not by sanitizing it, but by continuing its unfinished revolutions. We take inspiration not from fantasies of lost purity but from real victories wrested from injustice.

This myth unites the Left with America's deepest tradition: the tradition of ordinary people making democracy bigger than it was yesterday. It’s the story that says: We are not done. We will never be done. That’s our greatness.

This is our story. We’ve got to tell it—not just in books and essays, but in every speech, campaign, and conversation about what America means. The story is true. We need to be more ingenious, resourceful, and robust about claiming it and expressing it.

JOYOUS UPRISING

We don’t need to cower in the face of MAGA’s cowboy-hat ghost stories.

We don’t need their counterfeit patriotism stitched together from Confederate flags and beer slogans.

We have our own saga, hot-blooded and supernova-bright.

We have a river of ancestors who sang the republic wider and wilder than its founders dared to dream.

Our myth is enlightened struggle. Our myth is joyous uprising. Our myth is exuberantly singing the unfinished anthem of freedom.

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MAGA clings to the ignorant myth of pretend innocence, a toxic fairy tale of purity already lost. We say America was never whole, but was always holy in the way it dared its people to rise up and expand the circle of “We.”

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Our story is not the pathetic, whiny “make America great again.” Our story is: America has never stopped becoming. Becoming freer. Becoming more equal. Becoming more alive.

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Speaking of true stories:

Read my thoughts on why REALITY HAS A LIBERAL BIAS: tinyurl.com/RealityLiberalBias

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Read my thoughts on why THE TWO POLITICAL PARTIES AREN’T ANYTHING ALIKE: tinyurl.com/TwoPartiesNotAlike

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Reasons why American democracy might be stronger than donald trump: tinyurl.com/DemocracyWillNotDie

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Links to all my other stuff: linktr.ee/robbrezsny

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FREE WILL ASTROLOGY

For the Week of September 25

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): The ancient Mesopotamians believed each person had a personal god called an ilu who acted as a protector, guide, and intercessor with the greater gods. You’re in a phase when your own ilu is extra active and ready to undergo an evolutionary transformation. So assume that you will be able to call on potent help, Libra. Be alert for how your instincts and intuitions are becoming more acute and specific. If you feel an odd nudge or a dream insists on being remembered, take it seriously. You're being steered toward deeper nourishment.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): In Venice, Italy, floods periodically damage books at libraries and bookstores. Trained volunteers restore them with meticulous, hands-on methods. They use absorbent paper and towels to separate and dry the pages, working page by page. I offer this vignette as a useful metaphor, Scorpio. Why? Because I suspect that a rich part of your story needs repair. It’s at risk of becoming irrelevant, even irretrievable. Your assignment is to nurse it back to full health and coherence. Give it your tender attention as you rehabilitate its meaning. Rediscover and revive its lessons and wisdom.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): In classical Indian music, a raga is not a fixed composition but a flexible framework. It's defined by a specific scale, characteristic melodic phrases, and a traditional time of day for performance. Musicians improvise and express emotion within that expansive set of constraints. Unlike Western compositions, which are written out and repeated verbatim, a raga has different notes each time it's played. I think this beautiful art form can be inspirational for you, Sagittarius. Choose the right time and tone for what you’re creating. Dedicate yourself to a high-minded intention and then play around with flair and delight. Define three non-negotiable elements and let everything else breathe.

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): In medieval European monasteries, scribes left blank pages in certain texts. This was not done by accident, but to allow for future revelations. Later readers and scribes might fill these spaces with additional text, marginalia, and personal notes. Books were seen as living documents. I recommend a metaphorical version of this practice to you, Capricorn. You will thrive by keeping spaces empty and allowing for the unknown to ripen. You may sometimes feel an urge to define, control, and fortify, but acting on that impulse could interfere with the gifts that life wants to bring you. Honor what is as-yet unwritten.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): In West African Vodún cosmology, the deity named Lêgba guards the crossroads. He is the mediator and gatekeeper between the human world and spirit realm. He speaks all languages and serves as the first point of contact for communication with other spirits. In the weeks ahead, Aquarius, you may find yourself in Lêgba’s domain: between past and future, fact and fantasy, solitude and communion. You may also become a channel for others, intuiting or translating what they can’t articulate. I won’t be surprised if you know things your rational mind doesn’t fully understand. I bet a long-locked door will swing open and a long-denied connection will finally coalesce. You’re not just passing through the crossroads. You are the crossroads.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): In 1977, NASA launched two Voyager spacecraft into the abyss. Both carried a message in the form of a golden record to any extraterrestrial who might find it. There were greetings in 55 languages, natural sounds like whale songs and thunderstorms, music by Chuck Berry and others, plus over 100 images and diagrams explaining how to find Earth. It was science as a love letter, realism with a dash of audacity. I invite you to craft your own version of a golden record, Pisces. Distill a message that says who you are and what you are seeking: clear enough to be decoded by strangers, warm enough to be welcomed by friends you haven’t met. Put it where the desired audience can hear it: portfolio, outreach note, manifesto, demo. Send signals that will make the right replies inevitable.

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ARIES (March 21-April 19): In Tonglen, a Tibetan Buddhist meditation, you visualize yourself breathing in the suffering, pain, or negativity of other people, then imagine breathing out relief, healing, or compassion toward them. The practice can also be done on your own behalf. The goal is to transform tension and stress into courage, vitality, and healing. I recommend this practice, Aries. Can you turn your scars into interesting tattoos? Can you find mysterious opportunities lurking in the dilemmas? Can you provide grace for others as you feed your own fire?

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): In a YouTube video, I watched Korean artisans make hanji paper in the same way their predecessors have for 1,300 years. It was complicated and meditative. They peeled off the inner bark of mulberry trees, then soaked it, cooked it, and pounded it into pulp. After mixing the mash with the aibika plant, they spread it out on screens and let it dry. I learned that this gorgeous, luminous paper can endure for a thousand years. I hope you draw inspiration from this process, Taurus. Experiment with softening what has felt unyielding. Treat what’s tough or inflexible with steady, artful effort. Be imaginative and persistent as you shape raw materials into beautiful things you can use for a long time.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Legendary jazz musician Sun Ra was a Gemini who claimed to be from the planet Saturn. He aspired to live in a state of “cosmic discipline”—not just in his musical training but in his devotion to self-improvement, aesthetic exploration, and a connection to transcendent realities. He fused outrageous style with sacred order, chaos with clarity. I invite you to draw inspiration from him. Put your personal flair in service to noble ideas. Align your exuberant self-expression with your higher purpose. Show off if it helps wake people up.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): In Inuit tradition, qarrtsiluni means “waiting in the darkness for something to burst forth.” It refers to the sacred pause before creativity erupts, before the quest begins, before the light returns. This is an apt description of your current state, Cancerian. Tend your inner stillness like a fire about to ignite. Don’t rush it. Honor the hush. The energies you store up will find their proper shape in a few weeks. Trust that the silence is not absence but incubation. Luminosity will bloom from this pregnant pause.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): You’re feeling the stirrings of a desire that’s at least half-wild. A surprising vision or opportunity has begun to roar softly within you. But here's key advice: Don't chase it recklessly. Practice strategic boldness. Choose where and how you shine. Your radiance is potent, but it will be most effective when offered deliberately, with conscious artistry. You're being asked to embody the kind of leadership that inspires, not dominates. Be the sun that warms but doesn’t scorch! PS: People are observing you to learn how to shine.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): If humans ever perfect time-travel, I’m going to the Library of Alexandria in ancient Egypt. It was crammed with papyrus scrolls by authors from all over the world. It was also a gathering point for smart people who loved to compare notes across disciplines. Poets argued amiably with mathematicians. Astronomers discussed inspirations with physicians. Breakthroughs flowed feely because ideas were allowed to migrate, hybridize, and be challenged without rancor. Consider emulating that rich mélange, Virgo. Convene unlike minds, cross-pollinate, and entertain unprecedented questions. The influences you need next will arrive via unexpected connections.

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