First The Story, Then The State

How narrative conditioning prepares the ground for democratic erosion

Photo by Belinda Fewings on Unsplash

Organized harm is never born from nothing.

The Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, the Trail of Tears, and the machinery of American slavery were extreme historical endpoints of processes that began earlier, with stories about who counted as a neighbor and who counted as a threat. A reclassification of ‘the other’ as dangerous, then as less than human, then as something that decent people had a responsibility to act against.

Before rights are formally restricted and institutions are restructured, someone has to convince enough people that the threat is real. The danger has to feel obvious, and the response justified. The target has to be recast as something the public should fear.

This does not require everyone involved to be consciously strategizing. Some people in power are. Others are following incentives, repeating cues, or responding to a story that has already begun to harden into common sense. The mechanism is more ordinary than it looks: a gradual reorganization of how people interpret what they see.

In democratic erosion, the story usually changes before the procedures do.

When the category is elastic, the warning does the work

This week, the White House released its “2026 Counterterrorism Strategy,” a 16-page federal document signed by President Trump on May 7 that formally places “violent left-wing extremists” alongside jihadists and cartels as one of America’s three primary national security threats.

In press remarks on May 7, senior counterterrorism director, Sebastian Gorka, confirmed the strategy’s language, describing its targets as groups whose ideology is “anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.” According to a review by The Advocate, the document references “left-wing” seven times. It does not mention right-wing extremism once.

This strategy depends on ignoring the broader record. A Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis found that, since 2016, right-wing extremists have carried out 152 attacks in the United States and killed 112 people. Left-wing extremists, by comparison, were responsible for 41 attacks and 13 deaths over the same period. The point is not that left-wing violence does not exist. It does. The point is that the administration’s chosen frame reverses the weight of the evidence.

Nothing has changed on paper yet. The law remains the same, and the rights are still formally intact. But the official story is shifting.

Civil liberties experts have raised concerns about how broadly terms like “left-wing extremism” or “anti-American activity” could be interpreted, and that breadth is the point. When the federal government embeds an elastic category into its counterterrorism architecture, the uncertainty about who fits inside it does the behavioral work long before any prosecution occurs.

What narrative conditioning is and isn’t

Narrative conditioning is more subtle than simple propaganda. It works through repetition, incentives, and institutional cues rather than direct orders. Instead of forcing belief, it teaches people what to notice, what to fear, and what to excuse.

It works through the stories people repeat until they feel ordinary: who is threatened, who is threatening, and what a decent person is supposed to do in response.

High-control movements have long understood this. Before institutions can be changed, people have to be taught to read the world differently. A community, a protest, a classroom, or a neighbor can be made to look like a threat. Once that happens, actions that would have seemed harmful can be defended as protection.

The sequence is consistent across historical contexts: a vulnerable group is named, a threat is attached to that group, not a specific verifiable threat but a diffuse moral one. The threat expands. The language escalates. The frame through which people interpret civic life reorganizes around the emergency.

Narrative change precedes legal change. Law rarely moves far beyond what enough of the public has been conditioned to tolerate.

“Protecting children” as political infrastructure

No rhetorical frame has proven more durable in recent American political life than the protection of children.

The problem is not that people care about children. The problem is what happens when “children” become a political abstraction. Once that happens, the real child in the real situation can disappear from view.

In the specific grammar of contemporary moral panic politics, “protecting children” functions as an infinitely elastic container. It has been used to justify book removal from public libraries; to frame drag performers as inherent threats; to cast LGBTQ+ identity as recruitment or contagion; and to position public school curricula as sites of ideological warfare requiring parental armed response.

Sociologist Stanley Cohen described moral panic as a process where public fear gathers around a supposed threat, often a person or group cast as dangerous, and builds pressure for extraordinary action. That basic pattern is still recognizable. The difference now is speed: the story can travel faster, reach farther, and harden before anyone has time to test whether it is true.

Groups like Moms for Liberty took moral panic politics and made it portable. A broad cultural anxiety could be carried into school board meetings, curriculum fights, library challenges, and local elections. The conflict no longer had to stay abstract. It had a place to go, a script to follow, and people who could be cast as protecting children from danger.

And the child, in all of this, remained largely abstract.

The power of “protecting children” as a political frame is precisely that it is unfalsifiable. Any pushback becomes evidence of the threat. Any defense of the targeted group becomes proof of complicity.

How protest becomes disorder

Watch the language shift.

A march can be described as a riot. A demonstration can be treated as a disruption. Participants become agitators, and organizers are recast as outside instigators. The story does not need to account for the whole event. It only needs one image, one tense moment, or one phrase that can be made to stand in for everything else.

When officials apply security language to civic behavior, protest starts to look like something other than democratic participation. It becomes easier to treat it as a public threat. The law may stay the same, but the meaning of the act has shifted, and that shift changes what kind of response feels acceptable.

Renée Good, a 37-year-old mother who had just dropped her child at school, was translated by the official frame into something else: a driver wielding a deadly weapon, a noncompliant threat, a person whose ordinary life disappeared behind the language of force. But the stuffed animals in her glove box told another story: a mother’s car, a school morning, a life full of ordinary tenderness.

That life did not fit cleanly inside the language used to explain force. And yet, almost immediately, a narrative began to form that made deadly force sound justified.

Alex Pretti was a 37-year-old ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA, someone whose ordinary work was to keep veterans alive. Witnesses say he moved toward a woman who had been knocked down by federal agents. It was the kind of motion his life had trained him for: toward injury, toward fear, toward the person on the ground. But inside the official frame, that movement became something else: threat.

Inside the official frame, the presence of a firearm became the whole story. What remained contested was the crucial part: whether Alex Pretti ever drew it, and whether agents had already disarmed him before they opened fire.

Once the frame changes, the same government power becomes easier to defend. A crackdown on dissent starts to sound like restoring order. Surveillance of organizers becomes easier to justify when it is described as investigating a criminal conspiracy. And once advocates are called rioters, prosecution can look less like political targeting and more like public safety.

Security language creeps into civic life by degrees. “Extremist” begins to cover more ground. “Violent” starts attaching itself to speech, presence, association, even proximity. “Threat” drifts away from specific acts and settles onto whole categories of people.

Once security language overtakes civic language, participation starts to carry the burden of proof. A person who shows up to a protest may be treated as suspicious simply for being there. A journalist with a camera can be folded into the crowd they are documenting. Coordination and the ordinary work of organizing begins to look like conspiracy.

The algorithmic acceleration

Political actors have always used fear. The difference now is how quickly that fear can be amplified, targeted, and made to feel everywhere at once.

Digital media does more than carry fear narratives. It rewards the versions that move fastest. Platforms built around engagement learn from each click, share, and comment that outrage keeps people watching. Threat spreads easily. So does certainty, especially the kind that gives people someone to blame.

An information environment built on those dynamics will systematically reward the most alarming interpretation of any event and penalize the more accurate but less emotionally legible one.

AI-generated imagery has added a new layer. During Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota, manipulated and AI-generated images depicting protest violence circulated widely before being corrected by official accounts. The corrections traveled less far than the images. The images had already done their work: reinforcing a narrative of disorder that shaped how subsequent events were interpreted, by people who never saw the retraction.

Once visual evidence becomes suspect, interpretive authority shifts. If you cannot verify what happened, you rely on who you trust to tell you. And if institutional trust has already been systematically degraded, that authority flows toward whoever has most successfully positioned themselves as the authentic alternative.

Information saturation is not politically neutral. In an environment where everything is contested and nothing is verifiable, the advantage belongs to the actor willing to assert the most forceful interpretation and repeat it most consistently.

The psychological attraction of certainty

The appeal of fear-based narratives cannot be explained purely in terms of manipulation. People are not simply deceived into these frameworks. They are, in many cases, genuinely relieved by them.

Periods of rapid social change, demographic shifts, economic instability, institutional erosion, and technological acceleration create what researchers call epistemic strain. The old ways of understanding the world no longer explain what people are seeing. Trustworthy institutions show their flaws. Norms that once felt permanent start to look more fragile, more contingent, and more open to challenge.

A current example is the rise of AI-generated deepfakes. People were trained to treat video, photographs, and recorded voices as evidence, but that framework no longer fits cleanly. Seeing a public figure speak, a doctor endorse a treatment, or a crowd appear to act in a certain way no longer settles the question of what happened. The old cues still feel persuasive, even as the environment has changed around them. That gap is where fear-based narratives thrive.

In that environment, a movement that offers total explanation is genuinely appealing. Not because people are stupid or uniquely susceptible, but because coherence is a real psychological need and uncertainty is genuinely uncomfortable.

The claims themselves can matter less than the clarity they offer. Fear-based narratives sort the world quickly. They tell people where the danger is, where innocence belongs, and how to act without sitting too long in uncertainty.

*Complexity is metabolically expensive. Certainty is efficient. High-control narratives offer a bargain: a world that feels coherent, as long as people agree to overlook whatever the story cannot explain.*

This is why Dean Withers can be right on the facts and still lose the room. Narrative conditioning gives people a way to stand inside the world wrapped in a warm, fuzzy blanket of certainty. Facts can correct an error, but they do not always replace the sense of order the story provides. To dislodge the story, something else has to offer that same sense of coherence.

What this means for democratic life

The consequences of sustained narrative conditioning accumulate slowly.

Public debate starts to shrink. Some positions remain legal but stop feeling safe to say out loud. The pressure comes through social cost: judgment, isolation, suspicion, the risk of being treated as dangerous. People begin editing themselves according to what they think their community will tolerate.

When enough people are living inside stories that absorb every challenge as confirmation, common ground for democratic deliberation begins to shrink. Evidence against the story becomes part of the story. Objection becomes suspicion. You cannot negotiate with someone who has been taught that your disagreement proves your corruption.

Institutional trust is extraordinarily difficult to rebuild once it has been degraded. A narrative that casts public institutions as captured or hostile does not need much to sustain itself. Normal institutional behavior starts to look suspicious. A ruling, a curriculum choice, a university statement, or a news report can be treated as evidence that the institution was corrupt all along.

The Minnesota fraud narrative works this way. Real fraud occurred, and it deserves investigation and remedy. But the story has expanded beyond the facts of any particular case. It now gets applied to schools, public benefits, immigrant communities, and state government itself. Once the frame is in place, ordinary administrative choices can be read as concealment, incompetence, ideological capture, or corruption.

Narrative conditioning can leave the institutions of self-governance standing while training people to see those institutions as hostile. The building remains. The process remains. What changes is whether people can still recognize it as part of democracy.

The question worth sitting with

None of this is permanent. Moral panics have peaked before and then receded. Narratives that once seemed total can weaken when they keep colliding with reality, especially when people are willing to document the collision.

But reversal takes work. People have to name what is happening with enough precision that others can recognize the pattern. Institutions have to find their courage again. So do the people inside them. Refusing the frame is often costly, which is why refusal matters.

There is another, harder part: recognizing that people inside these narratives are often responding to real human needs. They are looking for coherence, belonging, safety, a place to put their fear. The danger is what happens when those needs are organized into a story that makes other people disposable.

That recognition does not excuse the harm. It helps explain why the harm persists, and where the interruption has to begin.

Before the law changes, the story does.

That is where the work begins. Once people are taught to see ordinary civic life through the lens of threat, the next step is not always a new law. Sometimes it is ambiguity: the quiet expansion of what people fear might be punishable.

Megan M. American Horse writes about systems harm, democratic erosion, moral panic, and the political uses of fear. Her work examines how stories prepare people to excuse what they might otherwise recognize as violence, neglect, or abuse.