I’ve spent my career as a policy advocate focused on solutions to inequality, but the 2024 election caused me to rethink the centrality of policy to politics. The Biden-Harris Administration did more to battle the material suffering of working-class voters than Donald Trump ever will, but Democrats have surrendered in the war to make meaning about why folks are struggling, who’s to blame, and who can fix it. The consequences are far-reaching.

The right-wing message is a simple zero-sum racial argument: You’re worse off because liberals in government are giving your jobs, opportunities, and tax dollars to undeserving racialized Others. Today, the Other is a criminal immigrant, caricatured as so nefarious and inhuman that unprecedented millions of Latino citizens chose to distinguish themselves as not-them at the ballot box. What Democrats often missed was how much the radical right made immigrants the main bogeyman for the economy, not just for racial panic: J.D. Vance’s big affordable housing plan was to deport the immigrants supposedly buying up all the good homes.

This message is false, of course. Our economy is not zero-sum. Immigrants contribute more to our tax base than they get in return; their exploited labor keeps prices low, especially for housing and groceries; they are less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens; and their presence has revived dying small towns and cities across America. But everything we believe comes from a story we’ve been told. There is a network of companies and people who profit from selling the false zero-sum story to voters. And what they’re selling is costing us all. Consumption of media sources like conservative radio and Fox News skews reality; not only are their listeners and viewers misinformed about society on issues like crime, immigration, and the economy, but they rate their own personal economic situation worse because of the bad-news drumbeat. In the end, they were much more likely than other Americans to vote for Trump.

Unfortunately, the right wing’s narrative dominance has long spread beyond Fox News and talk radio. We are now three decades into a radical takeover of our information ecosystem. Democrats have yet to take this threat seriously. One out of every three newspapers in America has died since 2005. More than half of American counties have little-to-no access to local news. Your local news broadcaster has likely been bought up by a right-wing corporation called Sinclair, which now reaches over 70 percent of the American population, with a deliberate conservative agenda and a focus on crime, homelessness, and drugs.

Whole segments of the population depend on social media to interpret the world, unaware of how the profit-seeking algorithms are tuned to serve up the most outrageous and divisive content. And that indictment of social media’s basic financial model was valid before Elon Musk spent $44 billion to transform Twitter into a white supremacist and misogynistic message board. Meanwhile, about 75 percent of the country’s rigorous journalism is stuck behind a paywall. When facts are expensive, democracy is the cost.

The COVID-19 pandemic further eroded many Americans’ trust in government and expert authority. QAnon and the Big Lie about the 2020 election mainstreamed massive conspiracy theories. Disinformation, chiefly from Trump-supporting Russian operatives, reached a record high in 2024, but the right wing has effectively worked the referees by crying censorship. The country’s top cyber officials had to admit that they have been powerless to stop foreign powers from manipulating our voters with deepfake videos, salacious memes, and false threats. Voters are bombarded with a glut of information, and they turn to narrative frameworks like the us-versus-them zero-sum explanation to make sense of it all. Democrats lack both that kind of framework and the means to communicate it over and over again until it becomes common sense.

For too long, the party has relied on liberal Hollywood and celebrity Democrats to press a cultural advantage. But 2024 saw those celebrities fail to deliver, a great example of the misunderstanding Democrats have about cultural power today. Our side asks multimillionaire superstars like Beyoncé and Bruce Springsteen to sing at rallies; their side makes superstars out of lesser-known people who are willing to ride shotgun in people’s lives, offering folks daily podcasts and multi-hour video streams that interpret everyday life through a right-wing lens. MSNBC is often touted as the liberal counter to Fox News, but it has no central organizing narrative about the world; it covers the news of the day with whack-a-mole criticism of Republicans and Trump. MSNBC producers and hosts don’t scour the news for stories of corporate greed the way their counterparts at Fox seek out examples of “reverse racism” and criminal migrants. At Fox, the “news” is incidental; the zero-sum narrative of grievance drives the programming.

That zero-sum story is a deep framework that can apply to gender and sexuality as well. On its face, there’s no reason why the gender identity of about 1 percent of the population should matter to enough voters to have much significance in a national election. But the zero-sum narrative warns there can be no mutual progress: One group’s advancement comes at the expense of everyone else’s. So anti-discrimination laws for trans people will destroy your daughter’s childhood sports dreams and her chance at a college softball scholarship; gender-affirming care is a boondoggle in prisons that’s draining your tax dollars.

More broadly, seeing women’s progress as coming at the expense of men’s is a core tenet of what’s been termed the “manosphere” of male-targeted right-wing media that spans from video gaming to YouTube personalities to podcast hosts. Of course, working-class and young men have real material concerns that Democrats should address: Their wages are often no longer enough to sustain a family; housing costs are soaring and men’s college completion rates are sliding. But the manosphere blames women’s ambition and the #MeToo movement while positioning a strongman like Trump as the answer. Our story doesn’t blame anyone, and we don’t seem worried enough about fixing what’s ailing men.

Of course, policy still matters. Millions of Democratic voters stayed home because they’d lost faith that their party would deliver, even with the trifecta the base won for them in 2020. I still blame Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin for the Democrats not being able to run through the tape on an agenda that would have materially impacted millions of working-class people’s lives. Policies such as a $15 an hour minimum wage, labor law reform, the care agenda, and criminal justice reform would have been immediately felt in working families’ homes in a way that a long-term and bipartisan infrastructure plan could not. And top Democrats ignored the clear signs that key members of their base would use their presidential vote as a moral stand on Democrats’ policy choices in the war in the Middle East.

But we are not going to be in a policymaking position at the federal level for a while. In the meantime, the progressive infrastructure is in the wilderness, and our strategists, donors, and leaders need to get real about the stakes for meaning-making in America. That means handing the mic to the storytellers who have the clearest, most emotionally effective and repeatable message about what’s happened, who’s to blame, and who can fix it. When progressives don’t blame the people and corporations wielding actual power, demagogues (including the richest man on earth) can scapegoat some of the least powerful people in society, from trans kids to desperate asylum-seekers. A real progressive populist message will mean a fight with the donor class, as it did with the Harris campaign’s messaging about price gouging, taxes, and antitrust—a fight that donors won. But more than $1 billion over some 100 days didn’t buy Democrats the election, so maybe big money deserves to have less sway over the message in the future.

Where progressive-aligned capital could be better deployed is in making plays for media ownership, backing progressive influencers, and boosting the communications savvy of movements and organizations. Local news deserts are opportunities for philanthropy and people with patient capital. Large media outlets and social platforms have a price tag; it can’t only be the self-interested megalomaniacs who bid for them. And the current state of the progressive nonprofit communications infrastructure is abysmal, using outdated models that target research and press releases to a narrow elite audience. Donors should invest in shared communications capacity and insights about the new media environment that many organizations can use.

The problem has never been with our policies. The problem is Democrats’ failure to make human-level meaning of our policy prescriptions, to highlight how they address what is broken, and who’s to blame. The irony is that our side does have a compelling story to tell about how racism and end-stage capitalism have made life worse for us all—and our story has the advantage of being true. Democrats have yielded the floor for too long. Now we must learn to tell our story clearly, starkly, consistently, and in the online places where voters live their daily lives if we hope to uproot the gruesome version of reality that our opponents so fervently sold to our fellow Americans.