Causal Lies, Emotional Truths: A Functional Approach to Far-Right Alternative Histories

• In Event: Narratives from the Political Right

Abstract

Far-right movements employ alternative histories, narratives that distort or reinvent the past, as tools for political mobilization, ideological coherence, and the rejection of democratic legitimacy. These stories, including false legal doctrines, fabricated constitutional turning points, and conspiratorial reinterpretations of national decline, draw on the formal logic of counterfactual reasoning while discarding its methodological constraints. This paper introduces an interdisciplinary framework for analyzing far-right alternative histories by integrating counterfactual analysis from political science and narrative theory from comparative literature with Epstude and Roese’s (2008) functional theory of counterfactual thinking distinguishing between content-specific pathways (informational, causal reasoning) and content-neutral pathways (emotional activation, identity reinforcement). Far-right narratives leverage both: they offer distorted causal chains to justify grievance and political action, while simultaneously activating emotional and motivational responses that sustain belief in the absence of empirical support. Using examples from the Sovereign Citizen movement and post-2020 election denialism, the paper demonstrates how these narratives exploit critical junctures, inflated agency, and redirected timelines to create closed ideological systems. By combining analytical and affective appeals, they function as full-spectrum narratives of grievance, positioning the present as the site of loss and the future as a redemptive struggle. The framework presented here offers political scientists and scholars of extremism a method for understanding how far-right actors use the past not as record, but as weapon.

Author

• Chelsea Joliet, City University of New York