Extreme political narratives: A response to Spear’s “Narratives that Divide and Narratives that Bind”

Abstract

Andrew Spear (2025) provides a useful and sympathetic account of our thoughts about narratives that arise in those with extreme political convictions (Ulatowski and Lumsden 2023). Indeed, his very title: “Narratives that Divide and Narratives that Bind,” gets to the heart of what we are attempting to do with our narrative account of political extremism The narratives that bind are those political narratives that unite the members of a group not only by being held in common but by entering into those individuals’ narrative identities. The narratives that divide are the kind of narratives rooted in a form of rejection of the opposing group in a way that insulates itself from the reasoning that such a group might provide. Those two characteristics of narratives can be two sides of the same coin; the binding among members of the group can rest on the rejection of an opposing group.