The unconscious nation: the politics of national confabulation in the age of populism

This article introduces the concept of national confabulation to describe the unconscious formation and widespread internalisation of emotionally charged yet historically distorted national narratives. Drawing from clinical understandings of confabulation as an involuntary response to cognitive disorientation, the concept is expanded into the psychosocial domain to illuminate how such narratives emerge amid ambient crisis and digital hyperconnectivity. Rather than stemming from deliberate fabrication or ideological manipulation, national confabulations arise from collective affective investments that operate beneath conscious awareness, offering coherence in conditions of persistent disorientation. Through case studies including Donald Trump’s populist rhetoric and the Capitol Hill insurrection, the article explores how emotionally resonant fictions come to feel true and structure national identity through affect rather than fact. It develops the notion of the unconscious nation to account for a mode of belonging shaped not by shared memory or evidence, but by the emotional appeal of repetitive, digitally mediated narratives. The article concludes by addressing the challenges of unsettling such narratives and calls for the cultivation of alternative affective attachments that can hold space for ambivalence without recourse to myth.