In 1938 the American literary critic Howard Mumford Jones revealed an article in The Atlantic titled ‘Patriotism – but How?’ As Europe teetered getting ready to battle, Jones noticed how fascist dictators have been skilfully manipulating their nation’s myths to rally their populations. In contrast, the US appeared culturally adrift – its mythic heroes discredited by a era of cynical writers and ‘debunking biographers’. Bemoaning this development, Jones known as for a ‘patriotic renaissance’, encouraging its writers and historians to unearth ‘thrilling anecdotes’ from their nation’s previous. ‘The one strategy to conquer an alien mythology’, Jones wrote, ‘is to have a greater mythology of your personal.’
A response got here, fittingly sufficient, from Hollywood, America’s myth-making capital. But whereas Gone with the Wind (1939) was massively well-liked, critics apprehensive that the myths it promoted have been extra prone to encourage American-style fascism than fortify democracy. Drenched in nostalgia for the slave-owning South, the movie invoked the ‘Misplaced Trigger’ fable of the Civil Warfare, romanticising the Confederacy’s position as a noble effort to protect a virtuous lifestyle relatively than a violent rebel to keep up slavery. Many implored the movie’s producer, David O. Selznick, to not make it. The Jewish actor Hyman Meyer wrote that such a movie would ‘be welcomed by the Fascists … of this nation’, together with the Ku Klux Klan. Certain sufficient, it shortly grew to become a favorite amongst Germany’s Nazi elite.
It was additionally well-liked with southern segregationists (and, it must be stated, the filmgoing public). Throughout the Nineteen Fifties, Gone with the Wind’s Misplaced Trigger mythology was invoked to energise a ‘large resistance’ to the civil rights motion. Extra just lately, as Richard Slotkin notes in A Nice Dysfunction, the Misplaced Trigger fable has been embraced by Donald Trump’s MAGA motion. When insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on 6 January, many did so waving Accomplice flags. At a 2020 marketing campaign rally in Colorado, Trump criticised that 12 months’s Academy Awards by asking his supporters: ‘Can we get, like, Gone with the Wind again, please?’
For Slotkin, it is a recurring downside with American mythology. Whereas myths are highly effective instruments for political mobilisation, reactionary forces have typically been more proficient at exploiting them. From violent ‘redeemers’ dismantling Reconstruction within the late nineteenth century, to MAGA insurrectionists making an attempt to overturn the 2020 election, reactionaries have slotted their actions into a specific model of US historical past. Alongside the Misplaced Trigger, they’ve invoked the parable of the frontier, with its celebration of white settler violence in opposition to Native Individuals. These myths lend legitimacy to sure actions – cancelling elections, suppressing votes and committing political violence – that in any other case seem blatantly un-American.
Slotkin’s ebook is partly geared toward debunking these corrosive political mythologies. He argues that Trump has resurrected a ghoulish model of historical past to incubate ‘an authentically American fascism’. However Slotkin is just not ready to dispense with American mythology completely. As an alternative, like Jones, the ebook calls on progressives and liberals to articulate their very own, extra unifying, variations of the nationwide story. To defeat Trump, Slotkin argues, Democrats want to inform higher tales.
In these ‘story wars’, the liberal-left has typically discovered itself at a drawback. Progressives have typically taken a vital view of their nation’s previous. Change is important exactly as a result of US historical past has an plain darkish aspect. Consequently, they’ve been extra inclined to debunk myths than to create them, confronting the poisonous legacies of dispossession, slavery and exclusion relatively than glorifying the Founding Fathers.
But Slotkin insists that reckoning with the nation’s previous needn’t preclude unifying tales. He exhibits how progressive myths have crystallised at key moments of nationwide disaster. Within the last years of the Civil Warfare, Abraham Lincoln linked the liberation of enslaved peoples to the unfulfilled promise of America’s founding. A century later, Martin Luther King Jr framed the civil rights motion because the fulfilment of Lincoln’s ‘new delivery of freedom’. The victories of the Sixties – together with the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) – yielded a brand new mythology, which Slotkin dubs ‘the Delusion of the Motion’. Accordingly, the American story is one in all hard-fought progress in direction of equality and justice, pushed by marginalised teams preventing for inclusion.
Barack Obama articulated this nationwide story particularly nicely. As president, he typically linked his identification because the youngster of an African immigrant and a white lady from Kansas to a broader narrative of racial progress. He preferred to paraphrase King’s commentary that the arc of historical past, although lengthy, finally ‘bends towards justice’. But Obama’s presidency additionally revealed the doubtful maintain of such myths. For some Individuals, a Black president was not the fulfilment of historical past, however a harmful aberration. Conspiracists and racists responded by excluding Obama from the nationwide story completely. They questioned whether or not he was born within the US. They unfold false conspiracies about his ‘Muslim’ background. Such canine whistles weren’t confined to the perimeter: John Bolton, later Trump’s nationwide safety adviser, known as Obama ‘the primary post-American president’. Assaults on Kamala Harris have adopted an analogous sample. The US-born daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, Harris could be the primary Black lady to develop into president. Trump has questioned whether or not Harris is ‘Black’ in any respect.
This determined tactic displays Trump’s anxiousness about Harris, who’s a much more formidable opponent than Joe Biden. Whereas Biden struggled to articulate how his agenda fitted inside the broader arc of American historical past, Harris has successfully linked her marketing campaign to a protracted historical past of struggles for justice. ‘The shoulders on which we stand’, Harris informed a packed crowd in Wisconsin, ‘generations of Individuals earlier than us led the combat for freedom, and now … the baton is in our palms.’ The 2024 election will probably be a vital check of Slotkin’s thesis.
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A Nice Dysfunction: Nationwide Delusion and the Battle for America
Richard Slotkin
Belknap Press, 528pp, £29.95
Purchase from bookshop.org (affiliate hyperlink)Sam Collings-Wells is Junior Analysis Fellow in American Historical past on the College of Cambridge.