If I worked in the state of Florida, I could not teach US history the way I do now. The state’s Stop Woke Act, passed in 2022 ostensibly to protect white students from feeling guilty about their racial privilege, bans any teaching “based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, and economic inequalities”.
This is absurd because while there is much that is admirable about the United States, it is indisputable that the nation was founded on the dispossession of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans. To deny that is to promote a sanitised version of American history for right-wing purposes.
Indeed, the American past has become a key battleground in the larger war over its future. This November, American voters head to the polls for yet another contentious contest to choose between two starkly different candidates. As Richard Slotkin argues in his ambitious and brilliant new book, the crisis in American politics manifests as “a crisis in the state of public myth signal[ling] a potential rupture of the web of beliefs and practices that hold nations together”.
Slotkin defines national myths as stories “that effectively evoke the sense of nationality and provide an otherwise loosely affiliated people with models of patriotic action”. No nation can survive without historical myths. For, in Benedict Anderson’s famous phrase, nations are “imagined communities” that require citizens to feel fellowship with strangers with whom they have little in common.
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Slotkin has spent a long and distinguished career exploring one foundational American story: The Myth of the Frontier. In a trilogy of classic works – Regeneration Through Violence, The Fatal Environment and Gunfighter Nation – he traced the cultural and political history of the great American genre of the Western from colonial times to the end of the 20th century. According to The Myth of the Frontier, white Americans brought civilisation to a wild continent by battling indigenous savages and reaping the land’s natural bounty.
A Great Disorder carries that story up to the present time. But Slotkin also analyses the development of other big American myths. The Myth of the Founding celebrates the unique genius of the men who established the nation’s republican institutions. The civil war, Slotkin argues, gave rise to three different myths. The Liberation Myth saw the war as a “new birth of freedom” that purged the nation of its original sin of racialised chattel slavery. For a brief time after the civil war, the US conducted a remarkable experiment in biracial democracy as former slaves gained significant political representation in the former states of the Confederacy.
That experiment was violently overthrown by white supremacists who promulgated the myth of the Lost Cause, which posited that the South’s secession was a noble defence of white civilisation. The Lost Cause myth justified the continued subjugation of African-Americans thereafter. Many northerners, meanwhile, adopted the Myth of Reunion, which saw Reconstruction as a mistake and joined the reassertion of white supremacy.
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Slotkin is at his best when explaining the role played by works of popular culture in shaping national mythology. For example, the platoon movies of the second World War showed how diverse ethnicities could join together to fight for the US. They played a crucial role in establishing a new national story: the Myth of the Good War, which “celebrates the nation’s emergence” during the second World War “as a multiracial and multiethnic democracy, as well as a world power”. He shows the importance of the film Black Hawk Down to George W Bush’s foreign policy. Bush’s obsession with the film’s portrayal of military restraint as a sign of weakness helped fuel his invasion of Iraq.
Though Slotkin describes Donald Trump as “historically illiterate”, he shows that the Make America Great Again movement headed by Trump owes its success partly to its ability to root itself in national myths. Maga is “akin to fascism, but with authentically American roots, combining the ethnonationalist racism of the Lost Cause, an insurrectionist version of the Founding, and the peculiar blend of violent vigilantism and libertarian economics associated with the Frontier”.
At the grassroots level, Maga tells its followers a convincing story that spurs them to action. Insurrectionists at the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021, some of them carrying Confederate flags, saw themselves as American patriots. They thought they were taking their country back in a “regeneration through violence” with many precedents in American history.
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At the elite level, the key source of funding for the American right comes from the fossil-fuel industry, which promotes climate change denial and unfettered drilling as part of the exploitation of nature that the Myth of the Frontier has always seen as essential to American economic development.
National myths inevitably stress what is particular to that nation. But the crisis of national identity and the rise of authoritarian ethnonationalism as a response has hardly been limited to the US in recent years. Instead of looking across the Atlantic, we need merely glance in the other direction across the Irish Sea to Brexit Britain. Slotkin overstates the uniqueness of American myths, which have analogues in other countries. Australia, for example, has its own version of the myth of the Frontier, as do other nations founded on settler colonialism.
But Slotkin is right that there are some things that are peculiarly American. In particular, the US level of gun ownership is unparalleled internationally; its rate of approximately 1.2 firearms per person is nearly double that of any other nation. This fact is partly explained by the historical resonance of firearms in its foundational Frontier myth that “sees the country as a borderland where white civilisation advances against the wilderness and its ‘savage’ Indigenous peoples”. Because so many Americans own so many guns the threat of political violence is so high. This is particularly true because many Maga supporters see guns as giving them not simply the “right to shoot deer” but the “right to shoot tyrants”. Those who pursue vigilante violence unfortunately have a long history to draw upon.
Slotkin is at his best explaining the role played by works of popular culture in shaping national mythology. For example, the platoon movies of the second World War showed how diverse ethnicities could join together to fight for the US
Though Slotkin has built his career on deconstructing American national myths, he knows that criticism alone is inadequate. You cannot argue with a story. Instead, what you need is a compelling narrative of your own.
One of the reasons why Maga has been so successful despite being a minority movement is that progressives have not yet crafted equally effective myths. Progressives cannot simply criticise the litany of injustices that make up American history. They also have to find something positive about their nation’s past that future generations can build upon. They need not just “critical analysis of myths” but “new ways of telling the American story”.
Slotkin tells progressives where to begin. They should appeal to the two great moments since Reconstruction of advance toward a more equal and just society. The first is the New Deal, when the American government redistributed wealth and took responsibility for ensuring the welfare of the majority of its citizens. The second is the African-American civil rights movement, which helped instigate a series of movements for gender and racial equality. Progressives, Slotkin argues, will have to find a way to integrate the myth of the New Deal and the myth of the movement if they wish to control the American future.
The problem, as Slotkin knows, is that the Democratic coalition is broad and diverse. Movements for a Green New Deal and for Black Lives Matter have cohered in the party’s left wing. This coalescence was visible in the Bernie Sanders campaigns and today among left-wing members of Congress such as the so-called Squad.
But though it has grown in recent years, the Democrats’ left wing remains subordinate. Anxious to appeal to moderate voters and corporate donors, most party elites are hesitant to advocate the kind of radical programmes once advanced by a Franklin Roosevelt or a Martin Luther King. As a result, mainstream Democrats don’t have as compelling a story to tell as do Maga Republicans. If Biden loses to Trump in November, this may be one reason why.
At times Slotkin overstates the importance of national myths in American history. He occasionally writes as if American history moves forward through contradictions in its myths rather through contradictions in its social structure that give rise to such myths. He claims, for example, that the “Civil war was above all a culture war”. While focusing on myths capable of winning a broad consensus, he also overlooks alternative stories, especially those advanced by non-white Americans. He rightly makes a lot of the Western but overlooks another key American genre: the slave narrative.
Because Slotkin deals with so many national myths in their broader contexts, he inevitably has to cover a great deal of American history. At times, he loses his theme in the process of recounting a grand narrative. But even here, A Great Disorder is useful as one of the best single volumes to cover the span of American history and to demonstrate the relevance of the American past to the American present. It is a book that a teacher could gladly recommend to a curious student. That is, so long as they don’t teach in Florida.
Daniel Geary is the Mark Pigott associate professor in American history at Trinity College Dublin
Further reading
Ronald Reagan: The Movie by Michael Rogin (University of California Press, 1992). Written during the Reagan era rather than Trump era, this classic collection of essays remains among the best studies of American national mythology. Rogin offers a brilliant and still relevant analysis of what he calls the “countersubversive tradition in American politics”.
Myth America by Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer (Basic Books, 2023). Twenty leading historians puncture popular myths about American history, many of which are spread by the American right. Also worth reading by Kruse and Zelizer is Fault Lines, a history of the US since 1974 that explains the roots of contemporary political divisions.
These Truths by Jill Lepore (WW Norton, 2018). The best single volume history of the United States written by a Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer who had to rethink her project after Trump’s election occurred when she was halfway finished writing it.
