The Myths Americans Live By

Posted on Saturday 5 October 2024 by Mark R. Kelly

A person’s history affects how he views the world; so too does a nation’s history affects its perceived position in the world, and its place in history. And every nation, or at least most nations, think it is very special, in some way or another. In ways that wouldn’t matter to some other nation. Everyone needs to feel special. Problems begin when people insist those reasons to feel special are somehow built into the natural order of things, and must be institutionalized.

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NY Times, guest essay by Richard Slotkin, 5 Oct 2024: To Understand Trump vs. Harris, You Must Know These American Myths


The writers is the author of A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America, whose table of contents indicates that it expands on the themes of this essay. (The description for the book on Amazon makes it sound like I’d read it before writing yesterday’s post.) I mentioned a review of this book when it appeared in March, in this post.

The essay begins:

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are making their appeals to the American electorate on the basis of personality, character and policy. But they are also framing themselves as actors in the American story — the events of the recent past and the deeper narrative of U.S. history carried by the symbol-rich stories of our national mythology.

There has been very little common ground expressed between the parties in this election, except the belief that a victory by the opposition would be apocalyptic. Even when they invoke the same historical references, they present them in radically different ways. To Democrats, Jan. 6 was a shameful assault on democracy. To many Republicans, it was a patriotic protest of a rigged election.

It’s as if we are living in two different countries, each with a different understanding of who counts as American.

Conservatives have had more practice refining mythological American “scripts” than liberals have, the writer points out. Then he steps through the core myths, which I’ll summarize thus:

  • The myth of the frontier;
  • The myth of the founding;
  • The liberation myth;
  • The myth of the Lost Cause;
  • The myth of the good war.

These are ‘myths’ because they favor just one group of Americans, as he says, regarding the first four:

In all of these myths, the default American nationality is white. That ethnonationalist presumption would be challenged by the crises of the 20th century: World War I, the Depression and World War II. These compelled the nation’s political and cultural elites to start seeing as equals the racial and ethnic minorities that had been marginalized or excluded from the body politic.

Considered from other points of view, they would not be considered existential certitudes, as the MAGA folks treat them. Thus their justification for lying, and violence.

This new Lost Cause also holds that to save civilization, extraordinary methods, up to and including violence, are justified. On Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Trump told a mass of demonstrators, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

This week, he said that to check the problem of property crime across America, it would take just “one really violent day” to fix it.

And he has some suggestions for Democrats.

Democrats could benefit by framing their programs with a story that has the narrative coherence and emotional resonance of myth. The party’s reform agenda is justified by its critique of America’s history of capitalist exploitation of land and labor, racial discrimination, Indigenous dispossession and imperialism.

But nearly every major modern nation-state’s history is rife with social injustice and the violence of unjust wars. What is admirable about America is not its supposed exception to these patterns of history but the persistence with which its people have struggled to amend injustice and realize an extraordinarily broad and inclusive concept of nationality.

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And then the usual daily quick items.

  • Washington Post, Colbert I. King, 4 Oct 2024: Opinion | This election isn’t about changing minds, subtitled “There’s no convincing Trump’s supporters that he shouldn’t be president. But he can still be beaten.” Comment: there are variations of this saying: You can’t reason someone out of a position that they did not reason themselves into.
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