Tom Zoellner in the Los Angeles Review of Books: The stories that a country tells itself are just as critical to its functioning as its army, its laws, its borders, and its flag. Where did the country emerge from, and where might it be heading?
Such questions of national mythology are especially fraught in the United States, still relatively young in the world, big, rich, powerful, multiethnic, and operating on a set of profoundly contradictory ideas. That it might be possible to make sense of American political division by naming those myths and interpreting the news of the day through their filter is the guiding ambition of Richard Slotkin’s exciting and detailed new decoder ring of a book, A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America.
The title is an homage to the Wallace Stevens poem “Connoisseur of Chaos,” which declares that “a great disorder is an order”—not just as a metaphysical statement but also as a tidy description of the contested historiography of the United States. Can we look into our past to find the white, Christian, hierarchical, free-market society of red America’s imagining? Or do we see the imperfect but ever-striving egalitarian and multiethnic vision of blue America? Both sides have told selective stories, which are neither completely true nor exactly false.
“Each has a different understanding of who counts as American,” writes Slotkin, “a different reading of American history, and a different vision of what our future ought to be.” His goal in the first part of the book is to describe and unpack “America’s foundational myths to expose the deep structures of thought and belief that underlie today’s culture wars.” In the second part of the book, Slotkin directly applies those collective stories to make sense of the tumultuous last eight years.
It is difficult to imagine a more qualified author for this freighted task. Slotkin has made a career out of dissecting grand national myths. He is an emeritus endowed chair of English and American studies at Wesleyan University and the author of a trilogy of books on what he calls the “Myth of the Frontier.” Two of them were National Book Award finalists, and his argument in Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (1973)—that European settlers learned the ways of Indigenous Americans only to convert them into tools of repression and genocide—has influenced the historiography of colonial America enormously.
Every nation does it, of course. Their leaders and poets construct “semifictional or wholly imaginary histories of the origins of their people and territories, which would enable Provençals, Bretons, and Franks to see themselves as French, or Bavarians, Prussians, and Swabians as German,” writes Slotkin. He makes a parallel case that the United States relies on these rich historical stories especially heavily, considering the multiplicity of its ethnicities, its sheer geographic reach, and its own self-proclaimed status as the first country in the world founded on an idea.
Those stories that Americans tell about themselves in the name of the “imagined community,” in the words of the theorist Benedict Anderson, manifest through public rituals like fireworks shows, public school curricula, the discourse of politicians, and the touchstones reinforced by constant references in the press and pop culture: the Alamo, Custer’s Last Stand, the showdown at the O.K. Corral, Valley Forge, “I Have a Dream.”
What are the specific meta-stories that drive today’s United States? Though he had a potential banquet before him and the possibility of a very messy plate, Slotkin keeps his scope narrowed to five. This number feels right: broad enough to avoid the trap of binaristic red-versus-blue stories yet tight enough to keep a useful focus. Each one is rooted in a specific historical process, though one with disputed meanings.
There’s Slotkin’s specialty, of course, the Myth of the Frontier: the romance of westward expansion and the individual Turnerian grit that helped subdue the unruly Indigenous inhabitants of a land that was meant to be American.
There’s the Myth of the Founding, in which wise gentlemen—albeit with slaveholders included among them—enshrined a set of moral principles into the documents that established a government dedicated to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
There are the Myths of the Civil War, which fall into two basic categories: the Southern Lost Cause, which rails against federal interference, especially when it comes to racial matters, and the Liberation Myth, which sees the federal government as the swift sword of racial justice.
There’s the Myth of the Good War, the idea that the United States is a multiethnic platoon out of a Hollywood film, striking a blow for democracy against totalitarianism and ascending into its rightful place at the top of the free world, with an omnipotent military and supercharged technological economy.
And finally, though Slotkin doesn’t group them among the “four myths [that] have historically been the most crucial,” there’s the myth of the New Deal, and the associated myth of the Civil Rights Movement, in which activist government policy rides to the rescue against the depredations of capitalism and racism.
Running contemporary headlines through this five-part interpretative machine yields pragmatic and useful results that will keep working after the narrative ends. Once you accept Slotkin’s premise that myths are hidden scripts for present-day actors (a proposition hard to deny), you begin to see them at work everywhere. While it is usually hyperbolic to claim that a book will change your life, this one may well have a permanent effect on how you consume and think about American political news.
When George W. Bush announced the country’s invasion of Iraq after 9/11, he purposely invoked Good War imagery in the nation’s associative mind by likening the jet attacks to Pearl Harbor, and the crusade against Saddam Hussein to one against Nazism. Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign tapped into Civil Rights Movement iconography, and the Tea Party backlash was undoubtedly rooted in atavistic Lost Cause urges of reclaiming a white beau ideal of the past.
Slotkin’s analysis is especially strong on guns, which should be no surprise from the author of Gunfighter Nation: Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (1992). He sees the 1990s debacles of Ruby Ridge and Waco as especially damaging because they reinforced Reconstruction-era paranoia among those who jealously guard their view of the Second Amendment. (It always seems to come back to the South.) The manly Hollywood actor Charlton Heston, also an NRA president in his later years, invoked the Myth of the Founding and the Myth of the Frontier when it came to his promotion of extreme positions in firearm rights discourse.
Though wracked and weakened by corruption scandals, the NRA still promotes the bogus claim that the Second Amendment was written to allow states to rise up against an oppressive federal government. In fact, it was somewhat the opposite: the founders worried that big standing armies posed a danger to the government and wanted to decentralize the stockpiling of rifles. The “originalist” doctrine of constitutional interpretation embraced by the right-wing judiciary claims to divine the founders’ real intent, but it is more about making a historical myth fit into a contemporary partisan choice.
Our addiction to national mythologies—and our inability to create a common meaning for them—has brought us to an unhappy stalemate. It’s hard to bargain and compromise with an opposition that you believe has fundamentally misunderstood its own country––to the point that they cannot even be considered good citizens. And with their mythologies as war clubs, both sides want to run an Antonio Gramsci–style takeover of institutions, making their reality the only acceptable paradigm. Slotkin writes an elegant, if depressing, diagnosis of the current mythological crisis. “The result is a deadly feedback loop: government failure to alleviate these problems leads to deep mistrust of democratic institutions, and the substitution of culture war for rational policy debate,” he argues. “[C]ulture-war hyperpartisanship then prevents government from acting effectively, which intensifies mistrust of institutions and ratchets up the intensity of culture war.”
Slotkin is not breaking any news that patriotic or antipatriotic mythology can be a powerful motivator for both social action and social breakdown. In his 1998 book Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, the philosopher Richard Rorty made a prescient critique of the academic Left for its fatal pessimism about the American experiment. “Stories about what a nation has been and should try to be are not attempts at accurate representation, but rather attempts to forge a moral identity. The argument between Left and Right about which episodes in our history we Americans should pride ourselves on,” he wrote, “will never be a contest between a true and a false account of our country’s history and its identity. It is better described as an argument about which hopes to allow ourselves and which to forgo.”
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