The Crisis of Public Myth

The old is dying and the new cannot be born

I approached Richard Slotkin’s A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America with no small degree of excitement.

Slotkin, a prominent historian and cultural critic, was one of my favorite professors when I was in college. His reputation is largely built around a trilogy of books — Regeneration Through Violence, Gunfighter Nation, and The Fatal Environment — that examine the role of the American West in the cultural and political imagination of the United States. The word “magisterial” gets thrown around a lot these days, but I can think of no better way to describe these books. Gunfighter Nation in particular had a big impact on me and the way that I think about violence in America.

So when I learned that Slotkin had produced a new book that would address our current culture wars and the sense that America is coming apart at the seams, I rushed to order a copy. Who better than my old college professor to inform my current work for the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation on political polarization?

Slotkin’s thesis is that America is currently suffering from the absence of a common national myth. We used to have such myths (which Slotkin defines as “stories — true, untrue, half-true — that effectively evoke the sense of nationality and provide an otherwise loosely affiliated people with models of patriotic action”), but thanks to the work of revisionist historians and progressive social movements, many Americans have come to recognize the flaws of these old stories, which often excluded huge swaths of the population and advanced questionable values.

Slotkin identifies four myths that he believes have been particularly important to the development of the United States: the Myth of the Frontier, the Myth of the Founding, the Myth(s) of the Civil War, and the Myth of the Great War. Slotkin describes our oldest myth, the Myth of the Frontier, as the idea that “the American people are spiritually regenerated through a violent struggle against an alien and savage enemy in a wild or chaotic landscape.” He argues that this story has been used to explain and justify “a culture in which White men generally had broad license to use violence to maintain social control along racial borderlines — to dispossess Indians and Mexicans in the West, and to ensure the subservience of Black people in the South.”

The first part of A Great Disorder amounts to a quick tour of how Slotkin’s four myths have influenced American history up through World War II. An uncharitable critic might say that Slotkin is just playing the hits here, reiterating arguments that he has made in more detail in his trilogy on the American West. But that’s not a bad thing from my perspective, given the power of his original insights.

The version of American history that Slotkin recounts is very much of the warts-and-all variety, full of “chicanery, government malfeasance and murderous violence.” For those who are concerned about the current threat of political violence in the United States, Slotkin offers a sobering historical lesson: the American disposition to violence is, as a government commission once argued, a congenital flaw in our national character.

Take, for example, the era that he dubs the “Age of Vigilantism” — a 60-year period lasting from roughly 1870 to 1930. Throughout these years, well-armed private individuals and organizations took the law into their own hands, perpetrating “acts of exemplary violence” designed to “terrorize and subdue a class of people regarded as dangerous to the social system.” According to Slotkin,

Vigilantism took a variety of forms across the United States. Some movements (San Francisco in 1856, Montana in 1866) were organized to break up criminal organizations that operated in partnership with local political bosses, and dissolved when their task was accomplished. In the South, as we’ve seen, vigilante operations were first mounted by political organizations and movements of Redemption from Reconstruction, later for the establishment and enforcement of Jim Crow. The range wars in Johnson County, Wyoming in 1889-1893 pitted gunslingers hired by wealthy cattlemen against posses formed by small ranchers. From the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 to the coal-country wars of the 1920s, labor disputes in every part of the country often degenerated into battles between armed strikers and antiunion vigilantes.

This is precisely the kind of thing we need from an historian like Slotkin — to add depth and nuance to our historical understanding and to help us put contemporary developments in a broader perspective.

Unfortunately, the momentum that Slotkin builds up in the first part of the book dissipates as he turns his attention to modern politics. Here Slotkin breaks no new ground, rehashing material about our last several presidents that has already been well-covered by numerous other writers. His take on the culture wars amounts to a pretty standard left-wing account — that American politics have been warped by the “anxieties of conservative White Christians” who are fretful about their loss of status in an increasingly diverse America. Echoing Jane Mayer and Kurt Andersen, Slotkin points his finger at a range of villains — the Koch brothers, Grover Norquist, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the National Rifle Association, etc. — who have worked tirelessly to defeat liberal policy initiatives in recent years.

Slotkin is not wrong to condemn the pernicious effects of these political actors, but reading A Great Disorder, it is easy to come away with the impression that the culture wars are a one-way conflict prosecuted by conservatives against liberals. Political correctness rarely appears without scare quotes around it. Almost no space is devoted to the kinds of left-wing provocations — campus cancellations, racial affinity groups, “Turtle Island” land acknowledgments, expressions of sympathy for Hamas, failures to condemn looting and rioting, arguments for open borders and police abolition, efforts to remove the names of figures like Abraham Lincoln and George Washington from public buildings, etc. etc. etc. — that have generated enormous backlash. Recent polling, which shows the Republicans winning unprecedented support from Black and Hispanic voters, suggests that it is not just deplorable white Christians who are resistant to these ideas. (It is worth noting that Hillary Clinton’s infamous “basket of deplorables” line, which has served as a rallying cry for so many Americans who feel scorned by liberal elites, is never mentioned in the book.)

In writing about the struggles of the Obama administration, Slotkin opines that “Obama’s real task was to persuade a center-right electorate to support a center-left program.” Here Slotkin comes close to my own reading of contemporary politics. While the anxiety of some white voters about multiculturalism is certainly part of the mix, it is far from the whole story. I am still trying to understand precisely why it has happened, but somehow significant segments of our political and cultural elites have become untethered from the American electorate, which I’m convinced is basically moderate in orientation and does not endorse the radical prescriptions of either the Left or the Right. (I may have co-written a book about this.)

Like many commentators, Slotkin uses the short-hand of “blue America” and “red America” to describe the divide in American life. But of course this vocabulary doesn’t fit all, or even most, Americans. Many Americans are basically apolitical and nonideological. There are now more registered independents than there are registered Democrats or registered Republicans. (And new research suggests that independents increasingly hate both Democrats and Republicans.) As Stanford political science professor Morris Fiorina has said, “moderate, centrist, nuanced, ambivalent” citizens — arguably the bulk of Americans — are underrepresented in our political discourse.

The specter of Donald Trump looms over the last third of A Great Disorder. At various points in his public career, Trump has, whether knowingly or inadvertently, made reference to all four of Slotkin’s national myths. But of course, Trump is the most divisive figure in American politics. His use of these stories highlights both their enduring influence (they continue to resonate with many Americans) but also their limitations (they no longer have the power to mobilize the great majority of the country).

Slotkin believes that American democracy is now on the brink of a potential “death spiral” — and that to break this spiral, “we must develop a durable social consensus about what has gone wrong and should be done about it.” In short, the old myths have outlived their usefulness, but nothing has emerged to replace them.

For Slotkin, the choice currently facing us is simple. The Democratic Party offers an ambitious program of social reform that invokes the New Deal and the civil rights movement as historical models. Slotkin believes that these elements have the potential to coalesce into a new national myth (which he labels an “American Reformation”), although it remains to be seen whether a vision rooted in the language of the New Deal and the civil rights movement has appeal to anyone who isn’t already a progressive.

By contrast, the Republican Party offers…well, nothing much at all. According to Slotkin, “a MAGA-dominated Republican Party [is] determined to fight for its cultural Lost Cause, [and is] resistant to the Democrats’ policies without offering an alternative program for reform.”

Are these really our only options? Is it not possible to imagine some sort of synthesis that combines a liberal belief in compassion and the need for continued social improvement with a conservative appreciation of freedom and the fragility of social norms? Can’t we acknowledge the sins of the past (and present) while also celebrating the remarkable achievements of our country? Is there no appetite for a brand of patriotism that rejects both ethno-nationalism and the excesses of wokeness?

As Slotkin admits, it is impossible to conjure a new national mythology out of thin air —unifying national stories only emerge over time. So those of us who want to lower the temperature and revitalize the center of American politics should get working. A good place to start might be Aurelian Craiutu’s book Why Not Moderation? Like Craiutu, we can begin by identifying a cadre of moderate heroes from the past and celebrating their unique contributions to the American experiment. Perhaps, brick by brick, we can help build a new set of stories that champion American optimism, pragmatism, and pluralism instead of violence and extremism.