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NY Times, guest essay by Richard Slotkin, 5 Oct 2024<\/strong>: To Understand Trump vs. Harris, You Must Know These American Myths<\/a><\/p>\n The essay begins:<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 the events of the recent past and the deeper narrative of U.S. history carried by the symbol-rich stories of our national mythology.<\/p>\n 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 Even when they invoke the same historical references, they present them in radically different ways.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.<\/p>\n It\u2019s as if we are living in two different countries, each with a different understanding of who counts as American.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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:<\/p>\n These are ‘myths’ because they favor just one group of Americans, as he says, regarding the first four:<\/p>\n 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\u2019s political and cultural elites to start seeing as equals the racial and ethnic minorities that had been marginalized or excluded from the body politic.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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> a mass of demonstrators, \u201cIf you don\u2019t fight like hell, you\u2019re not going to have a country anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n This week, he said that to check the problem of property crime across America, it would take<\/a> just \u201cone really violent day\u201d to fix it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n And he has some suggestions for Democrats.<\/p>\n Democrats could benefit by framing their programs with a story that has the narrative coherence and emotional resonance of myth. The party\u2019s reform agenda is justified by its critique of America\u2019s history of capitalist exploitation of land and labor, racial discrimination, Indigenous dispossession and imperialism.<\/p>\n But nearly every major modern nation-state\u2019s 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \\\\\\<\/p>\n And then the usual daily quick items.<\/p>\n 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, … Continue reading
\nThe writers is the author of A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America<\/b><\/a>, 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n
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