‘A Great Disorder’ by Richard Slotkin review

In 1938 the American literary critic Howard Mumford Jones published an article in The Atlantic titled ‘Patriotism – but How?’ As Europe teetered on the brink of war, Jones observed how fascist dictators were skilfully manipulating their nation’s myths to rally their populations. By contrast, the United States seemed culturally adrift – its mythic heroes discredited by a generation of cynical writers and ‘debunking biographers’. Bemoaning this trend, Jones called for a ‘patriotic renaissance’, encouraging its writers and historians to unearth ‘thrilling anecdotes’ from their nation’s past. ‘The only way to conquer an alien mythology’, Jones wrote, ‘is to have a better mythology of your own.’

A response came, fittingly enough, from Hollywood, America’s myth-making capital. Yet while Gone with the Wind (1939) was hugely popular, critics worried that the myths it promoted were more likely to encourage American-style fascism than fortify democracy. Drenched in nostalgia for the slave-owning South, the film invoked the ‘Lost Cause’ myth of the Civil War, romanticising the Confederacy’s role as a noble effort to preserve a virtuous way of life rather than a violent rebellion to maintain slavery. Many implored the film’s producer, David O. Selznick, not to make it. The Jewish actor Hyman Meyer wrote that such a film would ‘be welcomed by the Fascists ... of this country’, including the Ku Klux Klan. Sure enough, it quickly became a favourite among Germany’s Nazi elite.

It was also popular with southern segregationists (and, it should be said, the filmgoing public). During the 1950s, Gone with the Wind’s Lost Cause mythology was invoked to energise a ‘massive resistance’ to the civil rights movement. More recently, as Richard Slotkin notes in A Great Disorder, the Lost Cause myth has been embraced by Donald Trump’s MAGA movement. When insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on 6 January, many did so waving Confederate flags. At a 2020 campaign rally in Colorado, Trump criticised that year’s Academy Awards by asking his supporters: ‘Can we get, like, Gone with the Wind back, please?’

For Slotkin, this is a recurring problem with American mythology. While myths are powerful tools for political mobilisation, reactionary forces have often been more adept at exploiting them. From violent ‘redeemers’ dismantling Reconstruction in the late 19th century, to MAGA insurrectionists trying to overturn the 2020 election, reactionaries have slotted their actions into a particular version of US history. Alongside the Lost Cause, they have invoked the myth of the frontier, with its celebration of white settler violence against Native Americans. These myths lend legitimacy to certain actions – cancelling elections, suppressing votes and committing political violence – that otherwise appear blatantly un-American.

Slotkin’s book is partly aimed at debunking these corrosive political mythologies. He argues that Trump has resurrected a ghoulish version of history to incubate ‘an authentically American fascism’. But Slotkin is not prepared to dispense with American mythology entirely. Instead, like Jones, the book calls on progressives and liberals to articulate their own, more unifying, versions of the national story. To defeat Trump, Slotkin argues, Democrats need to tell better stories.

In these ‘story wars’, the liberal-left has often found itself at a disadvantage. Progressives have often taken a critical view of their nation’s past. Change is essential precisely because US history has an undeniable dark side. As a result, they have been more inclined to debunk myths than to create them, confronting the toxic legacies of dispossession, slavery and exclusion rather than glorifying the Founding Fathers.

Yet Slotkin insists that reckoning with the nation’s past needn’t preclude unifying stories. He shows how progressive myths have crystallised at key moments of national crisis. In the final years of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln connected the liberation of enslaved peoples to the unfulfilled promise of America’s founding. A century later, Martin Luther King Jr framed the civil rights movement as the fulfilment of Lincoln’s ‘new birth of freedom’. The victories of the 1960s – including the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965) – yielded a new mythology, which Slotkin dubs ‘the Myth of the Movement’. Accordingly, the American story is one of hard-fought progress towards equality and justice, driven by marginalised groups fighting for inclusion.

Barack Obama articulated this national story especially well. As president, he often linked his identity as the child of an African immigrant and a white woman from Kansas to a broader narrative of racial progress. He liked to paraphrase King’s observation that the arc of history, though long, ultimately ‘bends toward justice’. Yet Obama’s presidency also revealed the dubious hold of such myths. For some Americans, a Black president was not the fulfilment of history, but a dangerous aberration. Conspiracists and racists responded by excluding Obama from the national story entirely. They questioned whether he was born in the US. They spread false conspiracies about his ‘Muslim’ background. Such dog whistles were not confined to the fringe: John Bolton, later Trump’s national security adviser, called Obama ‘the first post-American president’. Attacks on Kamala Harris have followed a similar pattern. The US-born daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants, Harris would be the first Black woman to become president. Trump has questioned whether Harris is ‘Black’ at all.

This desperate tactic reflects Trump’s anxiety about Harris, who is a far more formidable opponent than Joe Biden. While Biden struggled to articulate how his agenda fitted within the broader arc of American history, Harris has effectively connected her campaign to a long history of struggles for justice. ‘The shoulders on which we stand’, Harris told a packed crowd in Wisconsin, ‘generations of Americans before us led the fight for freedom, and now … the baton is in our hands.’ The 2024 election will be a crucial test of Slotkin’s thesis.

• A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America
  Richard Slotkin
  Belknap Press, 528pp, £29.95
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)
  
  Sam Collings-Wells is Junior Research Fellow in American History at the University of Cambridge.