American Mythologies

‘A Great Disorder’ Review: American Mythologies



‘A Great Disorder’ Review: American Mythologies
© Provided by The Wall Street Journal
Barack Obama, asked in 2012 if he’d made any mistakes in his first term, declined to name any decision or policy and instead claimed he’d failed to tell a good story. “The mistake of my first term . . . was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right. And that’s important, but, you know, the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism.”

Richard Slotkin, a professor of English and American studies at Wesleyan, would sympathize with Mr. Obama’s answer. The reason the left’s politicians lose in the “story wars”—his term—is that, unlike their counterparts on the right, they have no national “myths” to draw on. Progressives, he observes in “A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America,” have usually overcome this deficit “by identifying America with its aspirations, its idealized self-image as free, inclusive, egalitarian, a nation of immigrants.”

There is truth in this insight. Progressivism, as the word itself implies, disdains the past, and many people don’t want to hear their past traduced by their leaders. Mr. Slotkin’s advice to the left’s political class is to emphasize the nobility of toiling for a better world. “If the dark side of our nationality is its history of racial violence and injustice,” he writes, “the glory of our history is the struggle Americans have waged to realize an extraordinarily broad and inclusive concept of nationality. If the dark side is the exploitation of land and labor by a rampant capitalism, its counterpart is the struggle for workers’ rights, environmental conservation, and our determined efforts to strike a just and constructive balance between individual rights, corporate power, and the public good.” Democratic consultants, take note!


Author takes a close look at America's complicated history with LSD
This passage, which I take to be more or less the book’s point, appears at its conclusion. Before he gets there Mr. Slotkin spends roughly 400 pages explaining the four myths, or origin stories, in which American culture is rooted and how they’ve been used and misused since the middle of the last century. First, the Myth of the Frontier—the subject of a trilogy of histories by Mr. Slotkin—regards America as the outcome of white settlers rescuing the continent from nonwhite savages and turning it into a great civilization (a bad myth, in Mr. Slotkin’s view). Second, the Myth of the Founding manifests itself sometimes as a revolutionary assertion of equality (good) and at other times as an insistence that America remain white, male-dominated and Christian (bad).

The Myth of the Civil War, third, can emerge either as a ratification of the Declaration’s promise of equality, as Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. saw it (good), or as a yearning for the Lost Cause of the Confederacy (bad). Finally, the Myth of the Good War—World War II—recalls a consolidated and multiracial nation engaged in a noble cause (good).

The book’s second half is a recitation of the major political controversies of the postwar era, and you may not be surprised to learn that the right defines itself by the bad myths, the left by the good ones. There may be value in an examination of our politics as a series of competing origin stories, but Mr. Slotkin’s history of postwar America is tendentious, predictable, repetitive and sloppy.

His analysis often reads like a collection of left-wing canards. We’re told matter-of-factly that Richard Nixon “sabotaged” the Johnson administration’s negotiations with the North Vietnamese in 1968—a conspiracy theory beloved of the left for which there is voluminous counterevidence. Ronald Reagan, a furtive racist and devotee of the Lost Cause Myth, according to Mr. Slotkin, won in 1980 largely by using the “dog whistle” phrase “states’ rights” in Mississippi; and George H.W. Bush won in 1988 largely as a result of a “racist” TV ad linking Gov. Michael Dukakis to the release of murderer Willie Horton. (The ad was, in fact, entirely fair and only “racist” for people ready to find racism.) Again and again Mr. Slotkin refers to Reagan’s “slogan” or “claim” or “principle” that “government is the problem” or “government is always the problem,” as if the Gipper were an anarchist. The line, which didn’t include the word “always,” is from Reagan’s 1981 inaugural address: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem” (emphasis mine).


Mr. Slotkin’s interpretation of the 2010s relies heavily on Jane Mayer’s book about the Koch brothers’ supposed control of American politics, “Dark Money” (2016), despite every election since its publication having disproved its argument. In the world imagined by “A Great Disorder,” conservative nonprofits like the American Legislative Exchange Council are consciously trying to suppress minority votes, only the Republicans practice gerrymandering, the U.S. is willing to “pay for oil with blood” and Donald Trump’s populist coalition has “become the vehicle for the development of an authentically American Fascism.”

The book is full of minor factual errors that, taken together, suggest a failure to engage seriously with any figure whom the author dislikes. “A Time for Choosing,” Reagan’s speech in support of Barry Goldwater, was not, pace Mr. Slotkin, delivered at the 1964 Republican National Convention in Daly City, Calif., just outside San Francisco, but in a Los Angeles studio three months later. In two consecutive sentences he says that Trent Lott was Senate majority leader in 1984 (he was still in the House in ’84) and that John Ashcroft was George H.W. Bush’s attorney general (he was the younger Bush’s AG).

Mr. Slotkin calls Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative—derided at the time as the “Star Wars program”—the “so-called Star Wars Space Defense Initiative” and repeatedly refers to the Koch-backed political advocacy group Americans for Prosperity as “Americans for Progress.” Some errors seem to originate more from ill will than carelessness: It is not remotely true, to mention two of many, that the Austrian School of economics “held all taxation to be a form of theft” or that the University of Chicago historian Richard Weaver and the Nobel Prize-winning economist James M. Buchanan were “Neo-Confederate intellectuals.”

That “A Great Disorder” purports to explain how other people are enthralled by myths is a particular delight, if unintended by the author.

Mr. Swaim is an editorial-page writer for the Journal.