Our country is in the grip of a prolonged crisis which has profoundly shaken our institutions, our structures of belief, and the solidarities that sustain America as a nation.
It’s as if Red America and Blue America are two different countries, each with a different understanding of who counts as American, and of the purposes for which our government exists. To explain and justify its beliefs, each appeals to a different version of American history and the symbol-rich repertoire of stories through which we have remembered that history—our national mythology. Such myths are part of the cultural structures that allow modern nation-states to function. We are born to our families and home communities. We have to learn to think of ourselves as “Americans”: as spiritual descendants of ancestors not related to us by blood, but made kindred by our participation in a shared and ongoing history. No modern nation is more dependent on its myths than the United States of America, because the ethnic origins of our people are the most diverse of any nation.
No modern nation is more dependent on its myths than the United States of America, because the ethnic origins of our people are the most diverse of any nation.
National myths develop through long-term and persistent usage in every medium of cultural expression: histories, school textbooks, newspapers, advertisements, sermons, political speeches, popular fiction, movies. They are the form in which we remember our history; but they are also, and most critically, the means through which we turn history into an instrument of political power. In any major crisis, one of our cultural reflexes is to scan our memory archives, our lexicon of myths, for analogies that will help us interpret the crisis, and precedents on which to model a “heroic” response.
The flags flown by the rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 symbolize the myths the MAGA movement lives by. Those displaying the face of their leader were the largest and perhaps most prevalent. But others carried historical resonance. The classic “Betsy Ross” flag, with its circle of thirteen stars, invoked the revolutionary aspect of the Myth of the Founding, which treats the work of the Founding Fathers as a form of Holy Writ. The so-called “Gadsden Flag,” yellow with a coiled rattlesnake and the motto “Don’t Tread on Me,” also invoked the Revolution in support of the contemporary anti-tax and Gun Rights movements. The “Stars and Bars” flag invoked the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, and the White South’s struggle first to defend, and then to re-establish the antebellum order of White supremacy and cultural illiberalism. The last of these is the one most critical to the MAGA movement.
The Myth of the Lost Cause was fabricated during the period of social and political violence that overthrew Radical Reconstruction and established the regime of Jim Crow in the post-war South (1865-1890). It celebrates the virtues of the Old South, its religious conservatism and patriarchal family structure, its firm hierarchies of race and class. It laments the destruction of that culture by Radical Republican reformers and their Black allies and justifies the violent post-war struggle of Southern Whites to redeem its traditional social structures and cultural values.
The Myth framed the conflict over Reconstruction as an existential struggle between conservative Southern Whites and an alliance of freed Blacks and Northern Radicals, so-called “philanthropists”—a term roughly equivalent to our “liberals.” The stakes were succinctly defined by Thomas Dixon, Jr. in his 1902 novel The Clansman, which became the basis of the epoch-making film Birth of a Nation in 1915. The Radical politician Stoneman asserts the primacy of democracy: “Manhood suffrage is the one eternal thing fixed in the nature of Democracy . . . The Negro must be protected by the ballot.” The Southern leader Cameron replies: “The issue, sir, is Civilisation! Not whether the Negro shall be protected, but whether society is worth saving from barbarism.”
In the novel, and in historical fact, the “Redemption” of the South is a cause that justifies the terrorist violence of the Ku Klux Klan and other vigilante organizations. Between 1882 and 1915 there were on average two lynchings every week, well-publicized communal events, often involving torture as well as hanging. Violence also took the form of “race riots” or pogroms against whole Black communities, ranging from the small rural town of Rosewood, FL to major cities like New Orleans, Atlanta, Memphis and Wilmington, NC. The Lost Cause also justified the destruction of political democracy. Between 1890 and 1915 Southern states revised their constitutions to deprive Blacks of the right to vote, using devices like the literacy test and poll tax which also disenfranchised large numbers of poor Whites. The political result was the creation in most Southern states of one-party rule, a quasi-authoritarian regime in which all or nearly-all Blacks and many poor Whites were disenfranchised.
MAGA’s account of recent history follows the Lost Cause script to a similar conclusion…Trump made himself the hero of that story by explicitly framing the 2016 election, and the conduct of his administration, in Lost Cause terms—as a fight to save American civilization.
MAGA’s account of recent history follows the Lost Cause script to a similar conclusion: America became the greatest nation when its political and economic institutions were run by White men, and its cultural standards were set by White Christians of primarily native ancestry. Then the Sixties happened, Blacks and Latinos moved in, gays and lesbians proliferated, and intellectuals won honor for telling White people that everything they stood for was wrong. Liberal displacement of traditional cultural authority was mirrored in the demographic “replacement” of native-born Whites by non-White immigration, also promoted by liberals. The result has been a “culture war” between liberals and conservatives, in which the stakes are existential. As former US District Attorney Joseph DiGenova told listeners to Laura Ingraham’s Fox News podcast, “We are in a civil war . . . The suggestion that there’s ever going to be civil discourse in this country for the foreseeable future is over.”
Trump made himself the hero of that story by explicitly framing the 2016 election, and the conduct of his administration, in Lost Cause terms—as a fight to save American civilization. Thus, if Republicans lose, “there won’t be another election,” and “If you don’t fight like hell you won’t have a country.” This new Lost Cause carries with it the central features of the original. Chief among these is the belief that to save White Christian “civilization,” extraordinary methods are justified. MAGA’s embrace of violence was signaled by Trump’s 2016 campaign rhetoric, his refusal to condemn the right-wing violence at Charlottesville—defending statues of Confederate heroes became a campaign pledge—and his cultivation of Gun Rights extremists. When violence came on January 6, to overturn the results of the 2020 election, MAGA partisans saw it not as an outrage but as a fulfillment of their expectations.
The new Lost Cause is the struggle for Trump’s restoration. To that end a majority of Republicans have endorsed the January 6 insurrection as “legitimate political speech.” As in the Reconstruction/Jim Crow era, vigilante violence and threats of violence are being used to intimidate election officials, school boards, judges, and District Attorneys. Trump and his supporters, aided by experts at the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society, aim to create a one-party, quasi-authoritarian state by using the Justice Department to prosecute political opponents, and politicizing the civil service, and exploiting their domination of state legislatures and restrict voting rights.
MAGA’s use of myth gives its adherents the sense of righteous empowerment that comes from association with a deeply rooted historical tradition…Thus, MAGA has become a distinctly American approach to fascism: more neo-Confederate than neo-Nazi, an amalgam of American exceptionalism, racial and ethnic bigotry, Christian nationalism, and neoliberal economics.
MAGA’s use of myth gives its adherents the sense of righteous empowerment that comes from association with a deeply rooted historical tradition. But its embrace of Lost Cause symbolism carries with it a commitment to the myth’s political action script of cultural and political authoritarianism. Thus, MAGA has become a distinctly American approach to fascism: more neo-Confederate than neo-Nazi, an amalgam of American exceptionalism, racial and ethnic bigotry, Christian nationalism, and neoliberal economics. With one of the two major parties committed to such a program, the future of liberal democracy will be at risk in national elections for at least the next decade.
Richard Slotkin is a historian of American culture and its mythology of violence. His latest book is A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Struggle for America.
Image made by John Chrobak using “DSC09338” by Tyler Merbler licensed under CC BY 2.0; “Confederate Mounument” by VA67 licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
