Richard Cándida Smith on Richard Slotkin’s *A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America*

Since the emergence of Donald Trump in 2015 as the dominating figure of national life, the United States has been in the midst of a continuing political crisis without a predictable exit.  Trump is not dominant, at least not yet.  No collective force currently exercises hegemonic power.  From the perspective of politics as statecraft, the country is drifting, pending the emergence of a governing coalition able to combine power and persuasion to impose its will upon the nation as a whole.  From a perspective of politics as spectacle, the country has been in an era of political wrestling matches much like those scripted and staged by Vince and Linda McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment.  All contenders have their chance to score a few wins and build up the fan base, the essential foundation in a culture of spectacle for remaining in competition.  If politics is mostly entertainment, the principle that a show will go on as long as it attracts an audience, rousing discussion, and buckets of money means there is no hurry to arrive at the resolution that would result in stable if not necessarily good governance.

The emergence of Donald Trump as avatar of the entertainmentization of everything looms over Richard Slotkin’s latest book.  Even more so, the aggressive movement backing him, in love with attention-grabbing violent rhetoric that constantly evokes, but seldom directly invoking, a national past of nonstop civil violence—murder of labor organizers and strikers, racial massacres, lynchings, forced separation of children from their families, forced sterilizations, to name only a few highlights of tragically ever-present dark features of everyday life in the United States between the Civil War and the Second World War.  Slotkin has studied cultural expressions of this violent history of national formation his entire professional career.  He returns once again to this dark history to help explain the present crisis.

The core of the book is the classification and analysis of four historical myths Slotkin argues are foundational to U.S. national identity—the Founding, the Frontier, the Lost Cause, and the Good War.  He traces the emergence of each myth and their conflicting expressions in popular culture and political rhetoric from the Revolution of 1776 to the end of the first Trump administration.  “National myths themselves have a history,” Slotkin states. “The longest-lived mythologies are the highly evolved products of numerous crises of belief and revision.  That is why a crisis in the state of public myth signals a potential rupture of the web of beliefs and practices that holds nations together” (9).

He places greatest priority on the myth of the frontier, whose invocation has had continuing salience for a broad range of political moments due to its celebration of the violence required for both national consolidation and economic growth.  The material on the frontier as a definitive symbolic form in national culture draws from Slotkin’s well-known trilogy, Regeneration Through Violence (1973), The Fatal Environment (1985), and Gunfighter Nation (1992) but expanded to cover a broader time period.  Addressing those who look to Mussolini, Hitler, and Vichy France for understanding of how authoritarian movements overturned democratic rule and what those histories portend for the nation’s future, Slotkin counsels that the national past shows how easily authoritarianism and democratic institutions have coexisted in the United States.  “MAGA is a movement akin to Fascism,” Slotkin argues, “but with authentically American roots, combining the ethnonationalist racism of the Lost Cause, an insurrectionist version of the Founding, and the peculiar blend of violent vigilantism and libertarian economics associated with the Frontier” (15).

In the nineteenth century, the myth of the frontier, with its general proposition that the United States is a prosperous nation because its citizens turned desert into beloved, productive places, was a belief that often antagonistic forces shared but expressed each in distinctive ways.  “National myths,” putatively necessary for uniting a people sharing the same country, in no way mitigated violent conflicts of region, class, religion, and race.  Possibly their ubiquity contributed to marginalizing alternative visions of the nation.  In the course of the twentieth century, the book’s four myths took on increasingly overtly divisive variations.  Around the motif of redemptive violence, for example, after 1945 competing myths of the Civil War and of World War II offered incompatible conceptions of who legitimately belongs to the nation and whose violence most authentically has defended national identity.

The material surveyed discusses important books and films to show the historical development of the book’s four central myths.  Slotkin’s survey also gives prominence to messages used in landmark electoral campaigns, thus demonstrating a symbiosis of popular culture and electoral politics that reaches back to the first decades of the republic.  A very large body of social science scholarship has developed around election campaigns in every part of the world having become a distinct form of popular entertainment.^[1]  Most of this literature sees popular media as a distorting, if not destructive force, an important contributing factor in the decay of national institutions, particularly as electoral campaigning moved from on-the-ground mobilization of churches, trades unions, clubs, and similar mass organizations to message advertising in a variety of media whose recipients were primarily individuals rather than groups.  Slotkin, on the other hand, examines campaigns as an orchestration of national myths, presenting voters with competing organizing principles for policy and action growing out of shared values presumably linking governors and the governed.  His approach facilitates bridging the abyss separating the unifying pretensions of national myth from the more cynical reality expressed by Henry Adams in the opening pages of The Education of Henry Adams: “Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”

When the survey arrives at the immediate past, roughly the six decades after 1960, years marked by intensification of polarization, the character of the book shifts dramatically.  Citations of popular culture diminish, replaced by a sequence of headline events illustrating the deepening incompatibility between the myths the right and the left in the United States invoke.  This aspect of the book foregrounds the degree to which politics has been a combative element of national culture, more like sporting events than a domain testing contrasting visions of the future.  Slotkin notes that assumptions that there was once greater consensus in national life exaggerates the contentions of the immediate past and obscures past disunity.

The book is rich in details, with its points effectively made in language that is approachable for a wide range of readers.  The book offers much to consider about the relation of the current moment to the nation’s past.  The book does not break new methodological or conceptual ground, but the many examples discussed present a complex and stimulating mosaic of continuities and disjunctions in how culture and politics have interacted over the last two centuries.  The argument that national myths are an essential part of any effective explanation of the contemporary political crisis parallels Heather Cox Richardson’s in-depth and more distinctly political studies of the Republican Party’s development since the death of Abraham Lincoln, but Slotkin brings a mid-twentieth-century American Studies perspective to his work, with significantly greater attention given to the active contribution of books, movies, television programs, and other elements of popular culture to the formation of national ideologies.  There is little direct consideration of the role cultural objects play in identity formation or contests to secure hegemony.  The most disturbing absence in the book is consideration of national myths as consumables manufactured in various media industries whose marketed products must be profitable, hence emotionally compelling in various ways, for producers and distributors to stay in business.

Successful politicians have long been masters of the new media formats and genres of their eras.  In the mid-nineteenth century, speeches and debates were often published with a view to their being read out loud at informal gatherings.  Abraham Lincoln understood that few Americans would ever see or hear him in person, but the voters he needed would likely hear his words standing around a Franklin stove in a store or a post office or some place equally casual listening to someone reading recent political publications out loud.  Lincoln’s personal secretary and biographer John Hay thought that Lincoln crafted much of his writing to make readers and listeners feel as if he were in the room with a group talking casually but intently about current events with an eye as to what could and should be done.  Trump worked up his crude, pugnacious media image when he appeared occasionally as a host for televised World Wrestling Entertainment events.  In 1988, Trump’s Atlantic City casino started hosting WWE “Wrestle-Mania” events.  Because the public responded so positively to Trump’s performance as a celebrity millionaire with a penchant for disrespectability led to his role in the show growing more prominent, and over time to Trump producing and starring in his own so-called “reality” television show, “The Apprentice,” where the viewing public came to know him for his mostly inaccurate image as one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs.

As part of discussing how Trump put his own personal brand on well-known national myths, Slotkin might have explored Donald Trump’s participation in popular media formats and genres where stance and attitude have been far more important than any given articulated message.  In both genres of wrestling and reality shows, Trump’s image is readily understandable to those drawn to that type of entertainment as a pose, part of a game of projecting a media image that communicates effectively because it is outrageous and caricatured.  Slotkin might also have examined other celebrity politicians, such as Ronald Reagan, John Gavin, Jesse Ventura, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Al Franken, Jerry Springer, or Cynthia Nixon, for contrasting examples of celebrities who adapted a successful public image as performers into a saleable political image.  Central to understanding this phenomenon is the degree to which the particular nature of post-World War II mass media encouraged a synthesis of politics and entertainment that facilitated movement of performers into government.

By the book’s conclusion, the central argument that myths are genuinely explanatory remains unproven.  An argument about myth may simply be a heuristic turning a complex body of materials into a coherent and instructive narrative.  The complex yet fully formed story Slotkin draws from two centuries of national history maps with little difficulty onto characters and events of the last few decades, a peculiar, disorienting period in which political institutions and routines, no doubt long in increasing states of stress, began metamorphosizing more rapidly.  Such a story gives form—narratability more than explanation, an important step towards understanding, but explanation still waits for what is hidden in archives to emerge, for more theoretical and empirical work on how the business of popular culture has shaped political messages, and, perhaps most of all, for the consequences of past actions to demand moral accounting in addition to explanation.

^[1] See for a relatively recent summary of political science literature related to this topic Alice Thwaite, “Literature Review on Elections, Political Campaigning and Democracy” (Oxford Internet Institute, September 2019, online at https://demtech.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2019/09/OxTEC-Literature-Review-Alice-Thwaite-Report-25-09-19.pdf).