Latest / Political Junkie Podcast / Episode 51: MAGA Is the Newest, and Oldest, American Myth

Transcript

Episode 51: MAGA Is the Newest, and Oldest, American Myth · Political Junkie Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: It's the summer of 1978, three years after the end of an American war in Vietnam, that Joan Baez and other musicians had lifted their voices to oppose.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_02: On this day, Baez is giving a live outdoor concert in Norway.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_02: Bantering with an audience of young Norwegians, she smiles to a happy shirtless youth and segues into her next song.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: How about...
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: I got one for you, buddy, that's really easy.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: The chorus goes na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_02: Copyright prevents me from including it here, but you can go to the show notes to find a link to Baez's cover of The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_02: Canadian Robbie Robertson, lead guitarist of the band, wrote it for his drummer, Southerner Levon Helm, in 1968.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_02: The original, backed by a Robertson, Rick Danko, and Richard Manuel blues harmony, describes the pain and despair of Virgil Kane, a Southern Railroad worker who watches the Confederacy crumble before his eyes in 1865.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_02: Although this powerful ballad can be seen as an anti-war song, it also sentimentalizes the Lost Cause myth, a cherished dream of the independent Southern nation based on white supremacy that might have been.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_02: As in other cultural renditions of this alternative South, in which all white men are equal and have dignity, the song conceals the causes of the war, a violent, illegal rebellion that sought to preserve racial slavery.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_02: Talking to one interviewer who raised this issue, Robertson again returned to myth-making.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_02: The song, he recalled, had its origins in a conversation with Levon Helms' father, a poor white Delta farmer, about what his family lost in the Civil War.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then it came up that after the Civil War and everything, they had to change and they had to accommodate these kind of things.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: And he said to me, but he called me Robin.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: He said, but Robin, I'll tell you right now, the South is going to rise again.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I got chills through me.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_03: I got those relatives too.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so years later...
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Years later, I'm sitting down at the piano, writing a song, and something creeped out of me, and it was a story.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I was writing a movie again, right?
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I was writing a movie about a Southern family that lost in the war.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: in the Civil War, and from their side, but the story of that family.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know, I was trying to write a song that I thought Levon could sing better than anybody in the world.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: And that's all it was.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_02: Robertson says he was writing a movie.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, he was transcribing and embellishing on a myth, one that figured rebellious Southerners as the victims of violence, not the cause of it, much as those being held in jail for the failed coup of January 6, 2021, are perceived by Donald Trump's supporters as martyrs.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_02: Nevertheless, it's a powerful song, and it became an instant folk rock hit when it was released in 1969.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_02: It climbed even higher in 1971 when Baez recorded it for her double album, Blessed Are.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_02: But why was Baez, a longstanding supporter of the black civil rights movement, singing such a song in the first place?
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_02: And why was she still singing it on August 1st, 2017, this time accompanied by the Indigo Girls and Mary Chapin Carpenter?
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_02: even as Donald Trump's MAGA crowds declared themselves descendants of that same Confederacy.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_02: A better question might be, how do myths provoke feelings so powerful that even people with progressive politics, like Baez, stop paying attention to the dangerous false histories they promote?
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_02: And who better to turn to at a time when the Donald Trump MAGA myth machine promotes the worst aspects of American history as virtues than American studies scholar Richard Slotkin?
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_02: A former colleague, friend, and mentor from my Wesleyan university days, Slotkin has spent a career exploring the violence at the center of the American past and how it is both concealed and elevated by national myth-making.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_02: And just to reassure you, not all myths are bad.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_02: After all, if the Confederacy represented one myth about the American founding, the Union government represented another.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_02: As Lincoln put it in the 1864 Gettysburg Address, that myth was that the founders, quote, "...brought forth on this continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_02: That was a myth too, but it's one that we who love democracy are willing to fight for still, and one that those who do not love democracy, Donald Trump and his allies, are determined to defeat.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_02: In his new book, A Great Disorder, National Myth in the Battle for America, Slotkin examines the history of the two Americas that now exist side by side with their clashing and common myths, two American cultures that will meet at the ballot box in November 2024 to decide the fate of American democracy.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_02: Join Richie and me for this episode of Why Now, where history and politics meet the challenge of today.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm your host, Claire Potter, professor of history emeritus at the New School for Social Research, a contributing editor at Public Seminar, and the author of The Political Junkie Substack.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_02: This is episode 51, MAGA is the newest and oldest American myth.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_02: And Richie Slotkin, welcome to the show.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you very much, Claire.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_03: Pleasure to be here.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_02: It's wonderful to see you.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_02: My listeners don't know that I can actually see you on the screen.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_02: And my listeners also don't know that we were colleagues for over 20 years and shared many a laugh and many a conversation about American history.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_02: Your new book, A Great Disorder, National Myth and the Battle for America, is
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_02: In many ways, it sums up a lifetime of thinking about American politics, American culture and American violence.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_02: But you've really, in some ways, brought that old knowledge to a new America.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_03: I've always been interested in the way we create the nation by telling a story.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_03: And it's something that historians of nationalism have known for a long time, that one of the basic ways in which nations get constituted is that the political classes make up a fable, make up a story.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_03: So I've always been interested in that.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_03: And my original work was on the myth of the frontier.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_03: because America was such a settler state, a colonial state, and grew by expanding westward and made that story why we're different from Europe, how closer to nature, how our economy involves the exploitation of resources, not people.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_03: Not true, but it's a way of thinking about the country and glorifying the country.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_03: I've been thinking for a long time that in focusing on this one myth,
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_03: I'd left a lot out.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_03: And then Charlottesville happened.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_03: And if you looked at the flags at Charlottesville, you saw that there were a number of different American stories that were fighting.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_03: There was the flag of the Confederacy, of the Lost Cause.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_03: There was the Black Lives Matter flag, gun rights, banners.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_03: And it seemed to me that a bunch of American stories were being brought onto a battlefield.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_03: and pitted against each other.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_03: And it really became clear later in the campaign when Trump started arguing about the left is defaming American history, taking away our history.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_03: And so that really was what brought the book together as a project.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_02: I want to get to the sort of type characters that you have written about all of your life.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_02: and whether there are some new ones that we need to be thinking about.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_02: But also, you've always focused on the means by which these stories have been told, whether it was captivity narratives, the novels that seized people's imaginations in the 19th century, the movies and television shows and radio that seized Americans' imaginations in the 20th century.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, now we have the internet.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_02: And there's no consensus as to what story we're supposed to be telling here, is there?
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_03: No, there isn't.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_03: What you have really on the internet, it's quite visible there, is a battle of stories.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_03: And one of the things that I was able to do in looking behind the flags is to see that if you go to the websites associated with the various chapters of the gun rights movement, Proud Boys, the other paramilitary groups,
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_03: that there is a fable there is a story that goes with that and they fall into certain generic patterns the ones that i really focused on for the modern period are uh the frontiers we're still about an economy of growth we're still about natural resources drill baby drill we're still denying the exploitation of labor that we get our our money some other way but the other big ones were the lost cause the old confederate story the jim crow story
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_03: that the white South having been oppressed by Northern carpetbaggers and their black clients were entitled to use radical violence, torture, lynching, political violence to restore white supremacy.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_03: And that story really came across coming out of Charlottesville and all of the groups that were associated with that.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_03: And then the last one that really kicked in coming out of the gun rights thing is a new way of fetishizing
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_03: the american revolution and the creation of the constitution so that instead of becoming a story of the establishment of law and order the establishment of constitutional government it's a story of armed uprising so the proud boys yelling 1776 going into the capital that that's that that's a meaningful thing when you put it together with the supreme court's bruin decision
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_03: which says you can't pass gun control unless it conforms to what was habitual in the 1780s.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_02: One of the things that really stands out in your work is that these stories are actually complex, and there are many things that are true about them.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_02: And at particular moments, we pluck out the story we want to tell.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_02: So one of the things you wrote about in Gunfighter Nation was World War II as this moment when the story of American immigration becomes a great story about our multicultural democracy.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_02: But now the story of immigration is an uglier one and is being massaged in an older way that figures immigrants as dangerous.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_02: So what is it that allows stories to mutate and change?
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_03: Immigration and the integration of strangers has been a part of the American story from the very beginning.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_03: How do you tell the story?
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_03: You tell it the World War II, the good war way.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_03: It's all of us coming together in a common cause.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_03: The alternative is to tell it the frontier way.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_03: And that is that we're facing a border.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_03: There's an enemy on the other side of the border, not white, primitive.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_03: That has to either be pushed back or kept out.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_03: And so there's a choice among stories that goes on.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_03: Another way in which this processing of myth works, and that is that every myth revolves around a persistent conflict.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_03: So that the frontier is about the settlers.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_03: It's also about the Native Americans.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_03: And you can tell that story as, oh, not how glorious that we destroyed the wilderness, but how terrible that we destroyed the wilderness.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_03: Shouldn't we listen to the Native Americans?
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_03: and have them tell us how to restore what we've lost.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_03: And it works like that with the good war as well.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_03: America is a place where all races find a common home and a common cause.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_03: But the plot of the movie that tells the story pits that complex group against a racial enemy.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_03: In World War II, typically the Japanese, less frequently the Germans, can see it in Star Wars.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_03: Star Wars has all the different races together in the Federation, but there's always a race that is outside the Federation that you simply cannot deal with.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_03: You've got to defend against them.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_03: The doubleness of every story gives it its power and gives you some options for using it.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_02: And of course, there are aspects of these stories that enter our consciousness without people even realizing their history.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_02: I've been thinking about since October 7th and the horrors of that day and what has ensued.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_02: Every time I look at an email or a social media post or a newspaper article that uses the word savage,
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_02: I just recoil.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_02: Even though what happened on October 7th was horrifying, the word savage invokes that frontier myth.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_03: Well, yeah.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_03: Savage war is actually the phrase that I think describes the concept that when white man meets the Indian, conflict is inevitable, inescapable.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_03: It's a necessary.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_03: It's a requirement.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_03: One of the reasons I focus on stories is
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_03: in a story everything happens for a reason everything that happens is necessary to get to a certain necessary conclusion and that's the problem when you live by myth is that you've entered a movie that is taking you to a determined outcome and unless you recognize what's happening and get off the train you can be in the wrong place the lost cause stuff it's sometimes handled very playfully
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_03: If you think about Dukes of Hazzard with the Confederate flag as a symbol of youthful rebellion, or the thing that still gets me today, Joan Baez, the lefty icon, singing The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_03: She should have been singing The Night We Drove Old Dixie Down.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_03: So you keep the story alive, this lost cause story, and then it comes back and bites you when it's picked up by young people who say, oh, Confederate flag.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_03: That's a good thing, isn't it?
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_03: Dukes of Hazzard.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_03: And here it is connected with a group that's white supremacist that's trying to, in the case of January 6th, overthrow the government.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_02: And your invocation of John Baez is wonderful because actually that's a song that's about
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_02: a white person who was caught in historical circumstances beyond his control.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_02: And we know that's not true.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_03: But the telling of the story then becomes critical.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_03: If you tell the story with slaves in it, then you're on the left.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_03: If you tell the story with, yeah, there were slaves, but they were really kind of cool with it all, then you're on the right.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_03: And it's like two Americas, two different paths.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_03: I want to say just one more thing about that lost cause.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_03: If you buy into that myth, you are justifying the overthrow of the government.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_03: That is what that story is about.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_03: It's about the overthrow of a reconstruction governance by the Ku Klux Klan or allied organizations.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_02: I read a piece by a film professor up at Dartmouth, an African-American guy.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_02: And one of the things he talked about are the ways in which these myths are handed down to each generation of white people with love.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_02: So that a parent will say, this is my favorite movie when I was a child and show them a Shirley Temple film with Bill Bojangles Robinson and so on.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_02: What is the aspect of love that infuses these stories that is so insidious?
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_03: Assuming that the story is a myth, it's tried and true.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_03: There are movies that you... It's the tradition you grew up with.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_03: It's something you identify with.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_03: And there is something to love in the story.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_03: It's what gives the myth its power.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_03: For me, love in this context...
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_03: I guess I have to think of it in two ways.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_03: You can experience love for the imaginary figure in a movie, in a drama, but this is patriotism we're talking about.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_03: This is love of country.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_03: And what is the country, what is the name of the country?
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_03: What is the characteristic of the country that you love?
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_03: Is it personified by John Wayne?
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_03: Is it personified by John Baez?
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_03: How do you imagine the place you live in and what is your relationship to it?
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_03: One of the things that has been said about the MAGA movement is that along with the hate, which is expressed towards those who don't belong, there is love for those who are inside the movement, which is supportive and powerful.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_03: And one of the things that happens when you are in a movement where
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_03: which has what I want to say, mythic resonance to it.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_03: You are surfing the edge of a wave of history, which reaches as far back and as deep as you can possibly imagine.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_03: You're at the crest of that wave and everybody with you is a brother or sister.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_03: because you share this powerful movement.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_03: People in the civil rights movement felt it.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_03: People in Black Lives Matter felt it.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_03: And that's very powerful.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_03: It's one of the things I feel that the left has lacked since, I would say, since the mid-70s.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_02: Part of what we're seeing today and in the 21st century is such a profound skepticism about
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_02: stories and national narratives that it's actually very hard for progressive activists to cohere around a consistent set of ideals.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_03: and to associate those ideas with a kind of history.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_03: I tried to sketch out what I thought might be the basis of such a way of telling stories.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_03: But you know, you can't force a myth.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_03: You can't sit down and write it and expect it to be enacted like a piece of legislation.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_03: It has to be a way in which people think about things and the way in which people actually tell stories to each other about things.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_03: Public schools help.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_03: History textbooks help.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_03: but evidently not all that much.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_03: And what gets left out is really critical.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_02: the disastrous undermining of the humanities makes all of this a great deal more fragile.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_02: But I want to turn to Donald J. Trump because this is someone who has managed to create a myth around himself that is both attached to older national myths and detached from them and something new.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_02: So can you talk about the Trump myth?
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_02: Where did it come from?
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_02: What aspects of older myths does it employ and what's new about it?
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_03: One of the things about Trump is he's a historical ignoramus.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_03: So he does not know what historical basis to touch, or he did not know.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_03: But the figure that he cuts is the American success story.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_03: He would tell it as rags to riches.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_03: It's actually riches to riches.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_03: but the American success, the self-made man.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_03: And he associates himself as well with the frontier in the sense of perpetual growth and the idea of a border, of a kind of the nation having a kind of racial borderland to it.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_03: During the 2020 campaign, when he realized
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_03: that the Confederacy and slavery were critical to his supporters and to those who were opposing him, he started going after the 1619 Project.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_03: He started supporting more explicitly the lost cause version of the Civil War.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_03: Slavery wasn't so bad.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_03: You can't cancel the founding fathers because they were slave owners.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_03: So at that point, for him, an aspect of history became a conscious tool in his kit.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_03: His real power is that he is a screen onto which people who are angry about something, who are aggrieved about something, can project their own
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_03: In some cases, much more coherent vision of things.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_03: I'm thinking particularly of Christian nationalists here who, particularly in the last, let's say, year and a half, have emphasized Trump as God's agent in a way that they weren't even doing before when he was president.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_03: That he's a Christ-like figure, that he's suffering, he's taking our sins on himself.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_03: He's bearing the punishment that our enemies would like to visit on us.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_03: It's that TV thing that he's a screen onto which you can project almost anything because he doesn't forbid anything except rejection.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_02: You point to the Christian nationalism in the Trump myth-making project, and that is another kind of myth.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_02: So what we're really seeing is layers upon layers of mythic storytelling, which are all competing with each other, but not really contradicting each other.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_02: What does that say about the genre of American myth-making more generally?
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_03: I think we're in a kind of a liminal moment here.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_03: There were ideologies at war here, too.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_03: If you want to think of it as story wars, there are a number of possible stories on offer that as national myths that weren't on offer before.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_03: Now, when I talk about national myth, I mean a story that connects you directly to the creation and maintenance of the nation state.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_03: So like the self-made man myth, it's a myth.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_03: And you can live it and you can become a popular figure by inhabiting it.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_03: but it's not a national myth in the sense that I'm using the term.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_03: Christian nationalism is becoming such a myth.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_03: If you read the literature, some of it has a wild theological basis to it, not common to all groups.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_03: Every group has its own distinctive eschatology.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_03: If you look at the politically oriented Christian nationalist groups like national conservatism, the myth to which they refer you is the founding.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_03: The founders were Christians.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_03: The founders meant for this to be a Christian country.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_03: It's not necessarily a biblical myth.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_03: It's back to the myth of the founding.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_03: That's a story that's in play that hasn't taken a form yet.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_03: Biden hasn't invoked the civil rights movement and the New Deal.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_03: Neither of those functions as a national myth.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_03: The New Deal has been called the Great Exception.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_03: The values of the New Deal were incorporated to some degree in the good war myth.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_03: But New Deal as such is not a story.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_03: How many movies were made about the Ford sit-down strike or the Republic Steel strike?
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_03: The great episodes in American labor history, utterly invisible to the world of myth.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_03: The only story you get out of the Depression is Tom Joad and Grapes of Wrath.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_03: So we never made that a part of the story.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_03: And yet Biden is trying to say, you know, hey, remember that?
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_03: That should be part of the story.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_03: And it's civil rights movement.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_03: It became, instead of a national movement, it became an identity politics movement.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_03: Every group could claim its version of the civil rights narrative.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_03: But what is the total American story of civil rights narrative?
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_03: I thought we had it with Obama, but I don't see it.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_03: I don't see it.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that's why Black Lives Matter hasn't grown as a movement beyond its original boundaries, why it hasn't been able to incorporate the labor movement.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_02: It's interesting because the myths that have come out of Black Lives Matter are actually martyrs.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_02: They're not really mythic characters.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_02: They are martyred characters.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_02: And there's a real difference between those two things.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_02: Similarly, John F. Kennedy is not really a mythic character.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_02: He's a martyred character.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_02: It's interesting what you're saying about how
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_02: progressive stories and radical stories are not really good fodder for myth-making.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_02: I was thinking when you were talking about the New Deal of Mr. Smith goes to Washington.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_02: But that's really a populist story.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_02: So are myths essentially populist in their makeup?
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, which feeds the MAGA side of things rather than the other way around.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_03: The other thing is that to the extent that the left is really dependent on the intelligentsia, we're devoted to criticism.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_03: It's what we do.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_03: And the civil rights movement was a critique of American traditions, a very profound critique of American traditions.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_03: As King made clear, it was appealing to something that was buried in those traditions that had not been allowed to fully flower.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_03: But it was also a critique.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_03: And we haven't gotten beyond the critique to say what it is that we're trying to build beyond a few sort of cant phrases about that.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_03: One of the things I tried to at least talk about, mention in the book, was that there is no general theory
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_03: of the modern economy in the way that Marx had a general theory of the industrializing economy.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_03: So that if you want to have a vision of how you get from here to there, you have to have a story to tell about here.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_03: And I don't think that that story has yet been told.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I remember when Marjorie Taylor Greene went to visit the January 6th
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_02: insurrectionists at the DC city jail, which is of course a notoriously horrible jail, which white people have just discovered now that they're in it.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_02: And she gave a press conference and she was talking and I was thinking, oh my God, Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, this is it, you know?
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_02: And then I thought,
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_02: There's nobody watching this press conference who knows that but me.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_02: So this sort of leads me around to saying, Richie, have we made a big mistake by getting rid of core curricula, the kind of foundational texts that might allow a broad swath of Americans to actually know what they're looking at when they're looking at a myth?
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_03: I guess I'd say yes.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_03: I think it is a mistake.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_03: I don't really know where the basics of the core are.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_03: I've been away from the institution for 15 or 16 years at this point and haven't really wanted to look back.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_03: But yeah, unless there's a common basis of historical knowledge, cultural knowledge as well, it almost doesn't matter
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_03: what it gets wrong.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_03: Critique has to take off from something.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_03: Even the history that I was raised in, as bad as it was, it was a launching pad.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_03: And I think it needs to be brought back in some fundamental way.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it's a launching pad.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_02: And then also we talk a lot about facts and the disappearance of fact-based knowledge in our current moment.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_02: But in their own way, films and novels and memoirs and all kinds of primary tax art are
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_02: are facts.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_02: There are certain kind of fact basis for the creation of myth.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_02: And if people are looking at myths without actually understanding the role of these texts in myth-making, I'm not sure what they're to make of it or how they're to critically understand them at all.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_03: Or understand or be able to read the small type at the bottom of the contract.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_03: When you sign up with the Confederate flag organization, where are you going to wind up if you don't understand what that carries with it?
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_03: Because there are people who do understand it.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_03: And the ones who lead the organizations tend to be understanding about where they're trying to get you and where they're trying to take you.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_02: So one of the things I love about all of your work, Richie, is that it gives order and coherence to the vast terrain of what we call American culture.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_02: And it's a huge arc from the 17th century all the way through to the present.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_02: But one of the things I think we all need to think about is, is it possible to bust these myths?
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_02: Is it possible to institute new myths where more destructive myths seem to be guiding the course of the nation?
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_02: And if so, how do we do that?
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_03: We do that by telling the story.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_03: That is, somebody has to write the history textbook.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_03: Somebody has to write the novel that tells the story that I try to sketch out in the book.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_03: You know, myth is made by actions, the events that occur, and then the processing of those events by people, the thoughtful processing, the passionate processing of those events by people.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_03: Myths do break down.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_03: myths do crumble when they fall too far out of
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_03: connection with the world they're trying to control.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_03: I'll give you an example.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_03: It's the good war myth.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_03: The good war myth is you've got to resist tyranny.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_03: You've got to unite our diverse people to resist the foreign aggressor.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_03: We did that in World War II.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely right.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_03: Did it in Korea.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_03: A little dubious, but fundamentally okay.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_03: Cold War stopped the Russians.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_03: We did it in Vietnam.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_03: Big mistake.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_03: We won't be fooled like that again, will we?
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_03: Uh-oh, Saddam Hussein is Hitler.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_03: We have to go in and knock out him.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_03: We have to take over Iraq.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_03: We have to occupy Afghanistan or else the bad guys are going to... So now you get a real bad guy, a real Hitler in Putin invading Ukraine, and nobody wants to believe it because they have heard this story before.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_03: Fool me once...
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_03: Shame on you.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_03: Fool me twice.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_03: Shame on me.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_03: And now it's fooled me like five times with that story.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_03: So myths can break down.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_03: The racial myth, to some extent, has cracked.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_03: Not as much as I thought it has, but you still have a much more racially open country than you had when I was growing up, God knows.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_03: So things happen.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_03: Things change.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_03: And change can be forced by criticism.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_03: Change can be forced by action.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_03: And action then registers in this collective process of storytelling that we do all the time.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_02: So, Richie, we are in possibly one of the most important election seasons our republic has faced since 1860.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_02: So why should our listeners read this book now?
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_03: Well, if Trump wins the election, what I say in the book won't matter because politics will shape the culture from that point.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_03: And everything will be in reaction to this powerful force that will be unleashed in our politics.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_03: A new stream of events will be created.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_03: And I guess what I'd say you'd have to read the book is because it traces moments in which that kind of thing happened before.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_03: And change occurred.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_03: A new story arose.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_03: An old story broke down.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_03: And what accompanies such breakdowns are crises that are truly, truly dire.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_03: Not just, you know, God, you're going to feel bad for like three weeks, but people are going to die.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_03: People are going to get killed.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_03: And the potential for that kind of violence is real.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_03: if you look at the history that I've sketched, I think that's one of the things that stands out is that myth and violence go together.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_03: And that when you don't understand the story that you're stuck in, you can't protect yourself against the violence.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_02: And that's it for today's show.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for listening.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_02: You can subscribe for free, or you can support my work for as little as $5 a month and get every podcast and every newsletter delivered straight to your desktop.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_02: Share this podcast with a friend who loves history, politics, and smart conversation.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_02: And you can follow me on threads, blue sky, or Instagram.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_02: Why Now is supported by the New School for Social Research and by paying subscribers to Political Junkie.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_02: Why Now and Political Junkie are written, recorded, edited, and produced by me, Claire Potter.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_02: My opening theme is by Galaxy News, and my closing theme is by Avocado Junkie.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_02: That's all for now.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_02: See you next time.