Stories, red or blue. Message: I hate you

Myths cherished by US’s right & left explain its politics

The election is definitively won, but the nation feels itself tearing at the seams. Rift between Red and Blue America, between the right and left, seems impassable. A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America by Richard Slotkin analyses this bitter culture war by tracing the stories that are meaningful to each political tribe. Right and left don’t just clash over abortion or gun control. In fact, these issues are rooted in different foundational beliefs about the country, and what patriotism means.

What are these myths, which have been overlaid with new meanings through decades of political change? Conservative Americans make much of the myth of the frontier: Idea of a white America that restlessly travels forth, expanding its territory and economy, exploiting resources, subjugating racial others who stand in its way.



The civil war can be seen either as American idealism to abolish slavery, as federal govt bringing about emancipation, or as the longstanding myth of the ‘lost cause’ that sold out white interests. The myth of America’s founding is one of revolutionary violence for the sake of independence, and of intelligent, virtuous ‘founding fathers’ of European descent. The myth of the ‘good war’ is about America as a defender of freedoms everywhere in the world.

Liberals also seize this ‘good war’ myth, as shown in countless military platoon movies, but in a way that showcases plural, racially integrated America. Wartime celebration of an America united across races and ethnicities spurred wider acceptance of the civil rights movement. It has endured from World War II to the war on terror, justifying American interventions in global conflicts.

Today, Maga warriors play on all these myths, as they mix American exceptionalism and Christian nationalism. This American form of fascism is less Nazi, and more Confederate South, the book argues. The myths of frontier and lost cause can be clearly spotted in Maga mobilisations of ‘real Americans’ against racial others or a corrupt federal govt or ‘woke’ initiatives like critical race theory.

Meanwhile, the liberal/progressive side does not have such a clear set of myths that connect the past to the present. Their cherished stories have been about FDR’s New Deal or the civil rights protests of the 1960s. Biden-Harris Democrats tried to strum both these chords, stressing on infra projects and issues of race, gender and sexuality.

All of these stories are selective retellings of the past, and they serve different political visions. Restless pushing of the frontier, with white settlers subduing indigenous tribes, has been cast in a romantic light, as all-American grit. George Bush’s global war on terror relied on this trope.

These scripts inform political themes. For instance, gun-control emotions are clearly shaped by the founding myth of a rightful insurrection against an oppressive govt. The left casts nonviolent civil rights movements as liberation, the right sees them as cause of a national degeneration.

Many of the old myths of the frontier or the lost cause come from a troubled, bloody past that lets slavery be seen as freedom, dispossession as progress, and hatred as heritage. These stories cannot provide common ground for a diverse nation, the book points out. To address the dysfunction of American politics, or continue to be coherent as a nation, it is necessary to reconcile these mythologies, or reform and revise them.