By Daniel Lazare

A Great Disorder is brisk, bold, and thought-provoking, but the volume’s muddled concept of myth does it in.

A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America by Richard Slotkin. Harvard University Press, 528 pages, $37.95

In A Great Disorder, Richard Slotkin, professor emeritus of English and American studies at Wesleyan, tries to make sense of an exceedingly messy place known as the United States. Eschewing the microscopic view of all too many historians, his aim is nothing less than to sum up and assess the entire national experience from the first 17^th-century settlements to the rise and second coming of Donald Trump.

Ambitious? You can say that again. Interesting observations are scattered along the way. “America was a kind of blank screen onto which all sorts of fantasy could be projected,” Slotkin writes, “not just the literary fantasies of Thomas More’s Utopia or William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, but operationalized fantasies of economic, political, and religious organization.” Sometimes, those visions came together as during the revolutionary period of 1775-88. Sometimes they pulled apart as in the 1850s and ’60s.

A Great Disorder is very good on the “Age of Vigilantism” from 1870 to 1930. This is when political stabilization at the top coincided with mass violence below. Custer’s Last Stand, better known as the Battle of the Little Bighorn, was not just a military debacle in which Lakota, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors decimated the 7^th Cavalry in 1876. It was also a “symbolic key” that newspapers in New York and Chicago seized upon to explain the great crises of the day, “the Indian war, the overthrow of the last Reconstruction regimes, and the labor disorders arising from the depression” following the Panic of 1873. “Each was a conflict,” Slotkin says, “between the desires of a ‘lower’ human order or class (Indians, Black people, and urban wage workers) and the imperatives of the new industrial system as defined by its owners and managers.”

Class conflict is strictly a European thing, or so we’ve been taught. Yet here is Slotkin aptly reminding us that it’s as American as apple pie. A Great Disorder has perceptive things to say about other periods in US history — the New Deal, the Second World War, and the Second Amendment mania that began gathering steam in the ’90s as the old vigilantism returned for a second run. Slotkin notes the extraordinary influence of a pre-Civil War Supreme Court justice named Joseph Story, author of Commentaries on the Constitution (1833), an important legal textbook of the day. A century and a half after his death, Story enjoyed a second burst of fame due to his theory that the right to bear arms serves as “the palladium of the liberties of a republic” because, by guaranteeing the states their own military force, “it offers a strong moral check against the usurpations and arbitrary powers of rulers.” This was a godsend for a new generation of ultra-rightists since all they had to do was broaden Story’s thesis so as to apply not just to the states but to the people at large. Once the Supreme Court endorsed an individual right in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), they had the ideological weapon they needed to declare war on the entire liberal state.

“The historical reality of the Second Amendment … is not that it protects the right to shoot deer,” Slotkin quotes one right-wing spokesman as saying. “It protects the right to shoot tyrants.” It also apparently protects the right to storm Congress in an attempt to overthrow a free election. Slotkin’s tale is thus a 400-year saga of creation and redemption followed by confusion and rancor as America again descends into civil war.

A Great Disorder is brisk, bold, and thought-provoking, but ultimately runs aground due to confusion of its own. The reason is a concept of myth that couldn’t be more muddled.

What is myth? For most of us, it means something incorrect, “an unfounded or false notion,” to quote Merriam-Webster. But Slotkin thinks otherwise. Myths, he contends, are origin tales whose truthfulness is secondary to their role as social binding agents. As he puts it:

Once a myth is well-established, new crises can be interpreted by recognizing analogies between current events and the scenarios of the myth, and recalling the historical memories the myth embodies. Although it involves a poetic leap rather than rational analysis, mythological thinking can help us imagine effective responses to a crisis and to see those responses as acts of patriotism.

Myths make us feel good because “the way we tell our national story shapes both our sense of membership or belonging and our understanding of what patriotic action can and should be.” But they’re also good for us because they “have made possible a culture that has become increasingly open to diversity of all kinds and newly sensitized to bigotry and injustice.” They make us feel good and do good at the same time. The more stories we tell around the campfire, the more super-sensitive we become.

If this has you scratching your head in puzzlement, it’s not your fault — it’s Slotkin’s. Basically, what he’s offering is a new version of Plato’s allegory of the cave in which, rather than looking at events directly, we stare at shadows on the wall in the form of national mythology. “Four myths have historically been the most crucial to Americans’ understanding of what their nation is, where it came from, and what it stands for,” he argues. They are “the Myth of the Frontier; the Myth of the Founding; three different Myths of the Civil War; and the Myth of the Good War,” which is to say World War II. Some of these four myths – or is it six? – are bad because they serve to justify a war of extermination against native Americans or lull us into believing that 1861-65 was nothing more than a family quarrel that had to be patched up as quickly as possible (which is why the minor irritant known as Reconstruction had to be gotten out of the way as swiftly as possible). Some are good because they help mold America into a progressive international force.

The result often sounds like a Democratic Party campaign stump speech. Indeed, when you read what A Great Disorder has to say about America as “a force for liberation in the world,” you can almost hear Joe Biden nattering on in the background in the same self-congratulatory tones:

We are the essential nation. We are the essential nation. The rest of the world is looking, so we have to stand up for our Constitution, our institutions of democracy, because MAGA extremists have made it clear they’re not going to….

This is a direct quote from a speech Biden gave in Phoenix last September in which he tried to rally the troops against Donald Trump and his “Make America Great Again” movement. Slotkin says essentially the same thing in touting a Good War myth based on “‘platoon movie’ nationality in which every ethnic and racial community was entitled to enjoy both its particularity and its equal membership in America.” America conquers in the name of ethno-racial equality. It feels justified in imposing its rules-based order on the other 96 percent of the global population because it stands for democracy. Hey, it’s who we are. Slotkin and the president agree so thoroughly that it wouldn’t be surprising if he pops up as a speech writer in the second Biden administration — if there is a second Biden administration, that is.

A Great Disorder spares a sentence or two for America’s growing structural difficulties. At one point Slotkin informs us that “given the limits of the two-party system, and of a constitutional order that gives rural states disproportionate representation in the Senate and Electoral College, it is a possibility for a minority amounting to less than 30 percent of the national electorate to win control of the government.” 30 percent? If that’s all it takes to stop Democrats in their tracks, then Trump, who received 47 percent of the popular vote in 2020, will have no trouble gumming up the works even if he doesn’t win in November.

Historian Richard Slotkin. Photo: PBS

It’s unclear from Slotkin’s footnotes where the 30-percent figure comes from, yet the situation is actually worse. Thanks to rampant use of the filibuster, it now takes just 41 senators to block any bill. Since 41 senators can be gleaned from states representing as little as 11 percent of the population, the consequence is a minority veto like nothing America has ever seen before. Moreover, there are two other facts worth considering. One is that two of the last four presidents were chosen by the Electoral College over the wishes of the people at large. Another is that five of the current nine Supreme Court were appointed by minority presidents who had lost the popular vote (i.e. John Roberts and Samuel Alito by George W. Bush and Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett by Trump) and four were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population (i.e. Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Clarence Thomas). When you take all that into account, it’s clear that mythology has little to do with it. America is laboring under an unprecedented minority dictatorship. It is foundering because its political machinery has broken beyond repair.

Slotkin’s final chapters on Trump are more than a bit one-sided. Predictably, he blames his rise on race. Trump supporters were “alarmed by demographic trends indicating that by 2040 a majority of Americans would be non-White, making this a ‘majority-minority’ nation…. The racial contempt endemic in American culture was politicized by recognition that the interests of non-White minorities were favored by liberals, an alliance that seemed to promise a permanent liberal majority in the future.”

But much as one hates to part ways with liberal orthodoxy, race in fact had little to do with it. Trump pulled ahead in 2016 because of war. Hillary Clinton was the most hawkish presidential candidate since “Dubya” himself. With the US bombing seven Muslim nations under her tenure as secretary of state, her policies in Libya, Syria, Yemen, and the Ukraine were leading to disaster. Yet Republicans like Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz parroted her at every step of the way in the hope that militarism would propel them to victory. Trump was the only Republican who dared break ranks — and the results were sensational.

Trump wrong, Democrats right — such is Slotkin’s operating assumption. The idea that Democratic failure smoothed the way for Trump’s success doesn’t enter into his equation. “The MAGA movement,” he says, “has … become the vehicle of the development of an authentically American Fascism: more neo-Confederate than neo-Nazi, an amalgam of American exceptionalism and Christian Nationalism…. Instead of Nazism’s Wotan / Siegfried mythos, it roots its world concept in the Myth of the Frontier and the Lost Cause, and therefore sees itself fighting a Lost Stand to save America from ‘replacement.’”

Jungian stereotypes aside, the fact remains that the Trump movement would never have gone anywhere if Democrats had come up with a more attractive alternative. The fact that they didn’t is why we’re in the boat we’re in. A Great Disorder would have been a better book if it had examined this failure as well.

Daniel Lazare is the author of The Frozen Republic and other books about the US Constitution and US policy. He has written for a wide variety of publications including Harper’s and the London Review of Books. He currently writes regularly for the Weekly Worker, a socialist newspaper in London.