The Book<\/h4>\n
A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America<\/p>\n
The Author(s)<\/h4>\n
Richard Slotkin<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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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.\u00a0 Trump is not dominant, at least not yet.\u00a0 No collective force currently exercises hegemonic power.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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\u2019s World Wrestling Entertainment.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
The emergence of Donald Trump as avatar of the entertainmentization of everything looms over Richard Slotkin\u2019s latest book.\u00a0 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\u2014murder 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.\u00a0 Slotkin has studied cultural expressions of this violent history of national formation his entire professional career.\u00a0 He returns once again to this dark history to help explain the present crisis.<\/p>\n
The core of the book is the classification and analysis of four historical myths Slotkin argues are foundational to U.S. national identity\u2014the Founding, the Frontier, the Lost Cause, and the Good War.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 \u201cNational myths themselves have a history,\u201d Slotkin states. \u201cThe longest-lived mythologies are the highly evolved products of numerous crises of belief and revision.\u00a0 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\u201d (9).<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 The material on the frontier as a definitive symbolic form in national culture draws from Slotkin\u2019s well-known trilogy, Regeneration Through Violence <\/em>(1973),<\/em> The Fatal Environment <\/em>(1985), and Gunfighter Nation <\/em>(1992) but expanded to cover a broader time period.\u00a0 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\u2019s future, Slotkin counsels that the national past shows how easily authoritarianism and democratic institutions have coexisted in the United States.\u00a0 \u201cMAGA is a movement akin to Fascism,\u201d Slotkin argues, \u201cbut 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\u201d (15).<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 \u201cNational myths,\u201d putatively necessary for uniting a people sharing the same country, in no way mitigated violent conflicts of region, class, religion, and race.\u00a0 Possibly their ubiquity contributed to marginalizing alternative visions of the nation.\u00a0 In the course of the twentieth century, the book\u2019s four myths took on increasingly overtly divisive variations.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n The material surveyed discusses important books and films to show the historical development of the book\u2019s four central myths.\u00a0 Slotkin\u2019s 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.\u00a0 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]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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<\/em>: \u201cPolitics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Slotkin notes that assumptions that there was once greater consensus in national life exaggerates the contentions of the immediate past and obscures past disunity.<\/p>\n The book is rich in details, with its points effectively made in language that is approachable for a wide range of readers.\u00a0 The book offers much to consider about the relation of the current moment to the nation\u2019s past.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The argument that national myths are an essential part of any effective explanation of the contemporary political crisis parallels Heather Cox Richardson\u2019s in-depth and more distinctly political studies of the Republican Party\u2019s 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.\u00a0 There is little direct consideration of the role cultural objects play in identity formation or contests to secure hegemony.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Successful politicians have long been masters of the new media formats and genres of their eras.\u00a0 In the mid-nineteenth century, speeches and debates were often published with a view to their being read out loud at informal gatherings.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Lincoln\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Trump worked up his crude, pugnacious media image when he appeared occasionally as a host for televised World Wrestling Entertainment events.\u00a0 In 1988, Trump\u2019s Atlantic City casino started hosting WWE \u201cWrestle-Mania\u201d events.\u00a0 Because the public responded so positively to Trump\u2019s 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 \u201creality\u201d television show, \u201cThe Apprentice,\u201d where the viewing public came to know him for his mostly inaccurate image as one of the world\u2019s most successful entrepreneurs.<\/p>\n As part of discussing how Trump put his own personal brand on well-known national myths, Slotkin might have explored Donald Trump\u2019s participation in popular media formats and genres where stance and attitude have been far more important than any given articulated message.\u00a0 In both genres of wrestling and reality shows, Trump\u2019s 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n By the book\u2019s conclusion, the central argument that myths are genuinely explanatory remains unproven.\u00a0 An argument about myth may simply be a heuristic turning a complex body of materials into a coherent and instructive narrative.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Such a story gives form<\/em>\u2014narratability 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.<\/p>\n [1]<\/sup><\/a> See for a relatively recent summary of political science literature related to this topic Alice Thwaite, \u201cLiterature Review on Elections, Political Campaigning and Democracy\u201d (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<\/a>).<\/p>\n Richard C\u00e1ndida Smith is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He has published seven books and over fifty essays.\u00a0 His most recent book is Improvised Continent: Pan-Americanism and Cultural Exchange<\/em>.\u00a0 He is currently working on a book, tentatively titled A Truer Self<\/em>, exploring the idea of \u201ceveryday life\u201d and strategies proposed for capturing the hidden world of the everyday.\u00a0 His work has explored arts and literary networks, movements, and institutions in the United States, with an emphasis on international connections and exchange. \u00a0He sits on the board of directors for Voices of Contemporary Art and on the editorial board of Transatlantic Cultures: Cultural Histories of the Atlantic World 18th-21st Centuries. \u00a0For more information: https:\/\/berkeley.academia.edu\/RichardCandidaSmith and https:\/\/www.richardcandidasmith.com\/.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Book A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America The Author(s) Richard Slotkin 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.\u00a0 Trump is not dominant, at least not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":122296,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12032],"tags":[2708,2922,3744,53917,15899,2338,18562,5306,4459,53918,1358],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-122295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-history","tag-america","tag-battle","tag-book-reviews","tag-candida","tag-disorder","tag-great","tag-myth","tag-national","tag-richard","tag-slotkins","tag-smith"],"yoast_head":"\nAbout the Reviewer<\/h4>\n