The myth of the frontier traces our national origin to the colonial settlements and the westward expansion that followed. It enshrines a distinctively American concept of capitalist development: Our extraordinary growth as a democracy arose from the discovery and exploitation of abundant natural resources beyond the zone of established order. Winning the frontier also resulted in dispossessing the nonwhite Indigenous peoples, which made racial exclusion part of our original concept of nationality. The myth of the frontier explains the origin of America’s exceptional character and unparalleled prosperity. It was the myth of choice for Gilded Age imperialists and for John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier.”
The myth of the founding is the story of the creation of our nation-state by an intelligent and virtuous (though flawed) set of white men, the founding fathers. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution embody the contradictions at the heart of our ideal of free government. From generation to generation, Americans have invoked these documents, and the principles they symbolize, to address the fundamental issue of our national organization: whether it is possible — and desirable — to form a single nationality and a just republican government out of diverse racial and ethnic elements.
The myth of the Lost Cause celebrates the Old South and its culture, and justifies violence, sometimes extreme, first to defend and then to restore its traditional structures of patriarchy and white supremacy. The Lost Cause myth sustained the South’s Jim Crow order for 100 years.
In all of these myths, the default American nationality is white. That ethnonationalist presumption would be challenged by the crises of the 20th century: World War I, the Depression and World War II. These compelled the nation’s political and cultural elites to start seeing as equals the racial and ethnic minorities that had been marginalized or excluded from the body politic. One result was the creation of the myth of the good war, which used the war-movie convention of the multiethnic and multiracial platoon to link the diversity of our country to our success as “leader of the free world.” It was this myth that informed our role in the Cold War and helped justify the interventions in Vietnam and Iraq.
Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign rhetoric follows the Lost Cause playbook. He invokes fear of racial pollution by characterizing liberal policies on immigration as the “poisoning” of the American bloodstream. He identifies himself as the agent of his people’s retribution. He promises to redeem American greatness by rooting out “communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country” and declares that that retribution “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
By contrast, since the 1970s, the left has struggled with this. Although the New Deal was the most transformative political movement since the Civil War, it did not generate a comparable mythology. Until Joe Biden, the last president to so fully invoke it as a major policy model was Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. Popular culture has rarely exploited the New Deal’s stories of relief and recovery, of enormous public works projects or union struggles that reshaped the relations between workers and executives. There is no genre of movies akin to those that memorialize the frontier or the Civil War. Rather, the New Deal’s social justice values and patriotic appeal were abstracted and subsumed in the good-war myth.
Ms. Harris has continued that focus on union jobs and middle-class economics and has rooted her personal story in the civil rights movement. At the Democratic convention, her acceptance speech emphasized labor rights, patriotism and public service as the basis of the Democratic agenda — but without specifically invoking the New Deal.
posted by f.sheikh
