A GREAT DISORDER: National Myth and the Battle for America, by Richard Slotkin
“A patriot is not a weapon,” Adrienne Rich wrote in a 1991 poem. “A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country/as she wrestles for her own being.” The historian Richard Slotkin uses these words as an epigraph for his sweeping new work, “A Great Disorder,” his effort to redeem nationalism from its violent and exclusionary politics through an exploration of Americans’ ideas about their country. His book is the culmination of a prolific career and a new way to make sense not only of the past, but of the contemporary culture wars.
Across three books of U.S. history — “Regeneration Through Violence,” about the period from 1600 to the Civil War; “The Fatal Environment,” about industrialization in the 1800s; and “Gunfighter Nation,” about imperial ambitions in the 20th century — Slotkin argued that Americans repeatedly turned to what he called the “myth of the frontier,” a notion that reinvention could be achieved only through the white supremacist violence of Indigenous displacement and fatal shootouts. The results were environmental degradation and capitalist exploitation.
An American iconography developed. The idea of the cowboy, the wilderness explorer and the fertile but deadly frontier landscape consumed the white American imagination, inspiring late-19th-century prospectors who hunted for coal and oil in Texas and Oklahoma as well as John F. Kennedy, who invoked the “opportunities and perils” of a “new frontier” to call for bold economic and civil reforms at home while waging brutal Cold War battles abroad.
Having interpreted 400 years of American history through this lens, Slotkin now turns his attention to the 21st century. Distressed by the division and dysfunction that have come to define U.S. politics, especially since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, he looks again to the motives we find in the stories we tell.
The present polarization, Slotkin argues, is rooted in competing national mythologies, “a different understanding of who counts as American, a different reading of American history and a different vision of what our future ought to be.” Only by understanding how those competing myths fell into place, then forging a new, unifying myth, can the country emerge from its current political crisis.
To underscore the centrality of myth to U.S. history, Slotkin adds to his myth of the frontier a number of others: the myth of the founding, the myths of the Civil War, the myth of the good war, the myth of the movement. It’s an enormous pileup that shows just how challenging his project is.
Consider the enduring and popular story of the Civil War. Slotkin readily acknowledges that it quickly fractured into separate and not quite reconcilable myths, from the competing foggy pictures of liberation and the Lost Cause, to the myth of the white reunion, which held that white soldiers on both sides fought nobly as Americans, a notion that echoes whenever we prioritize consensus and bipartisanship over justice.
The mess of mythologies that emerged after the Civil War signals the problem with Slotkin’s search for a unifying idea. This disorderliness arises even from more cohesive myths like the myth of the movement. Born in the struggle for Black civil rights, the myth of the movement built on both the democratic potential of the founding and the liberatory myth of the Civil War. Yet despite its promise to forge a new national creed, this time born out of nonviolence instead of brutality, it failed to produce a single vision. Activists, Slotkin argues, failed to dedicate themselves to that mythologizing task, opting instead to criticize the nation’s past and splinter into “a constellation of identity-based movements, each devoted to its own cause, sharing only a sharply critical stance toward national government and societal norms.”
But was there another option? As Slotkin’s Civil War myths suggest, there was no shared commitment to the Black freedom struggle, not in the 1860s and not in the 1960s. In all the mythmaking that he traces in “A Great Disorder,” one common theme emerges: Myths that gesture toward full inclusion cohere. Those that require it fall apart.
That falling apart is the focus of the last third or so of Slotkin’s book, which describes the period from the early 1990s onward, a time when irreconcilable visions of the country’s history and values cleaved the nation, especially after the election of Barack Obama. In 2007, Obama launched his presidential campaign with two myths tied together, nodding to the “men and women of every race, from every walk of life,” who “continued to march for freedom long after Lincoln was laid to rest.” Yet despite this carefully deployed American storytelling, Obama’s election was met with a Tea Party movement that countered with its own mythology of the Revolution and the founding.
For Slotkin, the weakness of progressive national mythologies is that they have failed to tell a compelling story that combines the nation’s multiracial and multiethnic origins with class politics. Near the end of “A Great Disorder,” he proposes “the American reformation,” a union of racial and economic justice that blends the promises of Reconstruction with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s welfare state and recasts U.S. history as “a long struggle against the dark side of our cultural heritage to establish a just and equitable society.” It’s a 1619 Project minus the pessimism, with a dash of Green New Deal. (Slotkinites might one day speak about the Myth of the New New Deal.)
With so many stories now on hand, it’s possible to find a way of reading mythology into many of the major moments of this century. Trump’s border wall and Muslim ban evoked the “savage wars” of the frontier; his intermittent calls for national mobilization in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic evoked the national unity of World War II; his election denialism after the 2020 presidential race evoked the Lost Cause.
It is clear that in recent years competing mythologies have played out in rhetoric, activism and visions of government. But it’s less clear that these mythologies have the kind of explanatory force Slotkin hangs on them. Evocations are not explanations; the analysis might be stronger if ideology, rather than mythology, were at its heart.
Still, as the book winds to a close with the U.S. Capitol shrouded in smoke, as Trump supporters drove lawmakers from the building and unleashed violence on the Capitol Police, the power of mythology is on display. People calling themselves patriots carried Confederate flags and invoked the legacy of 1776. At such moments, Slotkin’s mythologies, and the violence they still carry, become impossible to ignore.
For Slotkin, the insurrection only reinforces the need for a new national mythology. But two powerful myths built on racial equality have already failed. Perhaps that is a sign that myths cannot make revolutionary change; they can only help secure a revolution after it has been won.
A GREAT DISORDER: National Myth and the Battle for America | By Richard Slotkin | Belknap Press | 512 pp. | $37.95
