Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins

..given the deep divisions in the nation, it is not likely that the 2024 election will resolve the cultural conflict. In the absence of a unifying national myth, the states are dividing along ideological lines, as they did before the Civil War period and again in the Jim Crow era, with radically different laws on voting, on abortion and public health, on racial discrimination, on gun rights, on fossil fuels and green alternatives, and on the teaching of history.

If that process continues, national myth will continue to provide symbols for partisan battle flags rather than a unifying version of the American story. Americans’ ability to imagine anything like the common good, or to unite in response to the crises of climate, public health and international conflict that are sure to arise, will have to wait for a new chapter in the American story.

This is excerpted from Richard Slotkin's "To Understand Trump vs. Harris, You Must Understand these Myths", which I missed when it first came out last week in the NY Times. His article, for reasons elaborated below, reinforces my perception (hope?) that Harris is more than a typical political hack and that she understands that the crisis we're facing has a mythological, i.e., spiritual, dimension. Whether she finds a way to pivot effectively with understanding that remains to be seen, but it's important that she's seems to understand this and is trying. 

Slotkin makes the case that politics is always about competing myths, and that Democrats have been at a disadvantage since the collapse of the New Deal Order in the 80s, a blow decisively delivered by Ronald Reagan who replaced it with the older 19th Century 'Myth of the Frontier' that Slotkin describes as tracing --

... 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.”

This older myth provides a very powerful narrative that explains America's prosperity and rise as a world power--its rise to greatness, so to say. It was easy for Reagan to draw upon it as soon as the New Deal Order got wobbly in the 1970s. But as Slotkin points out, the New Deal, while I would argue that it draws on mythic sources, did not have defenders in the Democratic Party who understood the power of myth. Why the New Deal Order collapsed is complex, but certainly an important factor was its lack of a deep mythos to support it through the 70s crisis. Slotkin points out that--

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.

I would disagree slightly about his saying that no movies embody this mythos because Frank Capra's do. If the only Capra movie you've seen is It's a Wonderful Life, take some time this weekend and watch Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Meet John Doe. Capra was a populist in the best American sense of the word in his celebration of the decency of ordinary Americans. He had no illusions about the dark side of the American character or the corruption of its institutions, but he sought always to call upon what I would call the “Lincoln Mythos”, a vision of America that Lincoln believed in and sought to preserve. 

In Capra's Lincolnesque mythopoesis, Pottersville is America just as much as Bedford Falls is1, and both live in archetypal polar tension. But I'd argue that Reagan's dismantling of the New Deal Order unbalanced things toward Pottersville. That's the irony of Reaganism, of course--it's so Norman Rockwell in its packaging, but so Hillbilly Elegy in its reality.  Bedford Falls is Lincoln's America, and what I see/hope Harris/Walz trying to do is restore the Lincolnesque Bedford Falls side of the polarity.

Am I mythologizing Lincoln? Yes, I am because mythologizing is precisely what's needed. Slotkin again--

The New Deal and the civil rights movement symbolize the ideological split that has divided liberal politics. Bill Clinton and the New Democrats embraced the neoliberalism of Ronald Reagan, implicitly rejecting the New Deal, and focused on developing a high-tech economy, while progressives embraced identity politics. Neither faction addressed the great failing of American politics: the fact that since 1980, our political choices and tax policies, coupled with a changing global economy, have vastly increased economic inequality, constraining the prospects of the working class and the poor while granting extravagant wealth and political privilege to the wealthy and corporations.

This Reaganesque pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, rugged individualism Myth of the Frontier legitimated the Neoliberalism and all the destruction it has wreaked especially on rural, traditional America. But that destructive myth that animated the Ronald Reagan/Paul Ryan/Mitch Romney wing of the GOP, clearly and for good reason didn't work for populist Red America as it became more and more a Pottersville, and since the Democrats didn't offer any myth at all, Red America was easily seduced by another myth, the myth of The Lost Cause that has largely taken possession of MAGA. Slotkin describes it as celebrating--

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.

At its origin, the Lost Cause myth framed the conflict over Reconstruction (1865-75) as a struggle between the racial and patriarchal hierarchies of the Old South and the liberalism of Northern radicals. The myth justified extraordinary violence and political repression to save white Christian civilization from its racial and ideological enemies. It authorized the Jim Crow regime of segregation, disenfranchisement and lynch law to keep Black people in a state of abjection. The Lost Cause also justified the establishment of quasi-authoritarian state governments, as Southern states, between 1890 and 1915, revised their constitutions to deprive Blacks of the right to vote, using devices like the literacy test and the poll tax that also disenfranchised large numbers of poor whites.

But this is no longer a myth just for the South. Read about the "Texification" of America in Michael Lind's Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics (2002). All Red America is Texas now. 

If another positive, future-oriented humane mythos is possible, it must draw from the American experience and its traditions, literature, music, and most humane customs. I think the raw materials for it are found in the Declaration of Independence, the essays of Emerson, the poetry of Whitman, the speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, the films of Capra and the novels of Twain and Steinbeck--and so many other lesser figures who have been and are even now similarly inspired.² But the American intellectual class has, so far at least, not had a mythopoetic imagination, because they by and large find such "myths" phony and manipulative because there are so few contemporary examples of anything that works in a healthy way. Myth for them means a made-up story that has not basis in fact. Liberals prefer facts, but they seem finally to be catching on that facts are not enough.

Because fact and truth are not the same thing. Facts provide an important basis for us in our assessment of what is true or not, but facts by themselves are not meaningful. They become meaningful only when they take their place in patterns that connect them, and then the important question is which meaning patterns do the best job of interpreting the facts. By what criteria can we judge better and worse, truer and falser, more meaningful or less?

This is where it gets tricky, and this is where you need poets and prophets to help us form a true mythopoeisis, a story that provides a true underlying meaning pattern that works to help us imagine a collective story of our best possibilities, a story that gives us, not just as individuals, but as a people an imagination of a hoped-for future that is worthy of our deepest aspirations. Every healthy culture or civilization has such a mythos. And without a robust, healthy, unifying mythos, conspiracy theories fill the vacuum--they provide the meaning that a failing culture is otherwise unable to. 

We need some mythopoetic utopian thinking, not because utopia is possible but because it gives us a standard by which we can judge to what degree we are measuring up. But because Liberalism lacks a robust, positive mythos, it lacks such a standard, and so all Liberalism by itself has to offer is an ethic of tolerance and skepticism. Tolerance and skepticism are important, but their thrust is primarily negative--they can only say No. They provide nothing to which we can say Yes. And because most Liberal elites see too many people saying yes to nonsense, they won't permit themselves to be so unsophisticated and credulous. But such a negative ethic paralyzes the spirit, and more is demanded of us. Otherwise the bad guys win by default. The Myth of the Frontier and the Lost Cause Myth are toxic, and they need to be replaced, and that can only be done by offering something better.

I know how naive all this sounds. A national unifying myth? Are you serious? Aren't we too shattered and Balkanized for any such thing to grab hold of the public imagination? Maybe, but things can shift in unexpected ways and it's important that a quorum of Americans be prepared if it does. Such a unifying mythos could never unify everyone, but it could most of us If it is compelling and inspiring and truthful enough. And yes, it will always compete with other, darker myths, but most normal people want to live positively meaningful lives, not lives circumscribed by resentment, fear, hatred, and anger.

We're all sick of the nihilism; we know there's something better, and we are ready to embrace it if it's offered. We have the resources in our history and traditions, we just need poets and prophets to gather and integrate those resources and articulate it for us in a way that especially inspires young people.

Slotkin outlines in the short run rudimentarily what it might look like--

Democrats could benefit by framing their programs with a story that has the narrative coherence and emotional resonance of myth. The party’s reform agenda is justified by its critique of America’s history of capitalist exploitation of land and labor, racial discrimination, Indigenous dispossession and imperialism.

But nearly every major modern nation-state’s history is rife with social injustice and the violence of unjust wars. What is admirable about America is not its supposed exception to these patterns of history but the persistence with which its people have struggled to amend injustice and realize an extraordinarily broad and inclusive concept of nationality.

There is an opportunity here for Ms. Harris, who has invoked this persistence and wrapped it in a stirring call for patriotism. A myth can be made of such struggles, tracing a path from Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom” to the New Deal’s grand but imperfect project of economic and social reform to the triumphs of the good war, the Great Society and the civil rights movement. Such a myth — the myth of the land of opportunity? — would enable the left and the center-left to fight the story wars more effectively.

We can argue about what the best name for this new Lincolnesque myth would be--"land of opportunity" falls flat for me. Opportunity for what? To become a billionaire? To realize one's delusional, narcissistic fantasies? It's so easily coopted by a toxic, Neoliberal, every-man-and-woman-for-him/herself ethos that is already hegemonic. "No man or woman left behind" is more spirit of the mythos I'd prefer. For now I'll just call it the "Lincoln mythos".

The bottom line is whoever tells the best story wins, and so far the Democrats haven't had one that inspires anybody. The jury is still out on whether Harris/Walz will change that. They can’t by themselves, because this is not only, or even primarily, a political project. They’ll need some help from the poets, filmmakers, essayists, podcasters, social media influencers, and others who draw upon the Lincoln mythos to provide a vision of the future that makes a saner politics possible.

Notes

1. For those who dismiss Capra as a sentimentalist, read Rich Cohens "It's a Wonderul Life": The Most Terrifying Movie Ever". Here’s an excerpt—

Here's my point: I do not think the hidden message vanishes when the movie goes Hollywood and happy. I believe the resolution of the darker movie is, in fact, still there, wrapped around the happy ending of the classic. Look again at the closing frames -- shots of Jimmy Stewart staring at his friends. In most, he's joyful. But in a few, he's terrified. As I said, this is a terrifying movie. An hour earlier George was ready to kill himself. He has now returned from a death experience. He was among the unborn, had crossed over like Dante's hero, had seen this world from beyond the veil. In those frames -- "The Night Journey of George Bailey" -- I don't think he's seeing the world that would exist had he never been born. I think he's seeing the world as it does exist, in his time and also in our own.

George had been living in Pottersville all along. He just didn't know it. Because he was seeing the world through his eyes -- not as it was, but as he was: honest and fair. But on "The Night Journey," George is nothing and nobody. When the angel took him out of his life, he took him out of his consciousness, out from behind his eyes. It was only then that he saw America. Bedford Falls was the fantasy. Pottersville is where we live. If you don't believe me, examine the dystopia of the Capra movie -- the nighttime world of neon bars and drunks and showgirl floozies. Does Bedford Falls feel more like the place you live, or does Pottersville? I live in a place that looks very much like Bedford Falls, but after 10 minutes in line at the bank or in the locker room where the squirts are changing for hockey I know I'm in Pottersville.

I'm betting this was as much the case in Capra's time as it is in our own. He loved America but was watching the triumph of Pottersville. That's why, in the last scene, George looks at his friends with terror. He's happy to be alive, but he's disillusioned, wised up in just the worst way. He finally knows the world as it really is, what his friends are capable of, the dark potential coiled in each of them. His wife is a spinster in Pottersville because, if she's not with George, she cannot be anything. She's just one of two characters who are, in fact, the same in both worlds, the other being Mr. Potter. Everyone else is two-faced, masked. Simply put, George has been cursed with knowledge, shown the truth of the world -- seen hidden things. It's the sort of vision that makes a person go insane.

Nobody wants to live in Pottersville. 

2. I am purposely not mentioning religion, particularly Christianity here. It’s not that I don’t think it has a role to play, but not in its present form. I am a practicing Catholic for many reasons, but among them because I see the pre-modern religions, and in the West particularly the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions, as preserving important cultural memories and practices that need at some point to be ‘remembered’ more broadly. How that happens, I don’t know, but I do know that there’s something there that needs to be preserved and honored.

The problem with Christianity in America—even for many if not most Catholics—in this moment is that it is so deeply Calvinistic, and that’s part of the problem, not the solution. A a born-and-bred Calvinist like Emerson realized that, and for that reason became more the kind of German Idealist/Romantic that Taylor is pointing to as resource for overcoming what is most toxic in the Calvinist/Capitalist/Baconian system that so oppresses us spiritually now. So must the rest of us be cured of our Calvinism.