Opinion: To understand Trump vs. Harris, you must know these core American myths
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.Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are making their appeals to the American electorate on the basis of personality, character and policy. But they are also framing themselves as actors in the American story — the events of the recent past and the deeper narrative of U.S. history carried by the symbol-rich stories of our national mythology.
In the “story wars,” Mr. Trump has an advantage over Ms. Harris: Conservatives have devised over decades a store of established mythological American “scripts,” something liberals have failed to do. 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.
This new Lost Cause also holds that to save civilization, extraordinary methods, up to and including violence, are justified. On Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Trump told a mass of demonstrators, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” The civil rights movement invoked both the liberation myth of the Civil War and the good-war myth but did not itself become a national myth. 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.
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