It hardly qualifies as news today that the United States, the world’s foremost economic and military power, suffers from a political and cultural malaise. Americans are deeply sceptical of once well-regarded institutions such as universities, the media and the public health system, and do not trust the functioning of democratic politics. The economy is characterised by entrenched inequality, and intense polarisation between the parties makes it all but impossible to address long-term problems such as climate change. In A Great Disorder, the historian Richard Slotkin argues that the crisis is, however, essentially cultural rather than economic or political. Among the contributors to the steadily intensifying ‘culture wars’ between ‘red’ and ‘blue’ states, and between rural and urban communities, Slotkin identifies the banking crisis of 2007-8, the Covid pandemic and changes in the racial and ethnic make-up of the American population. To these familiar culprits he adds a deeper problem: a lack of unifying ‘national myths’ that embody shared views of the country’s history and future. ‘The loss of a common national story,’ Slotkin writes at the outset, ‘is central to the contemporary crisis.’ Myths that sought to explain American history and chart a path to the future once helped to bind the country together. Today, they are absorbed into the culture wars, reflecting divergent understandings of foundational American values and clashing definitions of which groups constitute ‘real’ Americans. Is it just a coincidence that one of this spring’s most popular films was called Civil War?
My dictionary defines ‘myth’ as both a popular tradition that embodies core social values and an ‘unfounded or false’ idea. The word hints at intentional distortion of the truth. But truth is more or less beside the point in Slotkin’s discussion of myths. He is neither asking Americans to embrace demonstrable falsehoods as a way of restoring a lost sense of national unity nor demanding that unifying narratives embody only verifiable facts about the country’s past. ‘As I use the term,’ he writes, ‘myths are the stories – true, untrue, half-true – that … provide an otherwise loosely affiliated people with models of patriotic action.’ Such common beliefs are more important in the US than elsewhere, since compared with other nations the country lacks traditional underpinnings of patriotic nationalism such as a shared ethnocultural identity, a long-established history and a powerful and threatening neighbour. In a more unified nation, people of different political persuasions would seize on myths as ready-made paradigms which help make sense of events. In A Great Disorder, Slotkin explores the emergence and evolution of the ‘foundational’ myths that have helped define American culture.