Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past

by Kevin M. Kruse

The first major development was the creation of the conservative media ecosystem, which ranges today from cable news networks such as Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News to websites such as Breitbart.

The second significant change, related to the first, is the devolution of the Republican Party’s commitment to truth.

A history that seeks to exalt a nation’s strengths without examining its shortcomings, that values feeling good over thinking hard, that embraces simplistic celebration over complex understanding, isn’t history; it’s propaganda.

Unmooring our debates from some shared understanding of facts inevitably makes constructive dialogue impossible because there is no shared starting point.

We need to see the past clearly in order to understand where we stand now and where we might go in the future.

The idea of “American exceptionalism,” in other words, falls squarely into an entirely common pattern. There is nothing exceptional about it.

By the 1990s, with international communism vanquished and McCarthyism long largely discredited, accusations of treason no longer served the Republican cause well. But the charge of not believing in “American exceptionalism” could accomplish the same purpose in a more subtle manner by casting Democrats and leftists as unpatriotic, countercultural cosmopolitans who, in an age of globalization, preferred other countries to their own and who despised the values of ordinary Americans.

For Gingrich, demonstrating America’s exceptionality has always mattered less than denouncing the Left for not believing in it.

The more progressive that Americans are in their politics, the more likely they are to see America as exceptional, if at all, in large part because of the harm it has done: the treatment of indigenous peoples, slavery, US foreign policy in the twentieth century, and contemporary inequality and racism.

As one much-cited article put it in August of 2020, “In a dark season of pestilence, Covid has reduced to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism.”

The very vacuity of the notion has been its strength, for it can be filled with whatever content is desired, even as it flatters US audiences by assuring them of their membership in the elect. There is little reason, then, to think that it will pass away in the new season of despair that we are living through today.

Instead, overmatched and unfit, tribal peoples would vanish from the scene. In this way, settlers absolved themselves of guilt for the cruelty they visited upon Native nations; they turned imperial violence into innocent virtue.

Immigrants are not outsiders. “They” are “us.” Immigrants have not “kept coming.” They have been driven, recruited, lured, and incentivized to come to the United States, often with the direct help and encouragement of the US government and businesses.

The idea that some citizens have political or moral priority over others by virtue of historical priority is intrinsic to nativism, weighing the entitlements of those who were supposedly “here first” above those of more recent immigrants—while also ignoring the claims of other groups who demonstrably arrived before these supposedly “real Americans,” including Indigenous people.

America First works as a shield precisely because it imputes innocence to its adherents, maintaining a mythic image of the nation and their privileged place within it that is at odds with historical reality.

The reality is that America has always been a fluid, heterogeneous collective that expands and evolves.

Any effort to define America in static racial or ethnic terms was defeated before it began—that ship had sailed long before 1855. Today it is an exercise in futility—which is precisely what makes it so dangerous, as people like Fuentes and his supporters endorse violence to bring about a fantasy version of “pure Americanism” that has never existed and can never exist.

By the narrowest definition, one that nearly everyone accepts—an empire is a country with colonies—the United States has been an empire and remains one today.

The reason Congress held territories back from statehood wasn’t that no one lived in them but because the wrong people did.

In all, the United States today has five inhabited territories that contain more than 3.6 million people. Those people cannot vote for president, have no voting representatives in Congress, lack full constitutional protection, and suffer the predictable effects. All five territories are poorer, per capita, than the poorest US state.

In country after country around the Caribbean, the United States seized control of finance, trade, and foreign policy while leaving sovereignty formally intact.

The United States isn’t exceptional for its abhorrence of empire. It’s been an empire, and it remains one today.

Americans attempted to police the movement of Native peoples by placing them on reservations, but they in no way tried to stop the migration of Mexicans across the newly drawn border. To the contrary, Mexicans—especially after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which excluded Chinese as a matter of law if not practice—became desirable and exploitable laborers who dug mines, extracted minerals, built railroads, and harvested crops. Nothing about this changed until well into the twentieth century.

The conflation of undocumented immigration with the need for a border wall is representative of how many Americans think today, and their thinking is wrong.

All of these things together expose the fact that the border as Trump saw it is little more than a symbol—of national insecurity, of the xenophobia of many Americans living far from the border, of our government’s habit of blaming others for problems of our own making, or of problems that do not have easy fixes.

Conservative politicians and commentators take quite a different view. For them, socialism has meant only a hankering for state tyranny and brazen assaults on property rights that, together, threaten the beliefs every patriotic citizen holds dear.

Socialists, then and later, played a major role in initiating and rallying support for changes that most Americans have no desire to reverse. These include women’s right to vote, Medicare, the minimum wage, workplace safety laws, universal health insurance, and civil rights for all races and genders. All were once considered radical ideas. But vast majorities now consider them the cornerstones of a decent society.

As Harrington liked to tell audiences, “You must recognize that the social vision to which you are committing yourself will never be fulfilled in your lifetime.”

Yet conservative politicians, business executives, libertarian think tanks, and millions of ordinary Americans resist these solutions, clinging to the notion that the best way to solve our problems is through the workings of the marketplace. They suggest that the private sector can handle these matters and that any government action is likely to fail, perhaps making things worse than they already are.

Market fundamentalism is not restricted to the United States, but that is where it finds its fullest expression and most wide-ranging support. This is not historical contingency. Rather, it is the result of a decades-long propaganda campaign to persuade the American people of the efficacy and benevolence of markets, the inefficacy and malevolence of “big government,” and the centrality of economic freedom in American life.

The myth of the magic of the marketplace was invented to defend the prerogatives of business leaders while denying many prerogatives of workers and consumers.

From the early twentieth-century defense of child labor to the mid-century attacks on the New Deal, American business leaders had argued that any compromise to business freedom threatened the fabric of American social and political freedom and therefore the American way of life.

NAM was transmogrifying a self-serving argument for protecting business privilege into a seemingly virtuous defense of American freedom.

It was a bit rich for the captains of industry to insist that businessmen knew what was best for the country when that argument had in living memory so conspicuously failed.

In Friedman’s vision, anyone could be a benefactor to men of ideas, but in practice only the wealthy were positioned to do so. In this and many other ways that Friedman would rarely acknowledge, the rich are a good deal freer than the poor: philanthropy is not a level playing field, and free speech is not free.

It’s rather that patrons find people whose views they like and then succor and sustain them. It’s a form of unnatural selection, an environment in which the rich can select the ideas they want and ensure their survival and propagation.

By the 1960s, the reforms of the New Deal and the experiences of European social democracy had proved that governments could both act assertively in marketplaces and strengthen social safety nets without undermining democratic governance.

In America, decades of neoliberal policies have made many people less free as they struggle to stay afloat financially or remain healthy in the face of the opioid crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Political and economic freedom are not indivisible, and markets are not magic.

For New Dealers, the point of the New Deal was not to return the US economy quickly to the precrash status quo but to promote a recovery in which all Americans could share, to demonstrate that the US government could still work for the American people.

The Depression showed, to use Roosevelt’s preferred word, the “interdependence” of all Americans and indeed all people. No one group could enjoy the benefits of prosperity if all did not.

How the Confederate past is remembered is tied to the narrative of the Lost Cause, a term adopted by southern whites after the Civil War to describe defeat. The evolution of that narrative is complex. Not only did it offer a means for white southerners to come to terms with defeat; they also used it to justify their failure to create a separate nation and to reject the idea that slavery was a primary cause of the Civil War.

Pollard laid out a Confederate history of the war, as well as a narrative that proved useful to white southerners reeling from defeat and the devastation of their world. Not only did he coin the term Lost Cause, but he also provided former Confederates with a rhetorical balm to soothe their psychological wounds. In doing so, he helped to lay the foundation of a mythology that reassured them that their cause was just and their values were worth fighting for even in the face of a thoroughly crushing defeat.

For three decades after the Civil War, white southerners continued their efforts to commemorate the Lost Cause, but between 1890 and World War I the narrative assumed a different tone and new intensity.

The evolution of the Lost Cause myth offers proof that it was never tied to a factual history but was always about an alternate reality.

The legacy of monuments within the Confederate tradition is a legacy of historical distortion. As a revisionist narrative, the Lost Cause has not only damaged Americans’ ability to determine fact from fiction; it has also served as a bulwark against racial progress and is its most insidious legacy.

There was, indeed, a long-term transformation in the two parties—first at the national level and then subsequently at the state and local levels—a process that stands at the core of twentieth-century political history.

Over several decades, Democrats abandoned their role as the party of slavery, segregation, and white supremacy to champion civil rights; in response, Republicans retreated from their original racial liberalism and courted white resentment.

Only recently have conservative partisans challenged this well-established history, presumably seeking to blunt accusations that Republicans have embraced racism today by pretending that Republicans never embraced racism before.

Longtime Republican Jackie Robinson left the convention deeply shaken: “I now believe I know how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”