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

by Kevin M. Kruse

As Blacks recoiled from the GOP, white southerners warmed to it.

In 1981 strategist Lee Atwater readily admitted that racism had been the foundation for “the Harry Dent–type Southern Strategy. The whole strategy was… based on coded racism. The whole thing.”

there was a “long Southern Strategy” that evolved and expanded from the coded racism of the Goldwater-Nixon appeals to a broader social conservatism attuned to religious fundamentalism and “family values” as well.

In the Reagan era, Republican campaigns blended these three themes in equal measure, delighting southern conservatives.

The Democratic Party’s evolution from being a defender of slavery, segregation, and white supremacy to a champion of civil rights represented a massive revolution in the political scheme, one that prompted an equally significant reaction, as the Republican Party retreated from its roots in racial liberalism to embrace and exploit the politics of white grievance.

If protests do not conform to the orderly marches staged by people practicing passive resistance in the face of violence, then they aren’t “good” protests.

By the time that Parks refused to move to the back of the bus in 1955, countless others had followed Plessy’s 1892 refusal to move to the Jim Crow trolley car, been arrested, and challenged the Jim Crow laws under which they were charged.

Nearly every iconic protest in the classical phase of the civil rights movement shared goals, venues, and methods with those that came before them.

With increasing intensity, conservatives have remade King into a caricature of his former self in an effort to hijack his legacy.

Nothing could be further from King’s position than fabricating his opposition to affirmative action.

Protests from the mid-1950s until King’s death were always about issues other than simply abolishing segregation. For example, fair economic policies always had a place in civil rights work.

Despite honoring King, most Americans remain unaware that King protested issues that today might be considered outside of the model of the “good” protest.

Yet as protests took new forms, occurred in unfamiliar venues, and targeted systemic problems through complicated symbolism, many Americans discounted or even condemned them.

The myth of the good protest has fostered a national belief that the purpose of the civil rights movement was to gain access to fora previously reserved for whites; when such access became legal, many Americans assumed that minorities had achieved equality even as governmental and private institutions continued to privilege whites over minorities.

Protests rarely succeed in isolation; instead, they succeed when they open up new ways to express citizenship rights and slowly erode structural inequities.

More accurately understood as persistent, not episodic, backlashes are the continuous—long-term and ongoing—attempt by white conservative reactionaries to stand in the way of Black people’s demands for equality.

Backlash, as the New York Times columnist Tom Wicker wrote, “is nothing more nor less than white resentment of Negroes.”6

Backlashers are often described not as choosing to participate in backlashes but as, in a variety of ways, being forced, almost against their will, into them, “wearied and angered by all the placard waving and demonstrating,” as the journalist Dick Nolan wrote in October 1963, or, as Judis put it, “sparked” into action.

As in the Reconstruction era, the two most frequent modes of backlash rhetoric were to blame the victim and to claim that the movements for racial justice were moving too quickly, both of which mandated reaction.

And congressmen claimed that they were “forced to oppose” the civil rights bill for a variety of reasons, including that it was too extreme (“so drastic”), that it was too “fast,” or that their (white) constituents opposed it.

The language of fomenting, provoking, and forcing not only placed the onus for the backlash on pro–civil rights activists and politicians; it also denied the persistence of white supremacy.15

Dan Balz of the Washington Post wrote in 2020 that “Obama’s election produced a backlash, that gave rise to a tea-party movement fueled by anti-government resentment but also by racial resentment,” which implies that his election was the causal agent.

The Great Society did not eliminate systemic racism. Far from it. But the gulf between the world as it existed in 1960 and as it exists today is wide, in no small part because Lyndon Johnson committed to spending down much of his political capital on civil rights.

In the fifty years since LBJ’s presidency, the social contract between employers and employees has broken down considerably, driven in large part by the sharp decline of private-sector unions.

Although entire libraries could be shelved with debates over the correlation (or lack thereof) between education expenditures and educational achievement, federal funding for K–12 education undeniably closed yawning gaps between wealthier and poorer regions and addressed a clear deficiency in resources that states would otherwise have been ill-equipped to remedy.

Alone, the safety net may no longer be enough to ensure that all Americans enjoy basic economic security—and with it, food and health security. But when critics home in on its alleged failures, they more generally hope to establish a case against government intervention in the economy. That case falls apart on reconsideration of the Great Society’s many achievements.

Contrary to the fearmongering rhetoric of politicians, history reveals that police violence very often inflamed community violence, not the other way around.

These funds enabled the twinned expansion and militarization of police in targeted low-income communities of color.

The history of protest—past and present—demonstrates that aggressive policing tends to incite violence, especially when residents are protesting the very thing to which they are then subjected.

Because police force is almost always viewed as legitimate, tear gas and other forms of state-sanctioned violence will remain the go-to, short-term solution that policy makers and officials embrace whenever people challenge racial hierarchies and the systems that uphold them.

the notion that January 6 is “not who we are” is one manifestation of what has become a regularly deployed Republican Party and right-wing media strategy: to deny the workings of overt and violent racist activism even when those actions threaten American citizens and democracy itself.

the very element that shocked so many that day, the presence of militant Right and white power activists in propelling the violence, has been with us for decades, if not generations. January 6 is exactly who we are.

Indeed, one can trace vigilante violence and lynching as foundational to American life and culture from the beginnings of the nation to the present.

Many of them traded white robes and hoods for camouflage fatigues and adopted the weapons and tactics of the Vietnam War.

All of this is, and remains, who we are. Knowing and understanding our history is the only path to a more democratic future.

Feminism has been an effort to strengthen the family and offer policies that allow parents and their children to flourish, rather than struggle, from the challenges presented by the marketplace, austerity policy, and restrictive ideas about gender and race.

The fight for women’s suffrage came under fire as an attack on the family. Opponents decried that the political independence of women would somehow prevent them from their traditional role of raising children.

The notion that conservatives have been waging a multigenerational, moral war to protect American families from the destructive impulses of feminists in general and Planned Parenthood in particular is a fiction, invented by modern conservatives who deliberately ignore this history to stoke contemporary partisan proclivities.

In 1965 feminists hailed the Supreme Court’s Griswold v. Connecticut decision, which allowed married couples to use birth control, a win that surely invested women with more power over their bodies, but it just as certainly only further legally encoded the special legitimacy of the family.

Such efforts sought only to strengthen American families, but the members of a growing conservative movement resisted these policies ever more energetically, claiming with unprecedented fervor that they were safekeepers of the “family values” that morally debased feminists—now with the help of Big Government bureaucrats—sought to destroy.

A broader politics of austerity promoted by the self-declared party of family values slashed welfare, child care, and health care while expanding a prison system that over the next several decades came to incarcerate Black men at more than six times the rate of white men, developments that unquestionably destabilized many families.

Despite these glaring contradictions, conservatives successfully managed to sustain the fantasy that the ideal American family was white, Christian, and heterosexual, and that only GOP policies could safeguard it from destruction by feminists and their progressive allies.

as effectively as this imagined American family taps into conservative nostalgia, it is most accurately unders...

Examples of such hypocrisy among ever-higher-profile figures—from Jim Bakker to Jerry Falwell Jr. to Donald Trump—have only accumulated over the decades, making the idea of conservative guardianship of family values, now or ever, still less tenable.

the emergence of the violent “incel” movement, which supplants the chivalry of an older conservative ethos with a men’s-rights worldview that understands women’s bodily autonomy as an affront, reveals the shallowness of such commitment to women’s rights.

Historically consistent in blaming progressives in general—and feminists in particular—for social ills, conservatives cry that the real problem is overzealous leftists who want to corrupt children with ideas that will make them ashamed of their heritage, unsure of their gender, and disrespectful of their parents.

Over time, a closer look at Reagan’s presidency and the 1980s has revealed that liberalism remained much stronger in America’s body politic than conservatives liked to think.8

When asked to choose between reducing Social Security and reducing defense, three-fourths chose to cut the military budget.

“Fired by the ideological zeal that helped carry President Reagan into the White House in 1980,” reporter Steven Roberts noted, “they see their mission as confrontation, not conciliation.”17 Gingrich’s smashmouth style of partisanship became the norm.

Nor was supply-side economics working. The premise that tax breaks for wealthier Americans and businesses would eventually trickle down to the rest of the nation didn’t pan out. Instead, by the mid-1980s, economic inequality had become worse, and the deficit kept growing.