In his poem “A Connoisseur of Chaos,” Wallace Stevens wrote that “a violent order is disorder” and “a great disorder is an order.” As things stand, we may well be entering the age of the Great Disorder.
The culture wars are not simply quarrels about issues like abortion and gun safety. They are disagreements about the fundamental character of American nationality and the purposes of the American nation-state. Even if President Joe Biden’s policies were to cure the disorder of our cities and restore the health of the American economy, MAGA Republicans would not accept this as “success” or validation of the blue coalition’s principles. For them, the only acceptable end of the political struggle would be victory in the culture war and restoration of the white republic. Trump’s “Big Lie” has convinced a majority of Republicans that Democrats cannot win an election without “stealing” it. And Democrats would have good reason to believe that the victory of any Republican candidate would be “stolen” in light of the Republicans’ use of state legislatures to suppress or delegitimize Democratic votes. Politics cannot save the culture from itself if the electoral process loses its legitimacy.
Belknap Press
Whatever the result of the 2024 elections, given the closely divided balance of partisan support, it seems likely that in the near future, a MAGA-controlled Republican Party will win the presidency or Congress. Authoritarian tendencies are already apparent in MAGA’s political leadership, and these are being given an ideological rationale by national conservatism and think tanks like the Claremont Institute. Under these circumstances, Republican control of the government would put the institutions and values that sustain democratic government in grave danger. The struggle to slow and reverse global warming would suffer a decisive defeat. America’s alliances would be compromised, weakening our ability to respond effectively to the violent revanchism of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the economic and military challenge of Xi Jinping’s China. If Trump himself were to win re-election, the damage to republican institutions and the national interest might well be irreparable. His contempt for Constitutional restraint has been amply demonstrated, and he now has a better-trained group of loyalists he can call on, and a firmer grasp of how to bend government agencies to his will and overcome legal restraints.
MAGA’s problem is that it can rule, but it cannot govern: It can use the instruments of law and government, the dictates of a conservative supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court, and vigilante intimidation to impose a degree of obedience. But its theory of politics precludes the possibility of working with the opposition toward mutually acceptable policies. Thus it cannot create a stable political order, such as the New Deal and neoliberal orders were in their time. It is certainly possible for a Democratic presidential candidate to win in 2024, control the Senate, and perhaps regain a majority in the House. However, it is unlikely that in the near future the blue coalition will be able to establish the broad public consensus required to establish a “political order” capable of the sustained and systematic effort required to address the endemic issues of the twenty-first century. Its effort to form a political movement is just beginning; its version of national myth is just taking shape. The coherence of its ideology and constituencies has been deranged by the exigencies of governing through multiple crises, yet it offers the best hope for a politics that could address the endemic problems of the new world economy and also save our culture from itself.
The blue coalition will need to vastly expand grassroots organizing, focusing on issues that go to the heart of reform: racial justice, voting rights, gun safety, workers’ rights, the preservation of democracy, women’s rights, and climate change. Given the hysterical pitch of national political discourse, such action must begin at the community level. Although such organizing would be vital for building political strength, it could also have a subtler but no less critical effect on the way communities affirm and negotiate cultural values. Organized efforts will have to be made to meet people where they are and reopen lines of communication within and between communities to address the most critical issues facing these communities in terms appropriate to their heritage and circumstances. Public meetings, like those held by towns and cities to consider Confederate monuments, or the regular meetings of school boards and election commissions, will be important venues for such conversations. But they must be prepared for door-to-door, person-to-person contact—by civil invitations to a mutually considerate exchange of views. There are useful models already in the field: Everytown for Gun Safety, the Parkland students’ March for Our Lives, and local violence-prevention groups like Moms Demand Action. The Reverend William Barber II’s North Carolina-based Poor People’s Campaign has revived the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s community-based organizing for economic and social justice, and Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative and its museums on the history of enslavement and Jim Crow have become a center for community discussion and played an important role in urban redevelopment.
It would be wise to think of such organizing not only as a way to build electoral support but also as a basis for nonviolent resistance should MAGA gain control of the government.
The actions we take and the political choices we make in the coming decade will be critical in determining the future of democratic government and the planetary environment. Implicit in our elections is a choice between national myths—those fables that express our sense of belonging to a single society, continuous in time, rooted in a given past, and moving toward an imagined future. Following the action script of its chosen myths, MAGA has decided it must destroy America in order to save its “authentic” culture, which is Christian, Euro-American, and implicitly white. It cannot win, and believes it can dispense with the consent of a majority of the governed. Its understanding of American nationality, of the rightful constituents of political discourse, denies the reality of the nation’s racial, ethnic, and ideological diversity. The alternative offered by the blue coalition, clear in outline though not fully formed, embraces the unprecedented racial, ethnic, religious, and ideological diversity of the American people as both a reality and a source of energy and strength, and reads our historical passage from settler state to metropolis as a long struggle against the dark side of our cultural heritage to establish a just and equitable society.
The making of national myths has proved to be essential to the creation of nation-states, and to the maintenance of that sense of historically continuous community that allows them to function. The danger of mythological thinking is that it tempts us to reify our nostalgia for a falsely idealized past, and to sacrifice our future to that illusion. But we are not bound to live the mythic scenarios bequeathed to us by tradition. The history of national myth shows that change is possible. No single creative act can produce a national myth. But the actions we take, the stories we tell about those actions, and the historical frames in which we set them can add up over time to the formation of a new or reformed national myth. We ourselves can agitate and organize, protest or strike, enlist or resign, speak, write, criticize old stories, and tell new ones. We can teach American history in all its true complexity and difficulty, so that the roots of present conditions and dilemmas can be understood by the rising generations. We can make mythic discourse, the telling of American stories, one of the many ways we have of imagining a more perfect union.
Excerpted from A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America by Richard Slotkin. Copyright © 2024. Published by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Used with permission. All Rights reserved.