The Majority Report with Sam Seder & Emma Vigeland
Richard S. Slotkin, cultural critic and historian, professor of English and American Studies at Wesleyan University, discusses his recent book. The concept of the “national myth” as the use of history and narratives of the past to rationalize the present and its ongoing crises.
Expanding on this, Professor Slotkin walks through the role of social and economic insecurity in spurring the need to make sense of a moment, before stepping back to touch on how malleable these mythologies can be, with the same stories often taking on multiple perspectives that can be used and presented differently to affirm various, frequently conflicting, contemporary ideologies, parsing through the various myths of the American Revolution, Civil War, and the “Good War” (WWII), and how they have been employed throughout history.
After expanding on the utility of these mythologies, particularly within the context of the US economic and legal systems, Professor Slotkin brings Sam and Emma into the modern era, outlining the grounding mythologies of the MAGA movement in the Lost Cause and the Second Amendment, and how Democrats can (and might be) learning how to use these mythologies to their benefit as Conservatives do.