Opinion | To Understand Trump vs. Harris, You Must Know These American Myths

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are making their appeals to the American electorate on the basis of personality, character and policy. But they are also framing themselves as actors in the American story — the events of the recent past and the deeper narrative of U.S. history carried by the symbol-rich stories of our national mythology.

There has been very little common ground expressed between the parties in this election, except the belief that a victory by the opposition would be apocalyptic. Even when they invoke the same historical references, they present them in radically different ways. To Democrats, Jan. 6 was a shameful assault on democracy. To many Republicans, it was a patriotic protest of a rigged election.

It’s as if we are living in two different countries, each with a different understanding of who counts as American.

Each candidate is trying to pitch the contest to voters as a heroic episode in the unfolding of American history and invites them to imagine themselves as players in the narrative.

In the “story wars,” Mr. Trump has an advantage over Ms. Harris: Conservatives have devised over decades a store of established mythological American “scripts,” something liberals have failed to do.

Among the big issues at stake in the 2024 election, for both the campaigns and the country, is no less than shaping what it means to be an American and who gets to have power.

The Core Myths of America

No modern nation is more dependent on its myths than the United States, because the ethnic origins of our people are among the most diverse of any place on earth. We must learn to think of ourselves as spiritual descendants of ancestors who are not related to us by blood but made kindred by our shared and continuing history. In a crisis, a cultural reflex is to scan our historical memory for analogies that will help us interpret the crisis and precedents on which to model a response.

The myth of the frontier traces our national origin to the colonial settlements and the westward expansion that followed. It enshrines a distinctively American concept of capitalist development: Our extraordinary growth as a democracy arose from the discovery and exploitation of abundant natural resources beyond the zone of established order. Winning the frontier also resulted in dispossessing the nonwhite Indigenous peoples, which made racial exclusion part of our original concept of nationality. The myth of the frontier explains the origin of America’s exceptional character and unparalleled prosperity. It was the myth of choice for Gilded Age imperialists and for John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier.”

The myth of the founding is the story of the creation of our nation-state by an intelligent and virtuous (though flawed) set of white men, the founding fathers. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution embody the contradictions at the heart of our ideal of free government. From generation to generation, Americans have invoked these documents, and the principles they symbolize, to address the fundamental issue of our national organization: whether it is possible — and desirable — to form a single nationality and a just republican government out of diverse racial and ethnic elements.

The Civil War put the myth of the founding to its sternest test and generated two conflicting mythic traditions. The liberation myth, identified with Abraham Lincoln, sees the Civil War as an ordeal that not only preserved “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” but also produced a “new birth of freedom” that included Black people formerly held as slaves. Lincoln was a mythic touchstone for the New Deal and the civil rights movement.

The myth of the Lost Cause celebrates the Old South and its culture, and justifies violence, sometimes extreme, first to defend and then to restore its traditional structures of patriarchy and white supremacy. The Lost Cause myth sustained the South’s Jim Crow order for 100 years.

At its origin, the Lost Cause myth framed the conflict over Reconstruction (1865-75) as a struggle between the racial and patriarchal hierarchies of the Old South and the liberalism of Northern radicals. The myth justified extraordinary violence and political repression to save white Christian civilization from its racial and ideological enemies. It authorized the Jim Crow regime of segregation, disenfranchisement and lynch law to keep Black people in a state of abjection. The Lost Cause also justified the establishment of quasi-authoritarian state governments, as Southern states, between 1890 and 1915, revised their constitutions to deprive Blacks of the right to vote, using devices like the literacy test and the poll tax that also disenfranchised large numbers of poor whites.

In all of these myths, the default American nationality is white. That ethnonationalist presumption would be challenged by the crises of the 20th century: World War I, the Depression and World War II. These compelled the nation’s political and cultural elites to start seeing as equals the racial and ethnic minorities that had been marginalized or excluded from the body politic.

One result was the creation of the myth of the good war, which used the war-movie convention of the multiethnic and multiracial platoon to link the diversity of our country to our success as “leader of the free world.” It was this myth that informed our role in the Cold War and helped justify the interventions in Vietnam and Iraq.

How Myths Shape the 2024 Election

Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign rhetoric follows the Lost Cause playbook. He invokes fear of racial pollution by characterizing liberal policies on immigration as the “poisoning” of the American bloodstream. He identifies himself as the agent of his people’s retribution. He promises to redeem American greatness by rooting out “communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country” and declares that that retribution “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

MAGA’s account of recent history follows a similar script. It holds that America became great when its political and economic institutions were run by white men and its cultural standards set by native-born white Christians. That social order was disrupted by the political and cultural upheavals of the 1960s, especially the political integration of racial minorities and the acceptance of “liberated” attitudes toward race, sexuality and gender. Liberal intellectuals challenged traditional ideological presumptions and understandings of American history. Immigration and the growth of the nonwhite population suggested that white people could be permanently displaced as America’s majority. The election of Barack Obama as the first Black president suggested that liberals and their coalition partners could control the centers of power.

This helps explains why Mr. Trump has framed these elections as a fight to save American civilization — and why he cast himself as the hero of that story and continues to tell it in 2024.

At a campaign rally in March, he told supporters, “I don’t think you’re going to have another election in this country if we don’t win this election.” At a recent rally in Las Vegas, he told supporters that if he loses, “You won’t have a country anymore.”

This new Lost Cause also holds that to save civilization, extraordinary methods, up to and including violence, are justified. On Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Trump told a mass of demonstrators, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

This week, he said that to check the problem of property crime across America, it would take just “one really violent day” to fix it.

As in the Reconstruction-Jim Crow era, vigilante violence and threats of violence are being used to intimidate local election and school board officials. Like the Lost Cause politicians of the 19th century, Mr. Trump and his supporters have plans to create a quasi-authoritarian state by using the Justice Department to prosecute political opponents, to politicize the civil service and to exploit their domination of state legislatures to restrict voting rights.

Even in his economic ideology, Mr. Trump invokes a myth, this time of the frontier: American prosperity depends on the unregulated discovery, exploitation and use of fossil fuels.

Mr. Trump and his MAGA movement can invoke narratives already sanctified in traditional mythology.

By contrast, since the 1970s, the left has struggled with this. Although the New Deal was the most transformative political movement since the Civil War, it did not generate a comparable mythology. Until Joe Biden, the last president to so fully invoke it as a major policy model was Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s. Popular culture has rarely exploited the New Deal’s stories of relief and recovery, of enormous public works projects or union struggles that reshaped the relations between workers and executives. There is no genre of movies akin to those that memorialize the frontier or the Civil War. Rather, the New Deal’s social justice values and patriotic appeal were abstracted and subsumed in the good-war myth.

The civil rights movement invoked both the liberation myth of the Civil War and the good-war myth but did not itself become a national myth. The New Deal and the civil rights movement symbolize the ideological split that has divided liberal politics. Bill Clinton and the New Democrats embraced the neoliberalism of Ronald Reagan, implicitly rejecting the New Deal, and focused on developing a high-tech economy, while progressives embraced identity politics. Neither faction addressed the great failing of American politics: the fact that since 1980, our political choices and tax policies, coupled with a changing global economy, have vastly increased economic inequality, constraining the prospects of the working class and the poor while granting extravagant wealth and political privilege to the wealthy and corporations.

Still, the elements of a new blue “story” are already in play. In his campaign, Mr. Biden invoked both the New Deal and the civil rights movement as precedents, in speeches as well in policies like the administration’s stimulus and infrastructure programs.

Ms. Harris has continued that focus on union jobs and middle-class economics and has rooted her personal story in the civil rights movement. At the Democratic convention, her acceptance speech emphasized labor rights, patriotism and public service as the basis of the Democratic agenda — but without specifically invoking the New Deal.

Democrats could benefit by framing their programs with a story that has the narrative coherence and emotional resonance of myth. The party’s reform agenda is justified by its critique of America’s history of capitalist exploitation of land and labor, racial discrimination, Indigenous dispossession and imperialism.

But nearly every major modern nation-state’s history is rife with social injustice and the violence of unjust wars. What is admirable about America is not its supposed exception to these patterns of history but the persistence with which its people have struggled to amend injustice and realize an extraordinarily broad and inclusive concept of nationality.

There is an opportunity here for Ms. Harris, who has invoked this persistence and wrapped it in a stirring call for patriotism. A myth can be made of such struggles, tracing a path from Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom” to the New Deal’s grand but imperfect project of economic and social reform to the triumphs of the good war, the Great Society and the civil rights movement. Such a myth — the myth of the land of opportunity? — would enable the left and the center-left to fight the story wars more effectively.

Still, given the deep divisions in the nation, it is not likely that the 2024 election will resolve the cultural conflict. In the absence of a unifying national myth, the states are dividing along ideological lines, as they did before the Civil War period and again in the Jim Crow era, with radically different laws on voting, on abortion and public health, on racial discrimination, on gun rights, on fossil fuels and green alternatives, and on the teaching of history.

If that process continues, national myth will continue to provide symbols for partisan battle flags rather than a unifying version of the American story. Americans’ ability to imagine anything like the common good, or to unite in response to the crises of climate, public health and international conflict that are sure to arise, will have to wait for a new chapter in the American story.

Richard Slotkin, a historian of American culture and its mythology of violence, is the author of, most recently, “A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Struggle for America.”

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