Leftist Myths about America Hobble Myth America

A ccording to many in corporate media, disinformation is a serious and rising threat to democracy. One especially harmful way in which this crisis could manifest, progressive American elites fear, is in the study of history. Myth America, a new essay collection edited by CNN contributor Julian Zelizer and serial plagiarist Kevin Kruse (both Princeton historians), seeks to tackle this problem by debunking the “myths” of American history.

This potentially worthy — if done properly and fairly — mission is, in this case, a failure. The book does not debunk any myths; it merely promulgates different, radically progressive ones. The book’s stunning lack of self-awareness is clear from the introduction, where the editors describe their ideological opponents as feeling “freer to write a history that begins with its conclusions and works backward to find — or invent, if need be — some sort of evidence that will seem to support it.” As it turns out, this statement accurately describes Myth America.

Most of Myth America’s 20 chapters follow the same format: asserting that something is a “myth,” shifting the necessary goalposts, and pushing a progressive narrative. There is little underlying support for its arguments and a lot of deliberate omissions to avoid having to deal with inconvenient facts that complicate the story.

For example, Sarah Churchwell’s chapter on “America First” focuses solely on the slogan itself, defining it as more nativist than isolationist. By doing so, she is able to associate the phrase — and its xenophobic, antisemitic connotations — exclusively with the political Right. Her narrative runs from the mid 1800s to the end of World War II in significant detail, but largely skims over the latter half of the 20th century, covering it in just two pages. Churchwell quickly jumps from Barry Goldwater (who had a Jewish father) and George Wallace (a Democrat) to Pat Buchanan and Donald Trump, avoiding any mention of the political Left’s Cold War and post-9/11 isolationism, which was framed by its proponents as aiding Americans instead of fighting wars abroad. The omission of this complexity may make for a good narrative, but it is bad history.

Other chapters stretch or narrow definitions beyond usefulness in order to “debunk” a claim. In the chapter on American empire, by Daniel Immerwahr, imperialism as a concept is broadened significantly. In his telling, because “statehood wasn’t guaranteed” for the “Western territories,” and “the federal government held absolute power over them,” these territories, until they became states, were therefore “colonial spaces.” (Somehow, the case for D.C. statehood is shoehorned into this discussion.) Immerwahr also includes overseas military bases as part of America’s “territorial empire [that] hasn’t entirely vanished,” and considers them “a large imposition, one that critics frequently decry as empire.” The chapter ends with favorable citations of Nikita Khrushchev, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden on the topic — a true murderers’ row of American enemies. Immerwahr rationalizes these figures’ antagonism by describing them as “malcontents” of American empire and our entirely legal and consensual overseas military basing as a provocation.

In the chapter he contributes to the book, Zelizer describes the Reagan Revolution as an idea “born out of an explicit political strategy” that exaggerated “the strength of conservatism and, equally important, the demise of liberalism.” He identifies the modern Republican Party with a “shrinking segment of the electorate” and a “radicalized policy agenda” without “broad support from the public,” thus supposedly proving that Reagan’s influence was limited and brief. This contention relies on a narrowing of the concept of the Reagan Revolution to a point that renders Zelizer’s argument unfalsifiable. He argues that since many of the most profound changes of the Reagan era were nonlegislative, and since some conservative aims were left unaccomplished, the term “revolution” is not applicable to this period at all. This minimizes Reagan’s massive electoral victories, his lasting foreign-policy successes, and the fact that, because of his legacy, American politics was relatively conservative until 2009. For instance, Zelizer downplays the 1984 electoral landslide by declaring that:

The president’s campaign was conscious about selling the myth of Reaganism. The slick “Morning in America” television ad showed viewers images of suburban families enjoying a rebounding economy. Mondale’s less charismatic straight talk — including his admission during one of the debates that he would raise taxes on Americans — didn’t excite voters.

If the campaign was selling the “myth of Reaganism,” then business was booming. One does not achieve an 18-point popular-vote margin and a 525–13, 49-state Electoral College victory on the back of an opponent’s lack of charisma alone.

A consistent issue with Myth America is its failure to substantiate its arguments. Chapters on the New Deal and the Great Society claim that both programs were successful — the former in ending the Great Depression and the latter in improving social outcomes. Neither of their authors makes a compelling argument to satisfy those claims.

In the first instance, Eric Rauchway argues that the New Deal was a success simply by observing that the economy improved after it rather than by attempting to compare the New Deal’s effects with those of alternative policies. The closest he comes to assessing the New Deal’s relative performance is in a sardonic and pithy comment: “That is the least one can truthfully say about the New Deal: even if it was terrible, it did not stop a speedy economic recovery.” Instead, Rauchway attacks the New Deal’s critics, saying that they are “misrepresenting [their] own attitude toward history” and that their critiques are “produced without concern for the truth.”

Joshua Zeitz, meanwhile, argues that the fact that many of the Great Society’s programs are “now inextricably woven into the fabric of American civic and economic life” is the main indicator of its success. This disregards the major fiscal troubles that many of these programs, such as Medicare and federal guarantees of student loans, have caused for American taxpayers. Zeitz also writes off the fact that the Great Society “was predicated on the belief that America would long enjoy sustained economic growth, low inflation, and strong wages and benefits for a growing portion of its population.” This fatally flawed assumption is left uninterrogated, even as the original conservative opposition to the Great Society’s programs recognized it and made it a significant basis for its critique.

Still, these highly partisan analyses are presented as the true, unbiased history of America. The book repeatedly attempts to camouflage trite partisan arguments with a veneer of historical objectivity. Many radical progressive tropes, especially the constant use of bigotry as a cudgel against conservative arguments, grace its pages. Chapters on immigration, the Southern Strategy, protest movements, and voter fraud are all replete with accusations of racism on the part of the authors’ ideological foes, meant to replace historical fact.

One of the worst offenders in terms of blatant partisanship in lieu of genuine scholarship is Elizabeth Hinton’s chapter on police violence. It regurgitates the false narrative that the protests of summer 2020 were “mostly peaceful” by claiming that conservatives ignore the reality that most protests “remained nonviolent.” She consistently labels riots as “uprisings” and “rebellions.” Her use of passive framing when detailing protest-driven violence (“the community burned,” “the fire spread”) showcases this bias. Hinton’s unabashed excusal of criminality under the guise of the pursuit of “civil rights” drives home the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of her argument:

Although the tactics may have differed, the people who attacked police, smashed windows, set fires, and plundered local stores shared the same demands as the mainstream civil rights movement. They were fighting against the process of their own criminalization, as well as making unanswered calls for socioeconomic inclusion and against racism more broadly.

Despite all these issues, does Myth America at least get its basic facts right? If only. There are myriad factual errors and deliberate misstatements throughout.

Churchwell, the author of the “America First” chapter, describes the phrase as “a Republican motto” before World War I and until Woodrow Wilson. However, she writes that “when William Jennings Bryan’s populist 1896 campaign attacked the gold standard as the mainstay of international finance, his supporters cheered that Bryan stood for ‘America first, the world afterwards,’ whereas William McKinley was maintaining ‘England’s grip on this country [by] secret means.’” The problem is that the opponent of “America First” in this instance, William McKinley, was a Republican, and Jennings Bryan, the “populist,” was a three-time Democratic presidential nominee.

Other statements are totally unsupported. The author of the chapter on the January 6 insurrection states that several people died, “including a police officer beaten by the crowd,” which, with respect to the police officer, has been categorically refuted. Author Natalia Mehlman Petrzela drops two whoppers: that feminism “has never been dead set on destroying the family,” a claim countered by a cursory review of feminist literature, and that Margaret Sanger was not a eugenicist, a fact that even Planned Parenthood, the organization that Sanger founded, has acknowledged. The war in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century is presented as the deadliest in American history. The relevant endnote, however, misleadingly compares an all-cause mortality figure from the time of the Philippines war with the number of Civil War–battlefield deaths. The chapter on voter fraud suggests that the lies surrounding the 2020 election “homed in on urban minorities as the threat to American democracy, and served as an excuse for a new wave of voter-suppression legislation,” and it cites no evidence whatsoever.

Moments of interest, notably in the “Founding Myths” chapter by Akhil Reed Amar, are few. For the most part, Myth America is a compendium of progressive historical narratives poorly disguised as scholarship: a promotion of modern partisan ideology under the auspices and authority of history. Like its forebear, the 1619 Project, Myth America seeks to reorient our understanding of American history in a firmly progressive direction.

Kruse and Zelizer describe myth-believing conservatives as being “against intellectuals, universities, the media, and other valid sources of information.” At least with regard to the intellectuals and elites who produced Myth America, that position seems eminently justified.