Book: Myth America

Twenty historians take on 20 myths about America that have gained currency, and cut them down to facts. The introduction has a WITHERING summary of the Right's embrace of the Wrong since the Trump phenomenon.

Well the introduction comes in blazing hot, but the first four essays (so far) have been pretty dry scholarly treatises.  The editor mentions he will not be touching the 1619 Project or the teaching of Critical Race Theory, as he feels these have been exhaustively covered elsewhere.

Chapter Twelve "The Southern Strategy" describes how the Republican Party pivoted after Brown v. Board of Education to court disaffected Southern Dixiecrat segregationists.  

There was an unholy alliance between "states rights" advocates -- read Confederate advocates -- and northern white conservatives looking to revitalize a dying party in the early 1950s.  The GOP adopted a tacit resistance to integration, and the Confederate states refused to accept that they'd lost the Civil War.

To this day, the South still largely holds this two-tiered citizenship model. Both Blacks and Whites are so immersed in the neo-Confederate system that they don't see it for what it is.

Republicans therefore won't be mollified by removing women's reproductive self-determination, Black equal rights, or the teaching of accurate history.  Their goal is nothing less than the overturning of the 14th Amendment.

Chapter 19 "The Reagan Revolution" talks about how Republicans took control after three weak / troubled presidencies: Nixon's appalling corruption, Ford's clueless response to it, and Carter being torpedoed by the Oil Embargo and the Iranian Embassy kidnappings.

After four decades of steady economic and social progress since Roosevelt, the industrialists and ultra-rich saw their opportunity to reverse some of this equality, and roll back health & safety regs, and shift heir tax burden onto the middle class.  The "revolution" was in fact a counter-revolution to the four decades of steady progress.

But the essay writer here makes the same mistake all writers make about Reagan.  Bonzo was not the architect of any of this.  He was a bumbling B actor hired to play an ah-schucks politician while the real power brokers engineered the dismantling of Johnson's Great Society in the background. Ronnie didn't read PDBs, fell asleep in cabinet meetings, and stumbled over big words in the TelePrompTer.  He was no more a statesman than Olson Welles.

The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library has a particularly colorful re-imagining of the hostage crisis.. Proves that FNC isn't alone in rewriting history.

Several of the chapters talk about the founders' intentions, how they explained they didn't have all the answers, and expected the Constitution to be amended as society progressed and evolved.  This flies in the face of the originalists, who want to treat the Constitution as some kind of bible, as an inerrant document.

But it also raised some questions for me, upon reflection.  

The whole thing is, at its heart, based on a fiction.

"Inalienable rights"?  "Endowed by their creator"?  "We hold these truths to be self-evident"?

Uh, no.  There is no creator.  There are no natural rights.  There is nothing that gives any person any rights, at all.  People have been doing terrible things to other people, sometimes whole classes of people, without any repercussions, for millennia.  Some whole species (neaderthalis) have been completely wiped out.

For an equitable, fair and safe society there are rules of engagement, standards of behavior which make the society function without breaking down into sectarian or racial warfare.  But these are entirely man-made rules or standards, nothing "inalienable" or "god-given" or "self-evident" about them.

Elevating these "good ideas" to some kind of universal truths is entirely an act of hopeful fiction.