Greg’s Reviews > A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America > Status Update

Far from being a basis of unity, historical memory is one of the main grounds of contention between the parties.

The most striking and peculiar gesture of Trump’s racial politics was his decision to become the chief defender of Confederate symbolism. Trump’s knowledge of the Civil War is negligible, but events in Charlottesville had taught him to recognize Confederate symbols as the trademark of his most militant supporters.

He would apply to politics the methods he had used in business: rhetorical extravagance, unscrupulous manipulation, hard bargaining, unapologetic vindictiveness, the will to dominate or destroy competitors, and pretensions to grandeur…It was not simply that Trump knew how the country might learn to win again—he was the only man who could do it.

Passage of the Voting Rights Act was the climatic victory of the movement...Coupled with the 1964 [Civil Rights] act, it constituted something like a ‘Second Reconstruction,’ although it would take years of grassroots struggle to begin to realize its potential. The two acts negated the legal basis of Jim Crow and put the powers of the federal government behind those working to destroy it.

The hallmark of national myth is that we imaginatively enter its narrative and take upon ourselves the unfinished business of its heroes.