"Selective Stories, Which Are Neither Completely True nor Exactly False"

"Our addiction to national mythologies—and our inability to create a common meaning for them—has brought us to an unhappy stalemate. It's hard to bargain and compromise with an opposition that you believe has fundamentally misunderstood its own country––to the point that they cannot even be considered good citizens. And with their mythologies as war clubs, both sides want to run an Antonio Gramsci–style takeover of institutions, making their reality the only acceptable paradigm. Slotkin writes an elegant, if depressing, diagnosis of the current mythological crisis. 'The result is a deadly feedback loop: government failure to alleviate these problems leads to deep mistrust of democratic institutions, and the substitution of culture war for rational policy debate,' he argues. '[C]ulture-war hyperpartisanship then prevents government from acting effectively, which intensifies mistrust of institutions and ratchets up the intensity of culture war.'"

Tom Zoellner at the Los Angeles Review of Books reviews Richard Slotkin's A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America.