At a rally in Ohio this month, Donald Trump paid tribute to the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, calling them “incredible patriots” and remembering them on that terrible day. He called people imprisoned for their involvement “hostages.” ”
This is a continuation of Trump's “Lost Cause” myth-making that began during his successful 2016 presidential campaign, and despite his 2020 defeat and the deadly insurrection his efforts sparked, he remained in power. Reinforced for his efforts to stay in place.
More than 1,200 people have been charged in connection with the January 6 incident. It goes without saying, but let's be clear: The people who were tried, convicted, and imprisoned for storming the Capitol were hostages, not hostages. criminal.
But the story of the Lost Cause is not about the truth. They are trying to deny the truth.
This is what happened when the myth of the Lost Cause was constructed after the Civil War. The cause of the war was not slavery but “invasion of the north''. Legends about happy slaves and benevolent slaves spread. This story glorified those who seceded from the United States and fought against it.
And it has survived to some extent for more than 150 years, pushed into the crevices of our political fabric. It still surfaces in a way that seems far removed from the Confederate Lost Cause myth, but it definitely furthers it.
It started last year when Florida changed its historical standards for African Americans, saying enslaved people benefited from enslavement “in some cases” and that slavery was the cause of the Civil War. It appeared in Nikki Haley's reluctance to state the obvious facts on the campaign trail. war.
This was evident in the infamous torchlight march in Charlottesville and the fierce resistance to the removal of Confederate monuments.
Trump has his own lost cause. It is not completely divorced from the old cause, but it is miniaturized, personal and trivial.
The story of the Confederate Lost Cause came after enormous losses, with hundreds of thousands of soldiers dead, the South destroyed, and the economy stalled. Trump's Lost Cause, on the other hand, is about the discontent he promotes, his inability to accept losing to Joe Biden, and his complete disregard for democratic norms.
Trump's version comes from a more recent vintage of lost cause narratives that have existed since at least George Wallace's first presidential campaign in the 1960s. A situation in which the loss of cultural superiority causes a sense of ostracism and deprivation.
David Goldfield, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and author of “Still Fighting the Civil War: A History of the American South and the South,” said many of Trump's supporters were white Southerners. He said he felt he had lost something similar. He felt they lost after the Civil War. “They didn't matter anymore. They weren't being listened to anymore. Plus, there were a lot of other voices active in the public sphere that weren't there before.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning Yale historian David Blight has written several times about Trump's Lost Cause, and says Trump's iteration has all the necessary ingredients: a lost cause. told me it was a story, a culprit, a ready-made villain, and “a story of vast grievances.” ”
As Bright explained, Trump “feeds on an imaginary narrative of what could have been, what should have been, and what could have been again. Glory can be reclaimed.”
Trump then invokes the Lost Cause in combination with another false narrative, claiming unprecedented happiness and unity – that all the glory is his. As he told the crowd at Mar-a-Lago on Super Tuesday, “African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, women, men, people with diplomas from the best schools in the world; And people who hadn't finished high school, every group was doing better than ever before.'' He went on to say, “Our country was coming together.''
What he ignores is that his presidency began with the Women's March the day after his inauguration and ended shortly after the summer protests of 2020, fueled by anger over the killing of George Floyd. Trump did not unite the country. He tore it further.
Unlike previous lost cause appeals, Trump's appeal has the advantage of modern communications. That means a virtual world of 24-hour cable news, an internet full of partisan news sites and social media, an octopus that reaches deep into the darkest corners of politics.
And Mr. Trump's case presents an opportunity to start over and simply rewrite history, not just win the narrative, but actually win the race, and turn electoral defeat into electoral victory.
This election not only gives believers in the MAGA movement an opportunity to correct President Trump's errors. MAGA may also rise again.
