The Confederacy built a lasting myth of victory out of defeat. Trump and his followers may, too.
One hundred and fifty years after the emergence of the Confederate Lost Cause ideology, a new Lost Cause invaded the U.S. Capitol with the incitement of the president of the United States. Waving American, Confederate, Gadsden and, especially, Trump flags, Donald Trump’s loyalists desecrated the greatest symbolic edifice of America.
Trumpism has already become a lethal Lost Cause. It does not quite have martyrs and a cult of the fallen in which to root its hopes and dreams. But it does have a self-destructive cult leader about to leave power in a defeat that has been transformed into a narrative of betrayal, resistance and a promise of political revitalization.
The important Lost Causes in history have all been at heart compelling stories about noble defeats that were, with time, forged into political movements of renewal: the French after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and the profound need for national revanche; Germany after the Great War and its “stab in the back” theory that led over the 1920s to the rise of the nationalism and racism of the Nazis; and the white South after our Civil War. All Lost Causes find their lifeblood in lies, big and small, lies born of beliefs in search of a history that can be forged into a story and mobilize masses of people to act politically, violently, and in the name of ideology.
The story demands a religious loyalty. It must be protected, reinforced, practiced in ritual and infused with symbols. What is the Trumpian claim of a stolen election but an elaborate fiction that fights to make the reality and truth of the unbelievers irrelevant. Some myths are benign as cultural markers; but others are rooted in big lies so strong as engines of resentment that they can fill parade grounds and endless political rallies, or motivate the storming of the U.S. Capitol in a quixotic attempt to overthrow an election.
Mr. Trump’s Lost Cause takes its fuel from conspiratorial myths of all kinds, rehearsed for years on Trump media and social media platforms. Its guiding theories include: Christianity under duress and attack; large corrupt cities full of Black and brown people manipulated by liberal elites; Barack Obama as alien; a socialist movement determined to tax you into subservience to “big government”; liberal media out to crush family and conservative values; universities and schools teaching the young a history that hates America; resentment of nonwhite immigrants who threaten a particular national vision; and whatever hideous new version of a civil religion QAnon represents.
An effective, enduring Lost Cause story needs to know clearly what it hates, has to attain widespread control of its own communication and needs institutional rooting, and it must explain almost everything. It converts loss and longstanding grievance into community, and promises of victory on altars of strife.
The Confederate Lost Cause is one of the most deeply ingrained mythologies in American history. It emerged first as a mood of traumatized defeat in the 1860s, but grew into an array of arguments, organizations and rituals in search of a story that could win hearts and minds and regain power in the Southern states. It was initially a psychological response to the trauma of collective loss among former Confederates. It gained traction in violent groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and in the re-emergence of the Democratic Party’s resistance to Reconstruction.
It assumed the character of a religious movement in endless sermons about the noble fallen soldiers who defended home, hearth, their women and their God. It maintained that the best cause in a war can lose nobly if overwhelmed by industrial might and other evil forces of modernity. A lasting civil religion requires a saint, and the South quickly created one out of the life of Robert E. Lee, the Confederacy’s leading general who fought to the bitter end, but died in 1870, before he could discourage the ubiquitous mythmaking and monument building in his honor.
Crucially, the Lost Cause argued that the Confederacy never fought to preserve slavery, and that it was never truly defeated on battlefields. Lost Cause spokesmen saw the Confederacy as the true heir of the American Revolution, and maintained that loss by the underdog could transform into a success story even for Yankees in need of security and patriotic sentiment in an age of anxiety over rapid urbanization, immigration and strife between labor and capital. Above all, the Lost Cause seductively reminded white Americans that the Confederacy had stood for a civilization in which both races thrived in their natural capacities, a regime of proper racial and gender order. The slaughter of the Civil War had destroyed that order, but it could be remade and the whole nation, defined as white Anglo-Saxon, could yet be revived.
By the 1890s, the Lost Cause was no longer a story of loss, but one of victory: the defeat of Reconstruction. Southerners — whether run-of-the-mill local politicians, famous former generals or women who forged the culture of monument building — portrayed white supremacy and home rule for the South as the nation’s victory over radicalism and Negro rule. Reconstruction in the 1860s, forged in the three great constitutional amendments (13th, 14th and 15th), had been overthrown to the glory of America.
The Trumpian Lost Cause has quite different origins, of course. It does not derive from sacrifice of blood and treasure in war. On its face it is not a response to the military conquest of a society. But it does seem to be tonic for those who fear long-term social change; it is a story in search of revival and order. Trumpism knows what it hates: liberalism; taxation; what it perceives as big government; nonwhite immigrants who drain the homeland’s resources; government regulation imposed on individuals and businesses; foreign entanglements and wars that require America to be too generous to strange peoples in faraway places; any hint of gun control; feminism in high places; the nation’s inevitable ethnic and racial pluralism; and the infinite array of practices or ideas it calls “political correctness.” Potent ideas all in search of a history.
Trumpists want something permanent and stable: border walls; ever-growing stock portfolios; access to the environment and hunting land without limits; coal they can burn at will; the “liberty” to reject masks; history that tastes of the sweetness of progress and not the bitterness of national sins. In his book “The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America,” the historian Greg Grandin describes how a growing sense of alienation, grievance and inequality led millions of largely white Americans to embrace the simple but clear story Mr. Trump told them. From more than a decade of angry right-wing attacks on all things Obama, Democratic Party and liberal, they were primed for “a conspiratorial nihilism, rejecting reason and dreading change” as they tuned in to Rush Limbaugh, watched Fox News and strolled down the internet rabbit hole to Q.
If, as many Civil War scholars have suggested, the Confederate Lost Cause was born in the imagery of Lee’s manly and noble surrender to Ulysses Grant at Appomattox in April 1865, perhaps the Trump Lost Cause has been born in the indelible imagery of the rioters scaling and assaulting the U.S. Capitol in January 2021. Their story, however fraught with lies and misguided beliefs, has tremendous traction among a majority of sitting Republicans in Congress, in the constellation of right-wing media and now in their thousands of veterans of the march on the Capitol. They may soon need a new high priest with much better political talent; there is no lack of candidates awaiting their chance.
Mr. Trump lost, but he and his minions may yet find ways, if they keep their deep foothold in the Republican Party, to manufacture a dreamlike story of future victory for their unstable coalition of an unhindered ruling class, Christian nationalism and the aggrieved white working class. Whether Trumpism can ever attain the staying power of the Confederate Lost Cause is unclear. It may flame out in a few years like the bad TV show it has always been. But the shock of Trumpists’ inevitable attack on the American experiment on Wednesday, Jan. 6, hit like a thunderbolt. They will be back. It will surely take great political skill and moral imagination across American culture, from the Biden administration to every teacher in the land, to fight this new Lost Cause ideology. The country needs healing and unity, but it needs justice and better storytelling of its history more.
The Supreme Court’s United States v. Stanley decision in 1883 declared that the equal protection provision of the 14th Amendment could be enforced only by the states, effectively placing individual rights beyond federal protection. Frederick Douglass reacted with outrage, saying the decision felt like a “moral cyclone.” He blamed it on a failure of historical memory in facing down the power of the Lost Cause. Douglass spoke for Black Americans’ “bewildering surprise.” “The surrender of the national capital to Jefferson Davis in time of war,” he asserted, “could hardly have caused a greater shock.” That Confederate flag parading inside the Capitol on Wednesday caused similar national pain and shock.
David W. Blight is a professor of history, African-American studies and American studies and the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale. He is the author, most recently, of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.”
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