Myth America

Some thought provoking essays but the content is uneven

This book is a collection of 20 essays that try to challenge some of the myths and implicit assumptions about American history. Overall, it’s worth reading, but the content is very uneven.

Of the 20 essays, there are 5 that I would give a 5 star rating to. These are the essays where the book is at its best - when it challenges assumptions that almost all Americans have, regardless of political affiliation.

The best ones are - American Exceptionalism, American Empire, The Vanishing Indian, The Classical Civil Rights Era, and The Inevitable Backlash. For example, we (as Americans) are likely not as exceptional as we’d like to believe we are, we do have more imperial characteristics than we think, and our tendency to place anything related to Native Americans in the past ignores the fact that there are millions of Native people still here and they have concerns that are unaddressed. Similarly, we tend to think of the MLK era of Civil Rights as having achieved all of his goals - it didn’t, and framing the issue this way makes current Civil Rights issues seems unreasonable (didn’t we already fix this back in the 60s?). Lastly, whenever there is some social progress, there is always the “inevitable backlash” that occurs, when things “move too quickly,” but in reality, much of the backlash was present before the movement started. Anyway, these are very much worth reading.

Where the book does less well is when it goes after the myths that are largely propagated by the right. This is definitely a left leaning book and the right wing definitely embraces many faulty myths, but this book doesn’t really go after them too effectively. The arguments often cherry pick facts and invoke left wing “truisms” in seeking to defeat those from the right. If you’re into this sort of opinion piece thing, then the rest of the book may be for you, but it became kind of tedious for me.

Of the essays that go after the right wing, only the one on the Southern Strategy did a good job of objectively showing how the Republicans who used to be civil rights champions from the North traded places with Democrats who used to be anti-civil rights from the South. This is often cited as something that happened because LBJ enacted civil rights legislation and Nixon capitalized on the backlash, but the roots of this shift go back decades longer, took decades more to fully shift, and never completely shifted at the presidential level.

Otherwise, the other 14 essays are where between 1 and 3 stars. This is why I gave the book 3 overall.