He isn't Trump. Somehow that's enough for people right now

That is one of the scariest parts of the Trump presidency.

Even now, John Kasich is thought by most of the American public as a "moderate", rather than the right-wing horror show that he actually is, just because he's anti-Trump.

We really need a dynamite candidate in 2020, not only to defeat Trump, but also to fend off a never-Trumper in 2024.

Americans will eventually forgive anything a president does. Their national mythology is way more important to them than concepts like holding leaders accountable.

A certain amount of contrition, a certain amount of historical white washing, and a certain amount of mythologizing is understandable, helpful even. I think it's fair to point out being a historical scold and tearing down national heros can be counter-productive; mythologies are meant to be aspirational after all, and real humans often make for complex figures, and badgering people into reminding everyone that historical figures and leaders have human failing is missing the point.

The problem is Americans have ****ty taste, and so we redeem the historical legacies of like Confederates, Andrew Jackson and George W Bush. That is to say, I don't think the mythologizing per se is problematic but the habitual rehabilitation of terrible people I think speaks to our dark aspirations. That is to say, you could forgive say a collective consciousness for intentionally forgetting that George Washington literally had a mouth full of ****ing extracted slave teeth if you wrapped your historiography in anti-imperialist banner and portrayed the Revolution as against colonialist impulses and excesses, but that Americans seem so dead-set on redeeming like Robert E. Lee seems just like the biggest tell.

The mythologizing has become more problematic over time, though, because the documentary evidence contradicting the narrative has been steadily increasing over time. Any of us can at a moments notice now google "George W Bush dumb" and get instantaneous access to thousands of pieces of evidence that he was dumb. And that's just one example. You can also to "George W Bush war crimes". When you try to build a myth around someone when contradictory evidence is readily available 24/7, it just creates evident hypocrisy. That's not good for national morale or whatever the myths are trying to establish and support.

I dunno, I maintain the bigger problem isn't that we have a national mythology which can be easily contradicted by the historical record, but that there seems to be some bizarre consensus to redeem and then enshrine George W Bush types into it. That is, I don't think mythologizing is problematic, but the choices we make in the process of doing it. Hypocrisy will always be part of the human condition; Martin Luther King was a pastor, a Christian, and he was undoubtedly a philanderer just like the Ron Paul newsletters claimed, he probably plagardized parts of his doctorate dissertation too, but who gives a ****? Put that man in national mythology and lionize him and forget whatever personal failings he had, it doesn't matter. There's a bunch of great reasons to do that. Why redeem George W Bush? It's not the mythologizing that's a problem, it's good for the national morale and the national character to create a few heros and not dwell on negatives about them, but it's the choices we make in doing it that seem often very ****ed up.

Even allowing the mythologising of Washington being subject to wrapping in anti-imperial language how is that supposed to stand up once someone points out that he had slaves teeth in his mouth? You're in danger of handwaving away atrocities to suit a particular narrative that is only a part of the story. Sure there are those whose mythology tells none of a story because it's a bs mythology from the get go but giving your founding fathers a pass has serious enough implications now.

Sure, but I'd say the problem was we didn't mythologize quite right, and so the implications of Founding Father aggrandizement (which you are correct to note are hugely problematic now) are hugely wrapped up in notions of how they received wisdom from the Gods and wrote The Perfect Constitution or how they had mastered a life well lived, as citizen yeoman idyllic plantation farmers who just happened to stumble into politics, and that sort of ****, which is to say we don't really mythologize the anti-imperialist nature of the Revolution and instead give a ****ton of winks and nods to the ideas that slavery was actually OK AND we should forgive the Founders for precisely that.

Like none of the anti-imperialist ethos you could pull from the Revolutionary Era sticks into the historical consciousness and all anyone ever wants to talk about with respect to the founding generation is how they were really wonderful statesmen with the incredible foresight to bequeath a Glorious Constitution which should never change because it was so wonderful. In other words they've been weaponized into the right-wing political movement and adjacent White Dad History Industry to sell America's White Olds on how It Was Better Back Then, and I think "giving your founding fathers a pass has serious enough implications now" because we focused on all the wrong ****, it could have been different, John Adams was sitting right there as a pretty decently committed abolitionist for his time and we chose to put Thomas Jefferson on Mt Rushmore and on the currency and whatever, maybe because of the Declaration but probably because he was a slaver. We had choices to create a better national mythology, which was a good idea, we just intentionally went down darker paths.

Take the converse case of Abraham Lincoln, wherein surely a bunch of his personal failings and less than savory decisions have been rightfully whitewashed, because the only people who focus on them outside of serious historians are atrocious racists like Thomas DiLorenzo who are literal neo Confederates but want to tear down Lincoln because he told racist jokes or wasn't a committed enough abolitionist, both of which are true enough but the only people seeking to correct the mythology have truly poor intents.

Are we saying mythologizing Lincoln was a bad idea because he wasn't Horace Greely? There's only so many hours in a day, people need simple stories and yarns and frames of references to they can engage in, to see themselves and their country in history, in time, in place. It's a good project. Those trying to tear down Lincoln almost always come from a place of incredibly bad faith and they do it with very regressive intent. Again, the problem isn't the mythology, it's how you engage in the process.

Trying to find a President or two or whatever and make them into national heros, or even trying to sanctify the institution to some extent seems like a decent idea. The problem is when you hang a portrait of Andrew Jackson in your office because your pseudo historian consultant wearing literally 5 different layers of collared shirts has sold you on the idea of America as a story of Blood and Soil Conquest.

Mythologizing is OK, Americans are often garbage at it.

Pushing back on W's legacy would require Dems to explain why almost the entire party voted for the Forever Wars or why we're still over there despite eight years of Obama being in office. And lol of course the Acela corridor pundits who enabled the whole thing aren't going to start speaking truth to power now.

Right. The simplest explanation for why George W. Bush is being redeemed isn't that mythologizing is bad but that our taste makers and opinion elites are ****ing garbage.

I don't even think it's a case of speaking truth to power, it's that a bunch of elites (media, political, business, otherwise) functionally deeply approved of George W. Bush and want to see him redeemed. It's not like these people are functionally toting around the unpleasant reality GWB was a ghoul in their minds but they just won't tell each other, it's that they really like him and what he stood for and want convince you he was really the swell guy they said he was, remember how he gave Michelle Obama candy and forget that whole Iraq dust up whoopsie daisy. I get a little anxious about "they just won't speak truth to power now" because I'm guessing 80% of the pundits and both party leadership, etc. simply do not agree with the reality that GWB was a ghastly war criminal. Failing to recognize that might misunderstand the situation that putting GWB back into the country's good graces IS their ideological project.

Yeah Bush can't have been that bad. Any bootlicking credulous power whore reasonable journalist could have been fooled by the faulty intelligence. Really it's all curveball's fault for lying to us all.

Sure we can agree that on balance Lincoln wasn't a deplorable and mythologising him is better than mythologising some rapist slaveowner but you don't need to mythologise Lincoln to defend his position on abolition because anyone that disagrees with his abolitionism isn't going to be swayed by his myth.

The most significantly mythologised politician in the UK is Churchill who was racist antisemitic and imperialist, responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths at least but to hear the other side you'd have him winning the war singlehanded. After this you probably have William Wilberforce who was an outspoken abolitionist but who's position in the abolitionist mnythologuy has essentialised him as the first poster boy for #notallwhitepeople while whitewashing the role of black abolitionists and slave led riots.

It’s not just the elites. Any full accounting of the W years is going to feature an enormous swath of the American public ready to toss away their liberties at the drop of a hat and give unlimited warmaking power to an illiterate buffoon. This country as a whole abandoned its principles entirely when the going got tough. That’s not a story anyone wants to tell. At least with Vietnam you have the mythology of a bunch of patriotic but naive kids sent to war by bureaucrats. After 9/11, like everyone I knew was gung-ho GET YA WAR ON. And even after we found out we were duped we still re-elected W. Who wants a Ken Burns documentary of that?

We want to believe Trump is some wild aberration of American politics, but there you had smirking W landing on an aircraft carrier saying MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. It’s all the same huckster gimmickry and shameless lying, Trump’s just more relentless with it.

What if the 90's and 00's and 10's could be explained by the idea that boomers were/are just mentally broken, permanently petrified, entitled pieces of ****? And Gen Xers are disconnected, rudderless, anti-confrontational snowflakes who let their boomer parents walk all over them.

One mythology I am absolutely sincere we should foster to get them all to save face and move along but ultimately sideline them politically is that they were lead poisoned en masse. It's probably true enough anyway but let's not dwell on the science. It's a nice out, we just have to act on the consequences which is total disenfranchisement. Sorry everyone born before the Clean Air Act of 1970 but we simply can't take the risk that your probable lead poisoning hasn't driven you to be unnaturally aggressive and stupid. Just go full GOP Senators :: Blasey Ford, something like we're sure someone poisoned your brain somehow, no one really knew how much toxic chemicals and metals we were pumping into the air and water, we're going to have to take your right to decide literally anything, shame.

Mostly the Boomers had a crisis of masculinity after Vietnam and they’ve responded with gung-ho militarism and jingoism and gun fetishism.

I haven’t thought about GenX much. I think we were all just watching MTV and playing Doom or whatever.

I think the thing is, Lincoln's already part of the cultural and historical zeitgeist so I don't think we can sideline him. And critically: why would we want to? The point is this; Lincoln is already on Rushmore, on the penny, on the $5. He's in every textbook, he's basically like the dominant figure of 19th century America. You effectively have two tracks:

1) Lincoln is a national hero and a treasure. Why? Because he freed the slaves and beat the Confederates
or
2) Lincoln is a muddled figure because he suspended habeus corpus and was really ultimately fighting to preserve the union and not really fighting for the political agency of slaves

#2 can descend from there into full DiLorenzoism, that he's actually a villain or whatever.

OBVIOUSLY the genuine historical record is this sort of mixed bag of **** and Lincoln is a complicated character, but whose interest does it serve to really beat back the first narrative? The first narrative is horribly simplistic and INCREDIBLY USEFUL to nice, normal people. You can explain Lincoln to a ****ing child: oh see that guy on Mount Rushmore, he freed the slaves from the bad guys. That's good for national morale to have those kinds of stories! Snarky internet dudebros who want to Well Actually Lincoln are effectively doing the bidding of garbage people, why bother? Save your complexities for your dissertations and your podcasts and for the passionate, but I'm not really sure what we're saying when you say we don't need to mythologize Lincoln. Why not do just that, exactly? Take like one of the most famous Americans ever, part of our national iconography and turn him into a heroic figure who beat fought against the ideology of people STILL IN OUR MIDST. Why would snarky leftists Well Actually that?

It seems pretty defeatist, like an incredibly famous person where the popular crude narrative is actually entirely useful to our ideological projects. Let's just go with that, keep it simple here. People like simple dumb stories, use it to your advantage, don't muddle up people's brains with your nerd history ****, like let the garbagey Well Actually deplorables annoy everyone trying to White Supremacistsplain the Real Lincoln and bask in the fact that ~everyone's frame of reference for Lincoln is actually pretty good for the national character!

Lincoln is like the one exception to the rule wherein the simplistic, A-B-C textbook Level 1 narrative is better than the genuine historical record, so stop hectoring people into cleaning that up, it's why Lincoln historiography and trying to revisionist history him into a complex Union Thug who just wanted to protect tariffs is so important to bad people, don't do their bidding.

I'm just relieved that the mythologizing of Stevie Six Shirts is being handled with care.

See I get this argument with regard to Lincoln, and yeah sure when discussing generally we defend the abolitionist and enemy of the confederacy but when having the conversation in circles where the historical scruffiness can be discussed without opening up avenues for the DiLorenzo's do that but I'm struggling to see many examples where this is the case. I'm not sure anyone wants to do this with FDR for example given the racial implications of the new deal. No one needs to claim that LBJ wasn't corrupt as **** to defend him over the CRA or VRA.

Maybe I'm not seeing the downside to saying Lincoln was complicated but freeing the slaves isn't. Even the GOP are at pains to point out that Lincoln was there's so I don't see people making the move Lincoln was complicated > freeing the slaves was a mistake other than those who think freeing the slaves was a mistake regardless of Lincoln.

I am however prepared to accept that Lincoln is worth mythologising if only to keep some distance between the deplorables and the general public but I think the US along with the UK needs to be really careful about anything that defers some actual reckoning on what the national character is.

We feigned aloof apathy as a self-defense mechanism when we were children and it kinda got hardwired in by the time we were adults.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/...prospects.html

Oh man, I was looking at a list of Dem politicians Obama plucked the other day and somehow missed Baucus. How the **** do you give up that seat in Montana to appoint him as...ambassador to China, of all things? RIP Kathleen Sebelius too, who could have put up a competitive fight for Senate in 2010 after her governorship ended if she wasn't running HHS instead.

This is a good point regarding 2020. Democrats will probably lose Doug Jones' seat in Alabama, and could flip Cory Gardner's in Colorado. After that, their best pickup opportunities are Maine (Collins) and North Carolina (Tillis). The rest are really unlikely. It's why holding ground in the Senate in these midterms is so essential.