The Power of Myth

The Centrality of Narrative in Contemporary Politics

Battling the Hydra

Shortly after January 6th, 2021, the conservative writer Jacob Siegel wrote something to the effect of, “The American Right has left its Gramscian period and entered its Sorelian Period.” It was well-observed but requires a little unpacking for the lay reader. Gramscian, of course, refers to Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist intellectual who developed the theory of hegemony, his famous account of how political struggle takes place in all the institutions of civil society. The Gramscian strategy, as it is usually understood by the right, is something like Rudi Dutschke’s phrase “the long march through institutions,” the gradual winning of mass consent through the takeover or replacement of political and cultural institutions. I suppose the “Gramscian phase” would be the strategy of the Conservative Movement, which began with a few magazines and ended with the takeover of the Republican party, the presidency, congress, and the courts. In short, it is the conquest of power through the means available and the challenges posed by a developed pluralistic liberal democracy.

Georges Sorel was a heterodox French socialist who wrote at the turn of the century. He rejected the rise of parliamentary democratic socialism and orthodox Marxism, championing instead myth and violence in place of their rationalistic concepts. The true inner meaning of the socialist movement was reflected in the myth of the general strike, a cataclysmic showdown between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Reformism, abstruse theoretical studies, and even conventional political organization were distractions, the key thing was the inculcation of this mythical view among the workers:

The idea of the general strike, engendered by the practice of violent strikes, entails the conception of an irrevocable overthrow. There is something terrifying in this – which will appear more and more terrifying as violence takes a greater place in the mind of the proletarians. But, in undertaking a serious, formidable and sublime work, the socialists raise themselves above our frivolous society and make themselves worthy of pointing out new roads to the world.

For Sorel, myths reflect an entire worldview in a series of striking images: “men who are participating in great social movements always picture their coming action in the form of images of battle in which their cause is certain to triumph.” Myths cannot be refuted through factual disputation, they are not subject to scientific testing, etc.: they mobilize the passions and imagination: “The myths are not descriptions of things but expressions of a determination to act.”

Siegel is correct that the American right today is suffused with a Sorelian consciousness. The decline of mediating institutions and the movement of politics into the frictionless world of image and spectacle online makes mythmaking more salient, but it is not a new phenomenon on the American right. Think of McCarthyism. Of course, there were actual Communist agents in the government, but they had mostly been exposed by the time of the McCarthyite crusades. Their existence was just fuel for the larger mythic narrative of “Communists,” a vast alien invasion of American institutions. Liberals often refer to right-wing lies, misinformation, disinformation, or conspiracy theories, but what they are identifying are myths in the Sorelian sense. For example, “stop the steal” was not the literal, empirical belief that votes had been stolen, it reflected a total conception of the world, a belief that the “true citizens” were disenfranchised and the system was corrupt. In the present moment, look at the apparent nonsense about fraud and waste in the government peddled by Musk and DOGE: they cannot provide much in the way of real evidence. But that’s not the point: it is backed up and attempts to reinforce the long-developed libertarian myth of the wholly rapacious and corrupt government. The myth is also a populist one: the government is hoarding treasure away from the people, and the people’s champions need to break in and get it back.

This mythic nature of these notions makes the liberal attempts to fact-check or dispute their contents piecemeal a futile exercise. The positivistic approach of liberal pundits, as expressed most characteristically in the unimaginative vox.com mentality, is completely out of its depth when it tries to deal with the policy merits or demerits of these new right-wing myths. Such an approach is even counterproductive in that it helps try to rationalize and make more palatable to rationalistic liberals what is inherently—by design—irrational. The facts are secondary to the story that they are being woven into. In contemporary right-wing usage, “DEI,” “CRT” or “Wokeness” do not refer to any particular suite of policies that can be rationally assessed. No, they are signifiers that are meant to conjure images of the ideological unsoundness, mental unworthiness, and racial impurity of vast swaths of federal and private employees. In like manner, “IQ” might seem like the most scientistic concept available: but it is not, it’s a myth that suggests an intrinsically worthy but unrecognized mass, held back by a fake meritocracy that unfairly privileges women and minorities. Trumpism itself is a mythic conception: a pragmatic, no-nonsense businessman who will “clean up the mess” of American government.

The conscious or unconscious realization of the importance of myth to the right is why even formerly reputable writers and journals of opinion have turned into veritable factories for the generation of narratives about stolen elections and hidden cabals of evil bureaucrats. Facts are only important insofar as they point to these “hidden realities” beneath the surface.

Can or should the left and liberals create counter-myths to battle the right? Or should we hold fast to Enlightenment values of rationality and truth, come what may? No doubt, right-wingers will say we already have our myths and point them out. Just ignore them: as usual, they are trying to embarrass us from engaging wholeheartedly in political contestation. But it’s no secret that we leftists and liberals need to tell a more stirring story about the country and its direction. One advantage we have is the truth on our side: they really are the party of rapacious oligarchs who are stripping the country for parts. From the standpoint of mythmaking, the problem with Russiagate and the idea of Trump as a Russian asset, probably the closest thing to a Sorelian myth the liberals were able to generate in recent years, was that it was just a little too sophisticated: it was for upper-middle-class people who read the Washington Post and enjoy spy thrillers. It was also too optimistic: it spoke to a utopian belief in bureaucratic competence triumphant, rather than years of bitter political struggle against an occupying enemy. (Sorel teaches that pessimism can be a strength.) When the factual basis started to look a little shaky, most liberals shrank away in embarrassment. So very unlike a hard-right conservative who would continue to insist that McCarthy had a point, despite the “excesses.”

Anybody serious about strategy needs to start thinking not just about discrete “messages” or “policy preferences” and begin to take seriously capturing the public imagination.