When I was in school, American history was taught as a series of triumphs over wrongs that belonged to the past. Slavery was evil, but the Civil War ended it; then the civil-rights movement ended segregation. The vote was extended to more and more Americans—starting with white men, then women, Black people, and finally even 18-year-olds—thus fulfilling the promise of democracy. There was no atoning for the near elimination of Native Americans, but somehow it didn’t invalidate the story of progress. Abroad, the U.S. led the cause of freedom against fascism and communism; Japanese internment, McCarthyism, and Vietnam were mistakes that didn’t erase the larger picture. It was an optimistic narrative, reassuring, shallow, and badly in need of a corrective.  

We’re now living in a golden age of fatalism. American culture—movies and museums, fiction and journalism—is consumed with the most terrible subjects of the country’s history: slavery, Native American removal, continental conquest, the betrayal of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, colonialism, militarism. In scholarship, works whose objective is to puncture our hopeful but misguided myths dominate, and titles such as Unworthy Republic, The End of the Myth, Illusions of Emancipation, and Stamped From the Beginning claim prestigious prizes. This mode of analysis doesn’t just revise our understanding of American history, illuminating areas of darkness that most people don’t know and perhaps would rather not. It also draws a straight line from past to present.  

In a country world-famous for constant transformation, historical fatalism believes that nothing ever really changes. Mass incarceration is “the new Jim Crow”; modern police departments are the heirs of slave patrols. Historical fatalism combines inevitability and essentialism: The present is forever trapped in the past and defined by the worst of it. The arrival of the first slave ship on these shores in 1619 marked, according to The New York Times Magazine, “the country’s true birth date” and “the foundation on which this country is built.” Cruelty, inequity, and oppression endure in the American character not only as elements of a complex whole but as its very essence. Any more ambiguous view—one that sees the United States as a flawed experiment, marked by slow, fitful progress—is an illusion, and a dangerous one.

[Read: The new history wars]

The new fatalism has its own historical causes, and they’re not hard to see: the failures of the War on Terror and the neoliberal economy, stubborn inequality, the disappointments of the Obama presidency, videos of police brutality, global warming, the rise of Donald Trump. There is no shortage of evidence to justify a dark interpretation of American history. But what’s striking is how eagerly the new fatalism crosses from empiricism into metaphysics. In search of original facts, historians and journalists go digging where the ugliest facts are buried, and what begins in research ends in dogma. They aren’t just looking to fill in gaps of knowledge, or going where the historical evidence leads them. Instead they replace one myth with another one, as powerful and even attractive in its way as the naive story of July 4, 1776, being the fountain of liberty and equality for all. Disillusionment is as appealing to some temperaments as wishful thinking is to others.

Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power, by Jefferson Cowie, a historian at Vanderbilt University, is a gem of the new fatalism. Synthesizing brilliant research in fluent prose, and writing with an indignation that’s all the more damning for being understated, Cowie explores the history of Barbour County, in Alabama’s Black Belt, at the southeastern corner of the state. Here, white settlers drove out Creek Indians in the early 19th century; white planters made cotton fortunes on the seized land with Black slave labor; defeated white Confederates restored their wealth and power using Black convict labor and a Jim Crow constitution; white mobs enforced their racist social order with lynchings. When the civil-rights movement eventually reached Barbour County, in the mid-1960s, white politicians kept Black voters out of power with intimidation and chicanery. By then, a native son of Barbour County named George Wallace was ruling Alabama as its arch-segregationist governor and taking the cause of white resistance national.

Cowie’s theme is how the sacred American creed of freedom serves to justify racial domination. At every turn in the harsh tale of Barbour County, white residents resisted challenges to their supremacy by invoking their birthright as free people. At nearly every turn, the federal government made inadequate efforts on behalf of equal Black citizenship, before yielding to the demands of white “freedom” backed by violence. “Those defending racism, land appropriation, and enslavement portrayed themselves, and even understood their own actions, as part of a long history of freedom,” Cowie writes. In his infamous 1963 inaugural address vowing “segregation forever,” Governor Wallace used the word freedom 24 times. To Wallace and his constituents, the real tyrant was the federal government, issuing its court orders and sending down its marshals and troops to impose its laws against the will of white Alabamians. Cowie quotes a blunt question from the 18th-century British essayist Samuel Johnson that could have been the book’s epigraph: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

In the uses of freedom, Cowie argues, domination is as central to the American creed as individual liberty and self-government. Freedom as white power “is not an aberration but a virulent part of an American idiom.” The history of Barbour County “was not much different than what happened in the rest of the Black Belt, the South, or the nation.” For proof, Cowie recounts the nationwide appeal of Wallace’s presidential campaigns in 1968 and 1972 (“We’re going to show there sure are a lot of rednecks in this country,” Wallace said before the ’68 election). The stories Cowie has excavated in Barbour County “are not simply regional tales lost in the dark, overgrown thickets of the past. They are quintessentially American histories—inescapably local, yet national in theme, scope, and scale.” The historian concludes: “To confront this saga of freedom is to confront the fundamentals of the American narrative.”

These claims are the heart of Cowie’s book. In one sense, they’re incontestable. Few Americans today embrace the overt goal of white supremacy, but the freedom to take away someone else’s rights at gunpoint is as American as the freedom to insult the president or make a pile of money. If you drive through rural Pennsylvania, you’ll see the Stars and Bars flying from houses in towns where the main square features a monument with a long honor roll of Union dead. The January 6 insurrectionists carried Gadsden banners and Confederate flags and railed against government jackboots. Though they might not state it openly, for some Americans Black equality + the federal government = tyranny is a permanent equation.

But on second glance, there’s something strange and willful about picking Barbour County, Alabama, as the exemplary American place. It would be hard to find a more brutal and benighted one, but fatalism makes the selection understandable. The Times recently published an op-ed under the headline “What If Hale County, Ala., Is the Heart of America?” Hale County—about 200 miles northwest of Barbour—was the setting for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee and Walker Evans’s Depression-era portrait of white tenant farmers; today the county’s Black majority remains deeply impoverished. Perhaps Barbour County and Hale County are the twin hearts of America.

My mother’s side of the family comes from Birmingham, Alabama, which is notorious for its history of white supremacy and violence. But the recent history of Birmingham, with its Black mayors and progressive politics, tells a somewhat less fatalistic story than Cowie’s tale of Barbour County. Another historian might argue that the history of Kings County, New York, where I’m writing this essay, can equally claim to represent the nation’s past. What if Brooklyn were the heart of America? That would give a very different picture of freedom—one largely shaped by immigration, ethnic competition, coalition building, and liberal state power, in addition to racial discrimination. But it might be better not to go looking for the national essence anywhere.

Cowie tells us that he wanted to write about white resistance to federal power, and “Barbour County found me.” He did indeed go digging where the ugliest facts lay buried, some quite close to the surface. When he took the step from writing superb history to diagnosing American character, the choice of place determined the conclusion. But constructing a narrative of the country’s past is the business of everyone, not just the professionals, and getting the facts right isn’t enough. As the philosopher Richard Rorty wrote in his 1998 book, Achieving Our Country, “Stories about what a nation has been and should try to be are not attempts at accurate representation, but rather attempts to forge a moral identity.” The stories we tell ourselves about the past allow us to see the country we want.

Did America become America in 1619, or 1776, or some other year? There is no objective answer. The answer is a choice, an expression of values, and the choice implies a story. Politics is a competition between stories—and it’s as politics that the new fatalism leads to a dead end. On a landscape strewn with the deflated remnants of old myths, with the country’s essence distilled to its meanest self, what moral identity is it possible to build? Punctured myths make us better students of history, but they leave nothing to live up to. Shame is a shaky foundation for any project of renewal. You can’t tell someone that he’s made a mess of his life because of his own bad character and then expect him to change. “National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals,” Rorty wrote: “a necessary condition for self-improvement.”

[Read: The rise of anti-history]

Cowie argues for a new narrative to combat that of Barbour County: “a vigorous, federally enforced model of American citizenship that is not afraid to fight the many incarnations of the freedom to dominate.” In other words, he wants the United States to start doing what, in his telling, it has largely failed to do for 200 years. But white resistance to federal power runs so deep in Freedom’s Dominion that no other model is plausible. If Barbour County is the dark heart of America, the course of the story is foretold. Progressive scholarship makes progressive politics seem hopeless.

Our political moment, composed of catastrophism and stagnation, offers no obvious way out. This impasse produces the magical thinking of fatalism: History is a living nightmare—wake up to justice! A popular idea calls for change by plebiscite and demography: Rewrite the Constitution, get rid of its anti-majoritarian features, create true democracy, and a new majority will carry out the progressive policies the country wants. In Two Cheers for Politics, the legal scholar Jedediah Purdy makes an eloquent case for more democracy as the path to national renewal. He suggests extending the franchise to noncitizens and holding a new constitutional convention every 27 years. Purdy acknowledges that democracy means giving power to people and ideas you might not like. Still, I sense he believes—despite election after election showing this country to be almost evenly split—that the correct majority will rule.

There’s no shortcut out of our impasse. The only way forward is on the long road of organization and persuasion. This is the theme of Timothy Shenk’s recent book Realigners. “There’s no one thread tying the history of American democracy together, no abiding center, no single answer,” Shenk writes. “But there is a recurring question: How can you build an electoral majority?” Shenk—whose progressive credentials include co-editing Dissent magazine—rejects “skeleton-key histories” such as the new fatalism that draws “a straight line from slavery in the seventeenth century to systemic racism in the twenty-first.” Realigners is about Americans—political leaders and thinkers, given that democratic politics is a contest among elites for popular legitimacy—who changed the country by helping to create majorities that lasted long enough to break with the past. They’re not the usual suspects. Shenk’s protagonists include the Democratic Party kingpin Martin Van Buren; the radical Republican Senator Charles Sumner; Mark Hanna, William McKinley’s campaign mastermind; W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter Lippmann, Bayard Rustin, Phyllis Schlafly.

Shenk’s portraits and stories are not the stuff of utopian dreams. Electoral majorities are extremely hard to build in our system. They depend on the convergence of public sentiments, historical events, political talent, institution building, and luck. They have to sustain contradictions and bring opponents together in unlikely coalitions. They never last more than a couple of decades. The only constant is change. The new fatalism gives us an open-and-shut vision of the past, but for inspiration in shaping the future, we have to look elsewhere.

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House Speaker Kevin McCarthy gave Fox News access to thousands of hours of video from the events of January 6, and Tucker Carlson’s effort to rewrite history isn’t just laughably incompetent; it’s already falling flat.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

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A Clumsy Gambit

When a mob tried to storm the Capitol on January 6, 2021, congressional Republicans—especially those in the Senate—seemed briefly to understand the magnitude of the events around them. Kevin McCarthy, then the GOP minority leader, said that President Donald Trump bore responsibility for the attack. Even Lindsey Graham swore he was done with Trump.

This new seriousness didn’t last. A year after the attack, most Republicans—including McCarthy—ducked a ceremony at the Capitol marking the anniversary and commemorating the lives lost. McCarthy would later be elected speaker on the say-so of a handful of extremist Republicans—some of whom openly sympathized with the 2021 insurrectionists—who made him grovel through more than a dozen rounds of voting. Insofar as other Republicans can bring themselves to even acknowledge January 6, many of them still portray it as a legitimate protest that somehow got out of hand rather than what it really was: a seditious conspiracy to attack the American system of government, instigated and encouraged by a sitting president of the United States.

Heading into the 2022 midterms, the Republicans hoped that an attempt by their party’s leader to overthrow the constitutional order would be no impediment to regaining national power. The midterms, however, proved that Americans still care about their democracy and that they could not be swayed to trade their freedom away merely because gas prices are too high. At this point, the Republicans are barely holding the House, and Trump is leading the pack of possible GOP presidential candidates while yawping about “retribution.” Most Americans continue to think January 6 was a terrible day for the United States and that Trump bears at least some responsibility for it.

Not to worry, Republicans. McCarthy and Fox News’s resident pluto-populist Tucker Carlson are on the case. Unfortunately, it’s going about as well as you’d expect from anything that involves the words Kevin McCarthy and Tucker Carlson.

To recap the events of the past few weeks: McCarthy apparently decided that Carlson was the person who could remove the stain of January 6 from the Republican Party. Remember, once Trump was elected in 2016, the GOP was a national majority, holding the House, the Senate, the White House, most governor’s mansions, and most state legislatures across the country. Trump destroyed much of that, and his decision to run again meant that January 6 could not somehow be memory-holed. So the speaker gave the ever-perplexed Carlson access to thousands of hours of video from the attack.

The objective here was clear from the start. If the GOP is going to make a run at national power again, it must find a way to deny the reality of January 6 and neutralize the cloud of seditious stink that still clings to every Republican because of Trump and the insurrectionists. Who better than Carlson to sneer his way through a dismissal of one of the worst days in the history of the United States?

Unfortunately, the attempt to gaslight millions of people isn’t going very well. Carlson, as my colleague David Graham points out, is engaging in a “long-standing Donald Trump approach of demanding that his supporters believe him rather than their lying eyes.” But there are likely limits to that gambit even for Carlson, who is presenting as bombshells things we already knew. It is not a revelation, for example, that the “QAnon Shaman,” Jacob Chansley, walked along with Capitol cops who were trying to keep the fur-hatted weirdo calm even while he was howling in the Senate chamber. Carlson’s attempt to deny the danger of that moment is not only silly but also a gobsmackingly incompetent attempt to use footage depicting a rioter whose bizarre behavior was already well-known to the public.

It’s one thing to assume that the Fox audience isn’t very bright and will believe almost anything—I will gladly stipulate to that—but it’s another to ask them to leap across a chasm of credulity. Sedition-friendly Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, tried to capitalize on Carlson’s after-school-video special by immediately calling for a new trial for Chansley. But even Fox viewers probably know that Chansley wasn’t convicted in a trial: He loquaciously pleaded guilty and got a stiff sentence of 41 months in prison.

I realize that, for many reasons, I am not Carlson’s target demographic. (He’s not much of a fan of my work either.) But when Republican members of Congress are pushing back on a major propaganda effort to help … well, to help the future fortunes of Republican members of Congress, things are not going well. You might have expected someone like Senator Mitt Romney of Utah to zing Carlson, and he did, saying the Fox host had gone “off the rails” and describing him as a radio “shock jock.” But conservative Senators Kevin Cramer of North Dakota and Mike Rounds of South Dakota both criticized Carlson. (Even Senate Minority Leader and ongoing profile in courage Mitch McConnell carefully opined that Fox “made a mistake” in depicting January 6 in a way that was “completely at variance” with how the head of the Capitol Police “correctly” described the day.) Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina said Carlson’s presentation was “inexcusable” and, for good measure, “bullshit.”

Trump, of course, thanked both Carlson and McCarthy. Because, really, if the point was to reassure the American public about whether the GOP is still in the grip of violent seditionists, what better way to do it than to clumsily cherry-pick some video and then elicit an all-caps tirade from the leader of the Republican Party?

LET THE JANUARY 6 PRISONERS GO. THEY WERE CONVICTED, OR ARE AWAITING TRIAL, BASED ON A GIANT LIE, A RADICAL LEFT CON JOB. THANK YOU TO TUCKER CARLSON AND SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE KEVIN McCARTHY FOR WHAT YOU BOTH HAVE DONE. NEW VIDEO FOOTAGE IS IRREFUTABLE!!!

Well then. As Sonny Bunch from The Bulwark wryly observed this morning: “Going to be kind of funny to watch GOP candidates dance around acknowledging that the presidential frontrunner and the party’s semi-official media organ are more or less pro-storming-the-Capitol at this point.”

As counterintuitive as it might be, perhaps the best thing for American democracy would be for Carlson to keep bumbling his way through more January 6 footage and to keep images of the insurrection in front of millions of viewers for as long as possible. If that’s how McCarthy and Carlson intend to restore the image of the GOP as a normal political party, who are any of us to argue with such public-relations geniuses?

Related:

Tucker Carlson and the new narrative of January 6 The new Lost Cause

Today’s News

Two of the four Americans who authorities say were kidnapped in a border city of Mexico have been found dead. The other two are alive, but one is injured. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell testified to the Senate Banking Committee, telling lawmakers that the Fed will likely raise interest rates higher than previously forecasted. In a speech at the Morgan Stanley conference in San Francisco, Elon Musk commented on the future of both Twitter and Tesla.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Derek Thompson lays out some surprising effects of remote work: more marriages, more babies, bigger houses.

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Evening Read

Alima Lee

Kelela Knows What Intimacy Sounds Like

By Hannah Giorgis

On a Tuesday afternoon last month, I found refuge from the dreary chill of New York’s winter in the cardamom-scented warmth of Benyam Cuisine, a small Ethiopian restaurant in Harlem. The family-run establishment is normally only open for dinner Wednesday through Sunday. But that day, a co-owner trekked in from Jersey City to indulge two homesick Ethiopian American women: myself and Kelela, the enigmatic R&B singer whose fan base includes the likes of Beyoncé, Solange, Björk, and, not coincidentally, the Benyam host’s niece.

Kelela, who is 39, has cultivated a mystique that’s exceedingly rare in the modern music business. It’s been nearly 10 years since she released her 2013 mixtape, Cut 4 Me, which earned her an eclectic following of industry heavyweights, R&B purists, dance-music DJs, and indie obsessives. In 2017, she dropped her studio debut, Take Me Apart, which cemented her standing as one of modern R&B’s most inventive vocalists. Take Me Apart is by turns brooding, defiant, and haunting—and in each register, Kelela’s voice wraps itself around the melodies with hypnotic confidence. After that creative leap and the subsequent tour, she essentially vanished.

Read the full article.

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Read. “Nomenclature,” a poem by Clint Smith.

“Your mother’s mother came from Igboland

though she did not teach your mother her language.

We gave you your name in a language we don’t understand

because gravity is still there

even when we cannot see it in our hands.”

Watch. Catch up on some Oscars contenders before the awards show on Sunday.

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P.S.

The director Michael Bay has taken his share of criticism over the years for producing movies that are big and loud and a bit dumb. (One word: Transformers.) His 2001 historical epic, Pearl Harbor, was so bad that the South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone immortalized it in a ballad in their hilarious movie Team America: World Police that included the lyric, “I miss you more than Michael Bay missed the mark / When he made Pearl Harbor.” But I am going to admit that I am a sucker for a few Michael Bay movies, and especially one of the most fun adventure movies of the 1990s: The Rock. (I discovered in a conversation this morning that this is yet another movie, like so many from roughly 1970 to 2000, that is completely unknown to my Daily editor Isabel Fattal, so I am recommending it to both you and her.)

Released in 1996, The Rock features Ed Harris as a renegade Marine general who has had enough of the wimps in Washington ignoring the sacrifices of brave men who died in black operations. He and his crack military team steal some nerve gas, set up a base on Alcatraz—the Rock—and hold San Francisco hostage. After just about everything else fails, an FBI biochemist played by Nicolas Cage and a former British spy played by Sean Connery (who is obviously supposed to be James Bond and whose character was held for years as a prisoner for stealing American secrets back in the 1960s) are sent in to get the rockets. Bullets; carnage; hard, manly stares; set jaws; inventive cursing; and a fair amount of hilarity ensue. This movie has so much testosterone in it that you could grow a beard sitting too close to the screen, but it’s also genuinely funny, with some classic dialogue that I cannot possibly repeat here. Bring a lot of popcorn to this one, and try not to repeat the best lines at the office.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.