The Guardian: The American myth always came at someone's expense. Now, it's all but collapsed

[William Seger]

Last edited Sun Jun 28, 2026, 06:31 PM - Edit history (1)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/28/america-250-origin-myth-narrative-power

The main pillars of the founding narrative have fallen on hard times. Today, its meaning is up for grabs

Celebrating ordinary people as the authors of “our better history”, Obama used his rhetorical gifts to trace a narrative arc – linking women’s suffrage to the New Deal, the civil rights movement and marriage equality, part of a continuous, unfinished march toward a “more perfect union”. The outlines of this American universalist narrative first emerged during the second world war, advancing upon claims to anti-fascism and anti-racism that gained sway even over conservative elites. During the post-second world war era, with anti-discrimination principles increasingly consecrated in law and culture, US history was defined as a series of emancipatory milestones that vindicated the domestic ruling order and US claims to global leadership.

Recent years have seen growing numbers of mainstream detractors from this consensus history – among the most prominent, the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which offered an account of a “new founding” adjacent to the one championed by civil rights liberals, but wildly traducing the original. The revolutionary war, its lead author Nikole Hannah-Jones argued, was primarily motivated by the tawdry desire to give a free hand to Bourne’s plantation patriarchs “in order to ensure that slavery would continue”.

Conservatives howled at this re-telling of the founding, and Jones’s claims received pushback from US historians, who long debated whether the country’s birth was best understood in terms of the heritage of slavery or anti-slavery. But generally glossed over – by both the 1619 Project and the ensuing debate over it – was the fact that land hunger, and westward expansion, was a major impetus of revolutionary energies.

In fact, emancipation and expansion are twin pillars of the American revolutionary narrative. Both are closely bound to the histories of slavery and freedom, mobile frontiers and the United States’ continental and global reach, and both have been variously used to support the idea of a democracy upholding opportunity and affluence for the majority of US citizens and residents. In the great muddle of the present moment, however, the idea of a virtuous expansionist-emancipatory dialectic has fallen on hard times, undone by growing wealth inequality, civil rights reversals, violent policing and unpopular wars of choice.