Is Gone with the Wind to blame for Trumpism?

‘America is merely a story the nation tells itself,’ the historian and cultural critic Sarah Churchwell writes in The Wrath to Come. Of the many American stories, few are more disturbing than the complex one represented by the rioter Kevin Seefried inside the Capitol on 6 January 2020. He carried the Confederate battle flag to a place it had never before been: the hall outside the United States Senate chamber. There is a photograph of him standing between two portraits – one of Charles Sumner, an abolitionist beaten half to death on the Senate floor for his views; the other of Senator John Calhoun, one of the South’s most ardent enslavers and advocates of disunion.

Seefried and his fellow insurrectionists were driven by dark American stories, among them the myths of replacement theory, the inherent superiority of white Christian men, and the Lost Cause. Strangely, the Lost Cause compels the devotion of millions of Americans – even northerners who have no historical allegiance to the ideologies that drove an enslaving southern elite to secede from the union, and their descendants to create an apartheid system governed by Jim Crow laws.

Perhaps the Lost Cause remains so prominent because of the powerful popular narratives that reflect and reinforce white American stances on race, privilege and history.