Prophets, Counter-Myths, and Rediscovering MLK Jr. |
One of the stranger developments of the modern American political landscape is that both the activist left and the activist right increasingly approach history through the same structure.
They begin with a legitimate observation: the simplified civic mythology taught to children often omits complexity, contradiction, hypocrisy, and conflict. From there, however, they move toward total inversion. The heroes become villains. The covenant becomes fraud. The nation becomes either irredeemably evil or irredeemably corrupted.
Howard Zinn did this from the left. Increasingly, figures on the modern right are doing the same thing in reverse.
That realization hit me while listening to Matt Walsh’s “Real History” series. My immediate reaction was that it sounded like right-wing Howard Zinnism. The same narrative structure was present beneath the ideological reversal. The audience is told that they have been lied to by institutions, that official history is propaganda, and that the hidden truth overturns the moral legitimacy of the public narrative itself.
There is often truth inside these critiques. American schools do sanitize history. They simplify the Founders. They flatten the Civil Rights Movement into moral cartoons suitable for elementary school posters. But there is a difference between restoring complexity and destroying proportion.
The modern tendency is flattening.
The Founders become nothing but slaveholders. The Civil Rights Movement becomes the origin point of modern ideological excess. Great figures are stripped down into either mascots or frauds. Complexity becomes........