Did you remember the Alamo today?

I always keep in mind how I can deliver value to my subscribers with each email I write, and if making sure you remember the Alamo isn’t value, I don’t know what is.

There’s a reason that the Texas Revolutionaries were absolutely insistent that the Alamo remain in their memory, and it was because founding myths matter. They knew this instinctively, and I imagine that we do also, but let’s explain why before we perform a wellness check on ours.

First of all, myth does not strictly mean “fictional.” Webster defines myth as:

So all myths implicitly suppose to be true historical events, but some of them actually are, and these are the best ones. Christ’s life in this sense is the greatest of all myths, because it is completely true and creates a comprehensive world view.

All decent nations have founding myths for this reason, not only that they may know how they became a nation, but what sort of nation they are. It gives them an identity, a way to understand their place in the world, a “world view of a people.” Their people.

Our true founding myth

I don’t need to tell you the story, you know it, but just consider what the American Revolution tells us about who we are. It tells us we are enemies of tyranny, we win against all odds, and we will even craft a new form of government to secure the rights of our people. It’s not just a great story, it’s a glorious identity. It gives us a powerful sense of what this nation is, both to its people and to the rest of the world.

The ethic of this story is even greater. The ethic of most nation’s identity is: We’re the good guys, and anyone in our way is the bad guys. That’s not bad, but ours is better: Defenders of freedom are the good guys, and tyrants are the bad guys. This in itself is revolutionary.

Truly, it may be the greatest birth myth of any nation.

The myth supplanting our true founding

Our true foundation myth is still there, but it has been evolving for some decades now into something else. Its brilliant light is becoming dimmer as other stories about our nation become more sacred in its place. This can only spell trouble for us, because it’s a threat to our identity, for reasons we just discussed.

The primary story that has defined us in the post-war world is, well, the war: World War II, and second to it is the civil rights movement. This might seem strange to you, but consider that the heroes of the American Revolution can be openly insulted in our age. This is not true of a proper foundation myth, to insult it is to insult the identity of everyone in the nation, and is not tolerated.

Who cannot be insulted? The Allies of WWII, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

This is why every discussion about politics invariably devolves into someone being called a Nazi, because the ethic of WWII is: Democracies are the good guys, and Nazis are the bad guys. This is not a defense of Nazism, it is simply an explanation of why we have become so obsessed with Hitler and the KKK, despite both being defeated. Like villains in a founding myth, they are not just historical figures, they are the ultimate evil we exist to defeat.

There is a lot of WWII history that I will not get into, but suffice it to say, it’s a terrible story to base our identity on. We got into a war on behalf of an ally that desperately wanted to go to war, killing civilians to bring it about, and what did we win? Not independence, not land, not treasure. We really just won another war with the USSR, who we empowered by helping them destroy the rest of Europe during the war. It would seem to tell us that we’re warmongers. It’s no mystery that we are warmongers now.

The civil rights movement is no better. This story tells us that we were terribly racist until we got told off hard enough, but some of us were so racist that the national guard had to be deployed to make them not be racist anymore. I suppose the ethic of that story is white people (especially in the South) are the bad guys, and black people and their allies are the good guys. Once again, it’s no mystery that we are told “white people are racist” now.

What do you think?

To be totally honest with you, I haven’t encountered these ideas seriously until I started reading up on Martyr Made’s work this week. The theme of these thoughts is borrowed from his recent appearance on Tucker Carlson, but of course I expounded on them as it relates to our present situation. Even though the idea is new to me, it makes so much sense of the nation we’ve found ourselves in that I’m compelled to believe it’s true.

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Fear no evil, for He is with us,

The Constantine Option