This is a re-work of something I wrote a few years ago that’s still important to me. When Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth came out, I knew I’d want to re-visit this. Grandin’s “myth” is that of the frontier. His thesis is that the sustaining myth of the frontier grew out of the insatiable drive of the U.S. to expand—first westward, and, when that was no longer possible, overseas. Grandin claims that the widespread enthusiasm for Trump’s southern border wall from the very sorts of people who, in the past, would have been most aggressively in favor of expansion, and the subjugation and exploitation of non-white people that went with it, proves that the frontier myth is now dead—that the U.S. drive for expansion is now over, and those hostile energies have turned inward. Consequently, he argues, the sublimation of, and distraction from, our most central social problems as a society can no longer be accomplished by expansion, and we must confront them as we never have.
The Myth of Montana, rev. ed.
The Myth of Montana, rev. ed.
The Myth of Montana, rev. ed.
This is a re-work of something I wrote a few years ago that’s still important to me. When Greg Grandin’s The End of the Myth came out, I knew I’d want to re-visit this. Grandin’s “myth” is that of the frontier. His thesis is that the sustaining myth of the frontier grew out of the insatiable drive of the U.S. to expand—first westward, and, when that was no longer possible, overseas. Grandin claims that the widespread enthusiasm for Trump’s southern border wall from the very sorts of people who, in the past, would have been most aggressively in favor of expansion, and the subjugation and exploitation of non-white people that went with it, proves that the frontier myth is now dead—that the U.S. drive for expansion is now over, and those hostile energies have turned inward. Consequently, he argues, the sublimation of, and distraction from, our most central social problems as a society can no longer be accomplished by expansion, and we must confront them as we never have.