This video is an hour and a half, but the lecture starts at 5:30 and ends at 35:30 followed by a Q&A. It is a very interesting Q&A, but I found the lecture on the myths much of our present day situation is founded on very fascinating.

As George Orwell observed so insightfully in his masterwork “1984”:

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

It is as if this is the guiding principle of the MAGA movement. They have an ideology and they will fit the news, stories and information to fit their agenda. But they were hardly the first to use this tool.  As we learn in this lecture by Historian Heather Cox Richardson this has been a tactic for a long time and one form that was particularly successful was the myth of the cowboy and individualism.

We see the influence of this myth still rampant in today’s US government in such persona as Elon Musk, Pete Hegseth and Trump’s comically and tragically inept economy wing.

Individualism has never been true cornerstone of our society, but has always served as a useful tool to divide any collective effort. If you take a clear eyed view of our history you will see that the US progressed and grew through collective effort from the very beginning when Ben Franklin said “We must all hang together, or assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” 

As a boomer I think back to those countless hours of westerns on TV in the ‘50s and ‘60s. I never thought they were in any way true, but I certainly didn’t think they were propaganda. But propaganda they were. And at the same time we were psychologically readied to believe anything that someone said from a position of authority even if it were an outright lie.

Just this week I read an assessment of education in this country. Professor James Loewen who authored “Lies My Teacher Told Me” stated at some point in his career:

“We’re not taught history, we’re taught patriotism.” 

That struck me as hitting the nail on the head. This helps explain why so many Americans take pronouncements from authority figures as totally believable if it fits into their version of America. It explains why the MAGA lies and disinformation, whether from Trump, Miller-Meeks or some dummy on TV, are believed. 

Here we are in 2025 running what was once the best hope for mankind on a basis of lies and mythology designed to keep us stupid and controlled.

This is interesting – the daily email from Richardson the day after I wrote this folded the concept of  cowboy individualism and the trump administration. So I thought I would cite the relevant passages to show how the cowboy individualism is alive in today’s administration:

Trump was the logical outcome of the myth of cowboy individualism embraced by the Republicans since President Ronald Reagan rose to the White House by celebrating it. In that myth, a true American is a man who operates on his own, outside the community. He needs nothing from the government, works hard to support himself, protects his wife and children, and asserts his will by dominating others. Government is his enemy, according to the myth, because it takes his money to help undeserving freeloaders and because it regulates how he can run his business. A society dominated by a cowboy individual is a strong one.

Leaders who pushed this ideology knew it attracted voters. Once they were in power, they could slash government programs and cut taxes and regulations that kept wealth and opportunity accessible to poorer Americans. They argued that a society works best if wealth and power are concentrated among a few elites, who can direct capital more efficiently than government bureaucrats can. Their rhetoric worked: from 1981 to 2021, $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. But those same people talking about individualism to secure votes also knew that the world has never worked this way. In the twenty-first century, U.S. security and the economy depended more than ever on coalitions and government investment.

As the middle class hollowed out, Republicans hammered on the idea that government action was socialism and the government was a swamp of waste and corruption. Donald Trump rode that rhetoric to the White House in 2016 but was still restrained by establishment Republicans who understood that the modern state underpinned America’s strength. President Joe Biden’s rejection of the Republicans’ economic vision and reorientation of the economy around ordinary Americans made Republicans rally against another Democratic president. They turned back to Trump, backed as he was by the MAGA base marinated in the rhetoric that government is bad, even though their counties are more dependent than Democratic counties on government aid.

Now the dog has caught the car. In 2024, Americans reelected Donald Trump, but he is no longer restrained by those who understood the importance of alliances and government programs. Instead, he is surrounded by those who appear convinced that displays of dominance will make the U.S. even stronger than it was when Trump took office and that destroying the government will free up great men to reorder society.

Thus we have the demonstration of myth believers running society and just how destructive that can be.