Living in a Mythocracy: Projecting 2025

The Simpsons

If one looks at the executive orders passed by Trump in the first week of his second presidency, and manages to look past the horror, one can see their utter consistency in terms of their vision of government, history, and society. This consistency makes up a universe, what could be called the Fox News Extended Universe. In this universe, undocumented immigrants, or “illegals” as they are called, are illegal through and through; breaking the law to get or stay in this country puts them outside of any law. They can only be harbingers of crime. In this universe, DEI, or really any attempt to address this country’s history of racism since the Civil Rights Act, can only be understood as racism. To mention race is to divide by race, and the true victims of this racism are the white men and women who have lost jobs, or at least social standing, by having to treat others as equals. In this universe, public health can only be a secret grab for power, and the CDC, WHO, etc., are nefarious tools of domination. In this universe, the federal government spends too much money on foreign countries, pointless research, and, as The Simpsons put it, the “perverted arts.”

These are all myths. I mean this first in the most obvious and banal sense of the word. Each and every one of them is untrue; undocumented migrants do not commit more crimes than citizens, and probably commit less violent crime than US citizens1; DEI is an attempt to address the long history of structural racism and inequality, not replace “white people”; the CDC is not trying to control us with chips, just possibly control bird flu; and I am not sure how to put this in DOGE speak but the amount the US government spends on foreign aid, scientific research, and arts and humanities is dwarfed by what it spends on the military to maintain the US empire.2 That they are untrue should not eclipse two equally important characteristics of these myths. First, these myths have an entire media universe propagating them, and have for decades now. All of these stories—criminal immigrants, reverse racism, government overspending on foreigners and perverts—could constitute a night of Fox News or its modern spinoffs online. Second, these myths work because they fit together as a coherent master myth. They have at their core the ur-myth of modern society, that of the individual, responsible and isolated, trying to make their way in a world of hostile forces.3 They paint a coherent and simple picture of what is happening and what is wrong. This picture is reinforced by daily experience. To paraphrase Spinoza, people are born conscious of their status of individuals and unaware of what government is for. Of course the simplicity of this myth is an effect, not a given. Even the putative natural givenness of race and gender, and their corresponding hierarchies, are an effect of a long history. 4 The immediacy of experience and the mediation of mass communication entwine and reinforce each other, especially as social media becomes the constant chorus accompanying daily life.

The right has always given lip service to these myths, but for the most part they have been aimed at popular consumption rather than shaping government policy. Actual governing has always had to deal with the distance between myth and reality. It was necessary to believe in the myth of “illegals” while still relying on undocumented workers to pick crops and clean hotel rooms. It was necessary to pay lip service to the idea that Medicaid and Social Security are drains on state finances, while recognizing that they are popular and necessary social programs. The last thirty or so years have been a perpetual conflict in the Republican Party between the “true believers” and the “realpolitiks.” This conflict stirs up again and again when it is time to raise the debt ceiling or bail out businesses. Trump is a true believer, and this time he has surrounded himself with true believers, with people whose expertise and understanding is entirely fit for the fictional universe of soundbites and tweets.

Which is as good a point as any to bring up Yves Citton’s book Mythocracy. Originally published in French in 2010, it is coming out in English from Verso this spring.5 In the book Citton writes the following:

The last decades have been characterized in effect by the incapacity of the political forces of the “left” to tell convincing stories. For reasons that we must comprehend, the “right” (security, neoliberal, xenophobic) has become a widespread, open, but relatively coherent story of images, various facts, information, statistics, slogans, fears, and reflexes and objects of debate that mutually reinforce the heart of one and the same “imaginary of the right.” The (soft) force of this imaginary has been its ability to rapidly colonize the discourse of a number of leaders of parties that are supposedly officially left. How has this “imaginary of the right” been able script large sections of our political life? On what bases is it possible to reinvigorate an imaginary of the left capable of taking charge of the powers of scripting?6

This brings up another important point about the myths described above. They do not have a real counter, no real opposition, at least in the dominant realm of party politics. For years the question for the Democratic Party has been how they are going to answer the questions the Republican Party poses to them. What are they going to do about the “crisis at the border”? How are they going to be tough on crime? How will they restrict spending? And so on. This passive position contrasts sharply with posing one’s own questions, or even defining one’s own crises, such as global warming, a crisis that not only explains in part the “crisis at the border” but dwarfs it. But that would be a fundamentally different Democratic Party. There are occasional ruptures in these myths. Covid brought about a government that did unprecedented things to address the needs of everyday working people, from relief checks to student loan forgiveness (everything we are told that government cannot do—but that was a moment of crisis). At every moment when it seems that the Democratic Party is going to construct its own myths, or at least call into question the prevailing ones, it veers back into line, claiming that it will be truly tough on the border, cut government spending, and respond to calls to abolish the police with even more police. There are multiple examples of this rightward turn, but I remember seeing the well-known clip of Kamala Harris and Oprah Winfrey online and thinking how much it showed that the Democratic Party was working from within the myths of the Republican Party. Kamala Harris did not just say she believed in the right to own guns, but situated that right within the myth of having to protect herself from an intruder.

For a long time the Democratic Party has been content to dwell within the myth of the other. To paraphrase Gilles Deleuze, that means they’re fucked.

There are many tasks in the difficult years ahead, and most of them involve actual organizing and working, the stuff that cannot be done on a screen. But I think that it is equally important to continue to not only undermine these myths, pointing out the flawed and incomplete vision of the world they come from, but to create our own myths of solidarity, generosity, and joy.

Originally published on Jason Read’s blog, Unemployed Negativity, January 26, 2025.