On January 6, 2021, former President Trump, the loser of the 2020 election, addressed a gathering of supporters who later joined the mob that attacked the US Capitol. Although rambling and incoherent, Trump's speech made some things clear: leftists had conspired to steal the election through fraud, and the mobs summoned to Washington in his name would have to “stand their ground.” The implication was that violence might be necessary, because “we will never take back our country with weakness.”
Trump then made former Vice President Mike Pence a target of collective scorn for refusing to send the electoral college process back to the states. If “weak Republicans” don't step forward and participate in overturning the results, Trump promised, “we will never, ever forget.” For the next four or five hours, in the most recorded event in American history, the world watched as a new “lost cause” was born amid violence and spectacular lies.
There have been numerous lost causes in modern history, usually after defeats in war, where the vanquished glorify their loss as a source of pride and shared animosity toward the victors. Three great lost causes have plagued world and American history. Following their bloody defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, the French exhibited an intergenerational cultural need to avenge the loss. Then, after Germany's defeat in World War I, the Nazis gained ground by blaming Jews and leftists, whom they described as “poisons” in the blood of the body politic. And then, of course, there was the American South after the Civil War, when the Confederate “lost cause” narrative produced a potent mix of twisted history and white supremacist ideology.
Lost cause narratives have sometimes been powerful enough to build or destroy political regimes, shape national and ethnic identities, and fill landscapes with monuments. They function primarily as powerful new founding myths, always promoting a politics of grievance that turns into retribution and sometimes victory. Immediately after the military surrender in 1865, forms of the Confederate “lost cause” took root in a Southern society marked by physical destruction, the psychological trauma of defeat, resistance to the victors' reconstruction policy, violence racial and, over time, carefully constructed sentimentality.
Specifically, the Confederate “lost cause” claimed that Southern soldiers had demonstrated unwavering courage and that the South had not actually lost, but simply succumbed to superior numbers and resources. Southern white women supposedly supported the cause to the bitter end and helped preserve “true” memory; the enslaved black population of the Confederacy supposedly remained loyal to their owners; and, finally, the Confederates had never really fought for slavery but rather for “home,” national sovereignty, and states' rights.
To sustain themselves as public propaganda, lost causes need a pure narrative with clearly identified villains and heroes. Sometimes they are a refuge for sick souls; other times, they are the means to power for a disciplined political movement. Trump's “lost cause,” now virulent as he campaigns for a second term despite multiple accusations, draws on a menu of grievances among the disaffected, energizing those who believe a multicultural America obsessed with “diversity” has gotten out of control, especially in relation to immigration at the border with Mexico.
Some also strongly believe in conspiracy theories about “fraud” allegedly committed in the 2020 election, as well as other dark notions of leftist machinations on American universities, on school boards, and in the Democratic Party. Unlike the Confederate Lost Cause, the Trump version is a kind of gangster cult, full of rituals of loyalty to one man and his plans to create an authoritarian American government that will use executive power to achieve the preferences of its followers.
Trump’s “lost cause” also has its martyrs, including the hundreds of convicted insurrectionists – known in the movement and by Republican politicians like Elise Stefanik (R.N.Y.), as “hostages” – who are now in prison. Above all, it promotes a model of politics and society according to which facts and evidence are irrelevant. At Trump rallies, constitutionalism is for losers, history is little more than a useful weapon, and American civility is used as entertainment to satisfy hatred of liberalism, representative democracy, and, in many cases, the United States. not white. Trump's “lost cause” is therefore a platform that the Republican Party has adopted to turn these stories and lies into votes. Whether he wins or loses, he will not die.
In the Confederate “Lost Cause,” white Southerners truly had to endure colossal mourning: nearly 300,000 people lay in graves across their landscape, and much of their society lay in ruins. Trumpian mourning seems rooted in social media-driven nostalgia for an ideal past that almost no one experienced. Supporters of the movement long for a vanished racial order, a world of secure social identities preserved from unknown but hated elites, and communities that have not lost their cohesion to the internet, the pandemic, and economic displacement. They need to make their story great again.
Lost causes can turn lies into common currency and forge deep and lasting myths. We are a long way from knowing how much staying power Trump's “lost cause” will have, regardless of whether he survives his criminal charges and the election campaign. What we do know is that we have already witnessed their formative years.
David W. Blight is Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book. “Frederick Douglass: prophet of freedom.“
