The American Redemption Narrative Is a Toxic Myth
Unhinged optimism isn’t healthy.
Is there anything more American than a redemption narrative — the idea that deep down, we know we’re right? That the right guy, the good guy, our guy, always wins in the end if you wait around or watch for long enough?
During election season, this belief becomes something like an addiction, with the New York Times needles and the Nates (Silver and Cohn, that is) serving as our dealers — offering up hope, horror, tweets, and forecasts long after our twitching eyeballs beg us to look away.
As things stand right now, with Joe Biden looking victorious, one iteration of the redemption narrative may well take hold: “Ah, yes, America is America. We knew she would pull through. Let’s get back to being American!”
After all, the nation itself was founded on this very premise, a kind of unhinged optimism that allows its core contradictions — that all men are created equal, except for, well, a huge swath of the populace — to exist alongside the unsubstantiated conviction that it is “the greatest country in the world.” We redeem America for its myriad injustices every time we perpetuate the myth of its greatness.
This makes its way into our personal psyches, too. We believe the person who works the hardest — to the detriment of all other areas of their life — will necessarily finish first. We think a sports team deserves to win merely because they didn’t last time. We frame self-improvement as the battle between indulgence and restriction, wherein we’re always waging a war against ourselves to prove we can be good. We often view life much like an election: as a zero-sum game.
We are so good at constructing these mythologies in our personal lives because they map onto a mindset that is so prominent in our culture. Even our maniacal focus on a Covid-19 vaccine over all other behavioral health interventions seems to display this. It has become gospel that after all this trauma, personal strife, and government incompetence, it will be innovation and pharmaceuticals that finally save us — even though history and experts suggest that a vaccine, even when we get it, may only be able to do so much.
Indeed, in real life, redemption often isn’t available, at least not in a tidy narrative we prefer. What’s more helpful to get through life as we currently know it is a kind of Stoic acceptance that we, and the country and world we live in, are broken. That even when we get a vaccine, life might never feel the same. That even if our candidate won, we still live in a country founded on the buying and selling of human beings. We are, for that reason, unredeemable.
It’s a deeply un-American thought. Almost akin to giving up. But maybe that’s precisely what we need to do. Our obsession with the redemption narrative isn’t serving us. No matter what happens this time, America can’t be redeemed. That seems like a good place to start over.
