The New Lost Cause
David A. Graham (The Atlantic, 18 October 2021). Genre: short essay / cultural diagnosis. Argues that nine months after January 6 2021, the Republican Party and the broader Trump movement are reconstituting the insurrection as a sacred moment of patriotic resistance — explicitly modeled on the late-19th-century Confederate “Lost Cause” mythmaking that recast a treasonous war for slavery as a story of valor, martyrdom, and constitutional fidelity.
The Argument
Graham’s evidence is concrete and contemporaneous:
- A Glenn Youngkin Virginia gubernatorial rally (October 2021), hosted by Steve Bannon with Trump phoning in: an emcee called an attendee on stage carrying “an American flag that was carried at the peaceful rally with Donald J. Trump on January 6”; the audience pledged allegiance to the relic flag. Youngkin (who was not present) “tepidly criticized the moment” but did not break with the rally apparatus.
- Ashli Babbitt as martyr. The Air Force veteran shot at the Speaker’s Lobby door on January 6, increasingly venerated by Trump and the movement. Trump produced a birthday video for her in 2021.
- The “political prisoners” framing for the J6 detainees.
- Trump’s earlier Confederate-Lost-Cause posture during his presidency: praising the Confederate battle flag, defending Robert E. Lee’s generalship, defending Confederate statues. Graham reads this as continuous with the New Lost Cause.
Graham’s structural argument: the original Lost Cause “recast the Confederacy’s humiliating defeat in a treasonous war for slavery as the embodiment of the Framers’ true vision for America” (citing Michael Paradis). The mythology emerged not immediately but late in the 19th century, especially during episodes of conflict over Black civil rights (statues, “shrines,” Pickett’s Charge mythologized as “the high water mark of the rebellion”). It then shaped twentieth-century racial violence and oppression.
By analogy, the New Lost Cause is being constructed in real time around January 6: martyr cult (Babbitt), claims of political persecution, veneration of artifacts (the J6 flag), inversion of the actors’ roles (the rioters as the true patriots). Graham’s warning: “lost causes have a pernicious tendency to be less lost than we might hope.”
Why It Matters Here
The wiki has hosted from the start a Counterrevolution thesis (Tait): the American Conservative Movement has long sailed under the conservative flag while functioning as a restorationist project. The Graham piece supplies the cultural mechanism by which one specific event of that project — January 6 — is being absorbed into the movement’s mythic infrastructure rather than expelled from it.
The piece also closes a loop the wiki had open: how does a coalition that produced January 6 retain political legitimacy in the years after? Answer: not by expelling the event but by canonizing it. This is the same pattern (manage the optics, never police the substance) the wiki has documented in the John Birch Society case study (Buckley’s “purge” was a cordon sanitaire around Welch personally; the politics stayed inside). The New Lost Cause is the same operation in mythopoeic mode: the 2020 Election denial and January 6 are absorbed as sacred history rather than disowned.
The “Confederate Lost Cause → New Lost Cause” mapping also gives the wiki a precise vocabulary for the M.E. Bradford / Lincoln-revisionist current that has long flowed through movement conservatism. Bradford’s neo-Confederate intellectual project to recast the Civil War as a tragic clash of “decent men” rather than a war over slavery is the literary precursor of the cultural operation Graham diagnoses around January 6.
What It Doesn’t Resolve
Graham writes in October 2021, before the J6 House Select Committee proceedings, before the United States v. Trump indictments, before the 2024 Trump victory. The piece’s analytical framework — that the New Lost Cause poses “a continuing peril” — has been substantially vindicated by subsequent events. The wiki’s open question, which Graham does not answer, is whether the New Lost Cause has institutional legs as durable as the Confederate Lost Cause’s: the original required Reconstruction’s collapse, four decades of veterans’ organizations, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The contemporary version’s institutional armature is rapidly accumulating (Heritage Foundation under Kevin Roberts, the J6 Choir on Trump’s 2024 campaign trail, the 2025 January 6 pardons) but is not yet historically tested.
Cross-References
- January 6 2021 — the event being mythologized
- 2020 Election — the “stolen election” claim that the New Lost Cause sanctifies
- Counterrevolution — the framework Graham’s piece operates inside
- M.E. Bradford — original Lost Cause’s intellectual heir
- Steve Bannon — host of the Youngkin rally where the J6 flag was venerated
- Pat Buchanan — earlier-generation rehearser of similar patriotic-restorationist mythopoeia
- Christian Nationalism — the religious dimension of contemporary martyrology
- Hard Right — where the most explicit Lost-Cause-style content circulates (IM-1776)