How Never Trump Became a Memory Project
From the eclipse of the Union cause to the amnesia of the American center.
The Eclipse of the Cause
A narrative war appears to be emerging among American political observers, one that both hinders the pro-democracy coalition and holds the key to its cohesion and triumph. The story of how we arrived at this moment is increasingly crucial to be understood and told clearly. Believing that today’s divides are just an aberration, like a random lightning strike of populist chaos, is not only unhelpful; it’s a form of historical denial.
Yet there’s an entire class dependent on that denial being the main narrative. The one that gets laundered and popularized in essays, podcasts, panels, and Substacks.
Historian Robert J. Cook, in his study Hollow Victory, reminds us that America has performed this act before. In the decades following the Civil War, the nation lost its moral clarity, which had once saved it. What began as a story of Union triumph and emancipation—a righteous cause framed as democracy’s victory over slavery and treason—slowly decayed into a sentimental myth of reconciliation. The complex, transformative truth was softened into a nostalgic sentiment. The victors surrendered the narrative. And with it, the moral spine of their triumph.
The New Exiles
Before we get there, though, I want to reflect on the present moment.
We’re watching a new group of narrators, they are political exiles from a party taken over by identitarian and populist forces, or loyalists of a status quo that led us here through its own blindness. Their commentary has the cadence of grief, the way someone talks about a home they can’t quite admit was built on faulty ground.
The result is a media landscape where the largest and most influential platforms are emotionally invested in not being clear-eyed about what has failed. They cling to a form of narrative therapy, explaining away collapse with “both sides” appeals or recycled strategies from the ’90s, as though triangulation might resurrect trust.
Their imagination, once their power, now serves as a defense mechanism.
You can hear it in the columns that scold Democrats for not meeting voters where they are, as though the same chorus didn’t spend decades nurturing the atmosphere that makes honest messaging nearly impossible. You can see it in the reflexive faith that a bipartisan consensus can be salvaged if we get the tone right. But beneath that hope is a quiet terror: that the center they once worshipped wasn’t a stable foundation at all, but really just a balance beam built over historical amnesia.
Cook’s Mirror
Cook’s narrative of memory gives us a mirror for this moment.
In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, Union veterans and historians served as guardians of memory, crafting a narrative that portrayed the Union in a noble light. One that stated the Union’s cause was sacred: a triumph of democracy, freedom, and moral purpose. The Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) kept that flame alive through parades, speeches, and the first Memorial Days. They told the nation: we fought tyranny and preserved the Republic.
However, as the years passed, the clarity of that story began to blur. Veterans aged. The public grew tired of war talk. The rise of industrial capitalism, urban modernity, and the pull of “national unity” all softened the edges. By the 1890s, as Cook writes, reconciliation replaced emancipation as the guiding myth.
The moral drama of freedom gave way to a sentimental theater of brotherhood. The Union soldier and Confederate veteran shook hands across battlefields — while African Americans, whose freedom had defined the war’s very purpose, were systematically erased from textbooks, ceremonies, and civic life.
The Spanish-American War sealed this revision. North and South are now united under a new banner, imperial ambition. White veterans who had once fought each other now fought together in Cuba and the Philippines, baptized in a nationalism that needed amnesia to thrive. Reconciliation became recruitment.
Memory became propaganda.
Cook calls it a hollow victory because the Union won the war but lost the meaning. Its story, once about liberation, was rewritten to make forgetting seem patriotic.
The Hollowing of a New Consensus
Fast-forward a century, and you can hear the same hollowing hum beneath our politics.
One institution, say, hypothetically, the Democratic Party, spent decades converting compromise into creed. Each deal, each deferral, each triangulation was justified as pragmatism, until pragmatism itself became paralysis. Another institution, such as the Republican Party, built its rebirth on resistance: resistance to equality, civil rights, and the moral demands of modernity. That energy metastasized into what we see now, not a betrayal of its roots, but their logical conclusion.
These truths are brutal to say out loud because they rupture the myths that sustain whole generations of narrators. For the center-right exiles, it means confronting the fact that the genteel restraint of their politics midwifed the very radicalism they now fear. For technocratic centrists, it means acknowledging that managerial liberalism, detached from moral urgency, was never sufficient to hold a democracy together.
And yet, I have sympathy. I’m 30. I know it’s easy to diagnose the era you didn’t build. But I also know how devastating it must be to realize that what you believed was a golden age was, in fact, just the glittering afterglow of decay. The trauma is real. Imagine finding out the culture that shaped you was a rerun, a bad TV show with excellent funding and terrible writing.
The Curse of Forgetting
Cook helps us see that forgetting isn’t a flaw in American history; it’s the engine that powers it.
After the Civil War, reconciliation required erasing the moral dimension of the conflict.
After the Cold War, globalization necessitated the erasure of the moral dimension of inequality.
Both eras produced comfort at the cost of clarity. Both produced elites who mistook unity for progress, consensus for virtue, and silence for healing.
In both cases, those left out, formerly enslaved Americans then, marginalized workers and voters now, paid the price of someone else’s narrative peace. The eclipse of the Union cause was, as Cook wrote, a triumph of nationalism over justice. The eclipse of the post-war consensus may well be the same.
Artifacts of a Receding Order
So when I listen to the commentariat, the bulwarks, the pod saves, the well-lit centrists, I no longer hear guides. I hear artifacts. I hear the same tone Cook found in the reconciliation parades: the insistence that if we stop fighting, the republic will be fine. But the republic isn’t fine. It’s asking us, again, to choose between a comforting myth and a hard truth. Between a hollow victory and a painful rebirth.
Our national story is not unique in its self-deception, but it is unique in its persistence, this belief that every wound can be healed by pretending it was never inflicted. We call that healing. But Cook reminds us: it’s how nations forget themselves into decay.
A Reckoning of Memory
We aren’t living through an aberration. We are living in the aftershock of every compromise America ever mistook for progress.
The ghosts of the GAR march beside the ghosts of the post-Cold War order, both humming the same tune — reconciliation without reckoning.
If this democracy is to endure, its narrators must stop laundering history for emotional comfort and start writing for posterity, including all the pain, all the humility, and all the honesty that requires.
We can still tell the story straight. But only if we’re willing to remember what it cost the last time we didn’t.
References
Cook, Robert J. “‘Hollow Victory’: Federal Veterans, Racial Justice and the Eclipse of the Union Cause in American Memory.” History and Memory 33, no. 1 (2021): 3–33. https://doi.org/10.2979/histmemo.33.1.02.
