The Mythic Life of Culture Wars: Editorial

Abstract

This essay frames the special issue on The Mythic Life of Culture Wars, which examines how myth operates as a dynamic technology of mediation within contemporary culture wars. We argue that today’s culture wars run on myth as narrative form, media infrastructure, and political technology. From Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence’s American Monomyth to Jeffrey C. Alexander’s theory of symbolic performance, US public life repeatedly casts conflict in dramaturgical terms, invoking heroes and villains, symbols rendered powerful via cumulative charge, values made sacred via collective historical investment, crisis and redemption. In digital environments tuned to emotion and repetition, such mythopoietic templates migrate across platforms, naturalizing ideology and converting attention into legitimacy. Drawing on scholars of myth such as Roland Barthes and Chiara Bottici, we frame myth as ongoing work on narrative patterns that organize belief and belonging. Reception studies further ground our claim that myth’s “afterlives” are interventions that can entrench power or contest it. In tracing what the issue’s contributions reveal about these processes, we map how myth adapts to changing aesthetic and technological forms, and how it mediates between crisis and community. We also show how the essays extend existing debates while opening new pathways through which myth can be studied. The essay concludes by proposing critical myth-work as both interpretive and political practice; a means of decoding how myths render conflict intelligible, legitimate, and, at times, reparable, while also enabling us to imagine futures that might yet be otherwise.