Can we *PLEASE* stop calling Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories about the election the creation of a new Lost Cause myth?

It’s not a Lost Cause myth. It’s a stab-in-the-back myth.

The Lost Cause generally refers to the views that the South fought nobly and valiantly against insurmountable odds in the Civil War; that states’ rights, not slavery was the cause of the war; and that Reconstruction was a crime against nature because of Black self-government.

The point is, the Lost Cause was not a conspiracy theory to explain away the Confederacy’s military defeat.

It was, rather, a conscious attempt to rehabilitate the Confederacy’s political agenda *after* that military defeat. And incredibly successfully, too.

Stab-in-the-back myths—there’s the Dolchstoßlegende in Germany after World War I, most infamously, but there are plenty of other examples—are also about rehabilitating the defeated, but not by emphasizing the vanquished’s military prowess or honorability.

Rather, stab-in-the-back legends are about how a particular power COULD have won, if it hadn’t been for internal betrayal.

So, the Jews and Communists in Weimar Germany, the hippies and radicals in post-Vietnam America, etc.

The Trump election conspiracy theories aren’t Lost Cause myths.

If anything, the Lost Cause is popping up among moderates who are insisting on not tarring Trump administration officials with scarlet letters.

“There were honorable people in the administration!”

The election conspiracy theories are rather a stab-in-the-back myth.

“If only the Democrats hadn’t committed massive voter fraud... and if only the Republicans weren’t cowards who had the guts to stand up and do what’s necessary.”

This may seem like nitpicking, but it’s actually pretty important to make these distinctions, if only because we’re seeing BOTH a kind of Lost Causeism among moderate apologists AND a stab-in-the-back legend among the more radical factions of the GOP.