I recently finished Jill
Lepore's "These Truths", a history of the United States
told in 800 pages. I had known of the book for some time but resisted
reading it because I feared it would be dominated by outrage at the
racist and misogynist aspects of US history. In that I was pleasantly
surprised. It did devote considerable attention to those issues, more
than any history written 50 years ago would have, but the
consideration was even-handed. Like any good historian, she
recognized that past actions have to be judged by how things seemed
at the time, and how political realities -- what they could
realistically achieve -- constrained the actions of good-hearted
people.
The acceptance of slavery in the US
constitution is often referred to as our original sin and the source
of so much later strife, but I haven't seen anyone explore what would
have happened if the north had held firm and refused to enter a union
that included protection of slavery. My first guess is that the
equivalent of the 1861 Confederacy would have arisen much earlier in
a slave-holding South along with a free North United States, the two
engaged in accelerated conflict as they tried to expand west faster
than the other nation. The fact that the US as we know it would not
exist doesn't trouble me especially, I would just want to know
whether overall the two societies would have been more or less just.
My initial guess is that slavery would have persisted in the south
much longer than it in fact did. The compromise that created a very
imperfect union was resolved by a civil war starting in 1861. But
enough of my speculation and back to the book.
I have read a few dozen books of
history. This includes biographies of the more prominent US
Presidents. But I read about no one more recent than Nixon, and even
there I skipped the sections about the Vietnam war and Watergate.
Part of the reason was that since I lived through them as an adult (I
turned 14 in 1968) I already knew about them. Part of me knew this
was a flawed perspective, and that we can make sense out of events a
few decades after the fact that we could not simply by living through
them. Another reason I avoided recent history was that I found so
much of it depressing. Starting in 1976 I had dreams of radical
transformation which had moderated to liberal dreamd by 1985. But
even the liberal dreams have not been realized. As I read Lepore's
account of recent decades, I did find myself feeling despair, but I
made myself keep going to the end.
So what did I learn? There were tidbits
of interest in themselves. For instance, one significant impetus to
the Civil Rights movement at the level of the nation's elite was a
Cold War concern. It was difficult to portray America as a totally
wonderful model to Third World peoples when the South was segregated
by race -- a fact which figured in Soviet propaganda.
But to me the most interesting
assertion was how early people expressed concern about manipulation
in political discourse. The 19th century ideal was ordinary people
reading newspaper accounts of the issues of the day and discussing
them with each other. But even in the 1920s and 1930s there were
people whose job it was to find and disseminate short, emotional
messages that by no means contained the whole truth. There was
polling to determine which messages would help a candidate or hurt a
cause (one notable cause that got hurt, repeatedly, was national
health insurance). These methods worked, and proponents of a more
rational discourse were dismayed. Lepore traces how these trends have
gradually accelerated to the point where we now have Donald Trump.
She traces much of the polarization in
this country to deregulation of the airwaves. She asserts that the
period from 1950 to 1980 was the least polarized in US history, and
one reason was that there were only three TV stations, all giving
moderate or balanced views and constrained by the fairness doctrine,
which said that different sides of major issues had to be presented.
She also notes that since all the networks had the news on at 6:30,
those who were not so interested in politics would typically sit
through a half hour of news and be exposed to moderate views. Once
cable TV came in, those same people could just switch the channel.
For those who were interested in politics, once the fairness doctrine
was repealed, stations could and did emerge that catered to just one
political point of view. Fox News was a dramatic example. People
could watch networks which matched their political preferences, and
those networks would amplify and reinforce those preferences, leading
to polarization. The roots go back much further than the internet.
She offers literally no solutions to
this problem, turning in her last pages to nothing but metaphors and
a vague prescription of a need to rebuild anew.
While she has a liberal slant on
things, she has plenty of criticism in store for the left. I had
always thought that the Democratic loss of the white working class
was due to neglect on their part and manipulation by Republicans, but
she cites some examples of more active Democratic disavowal of their
importance, which I found disheartening. She is deeply critical of
the identity politics that comes from intersectional feminism, which
strives to discover which groups are more oppressed than others and
emphasizes differences rather than what we hold in common. A key root
of this problem was the belief of college students starting in the
1970s that there is no objective reality and nothing but power
relations. I had always thought only a misguided fringe of people
actually believed that, but Lepore makes me confront the fact that I
might have been very wrong about that.
My best solution to the gulf between
red and blue has been for people whose family connections include
those on both sides of the red/blue divide to sit down and seriously
debate the issues. But my own experience and those of others is that
this can be extremely difficult. Both sides have an explanation for
how their opponents came to their misguided views -- they listen to
fake news. And without a shared set of facts, it's hard to make
progress. (I feel confident that the red news is fake and blue news
is true -- what is considered newsworthy and its interpretation may
be biased, but the facts it is based on are the true ones.)
Lepore's book contains virtually
nothing about the danger of climate change. Perhaps this makes sense,
since it is in political terms a recent development, and the
consequences have yet to be felt. Yet the evidence is that the
consequences will be very severe indeed, and the only real debate is
just how severe.
