Review of Lepore's "These Truths"

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.