The Books of My Life: These Truths

 

These Truths: A History of the United States (New York: Norton, 2018) by prolific Harvard historian Jill Lepore takes readers on a journey through the tortured and not so exceptional landscape of United States history from its imperial settlement to the early twenty-first century. Focusing on the not so peculiar mix of universalism and parochialism that has undergirded American history, Lepore explores the contradictions that have been at the heart of American history and American culture since even before there was a United States of America. 

There are, Lepore claims, several contradictions at the heart of America. There is, she claims, the contradiction between the "these truths" rhetoric of liberty and freedom and the reality of slavery and slavery by another name in the United States, Jim Crow, a slavery that really did not end until the 1970s. There is the contradiction between the "these truths" rhetoric of the equality of all Americans, well at least White American males for much if not all of American history, and the reality of inequalities of income, inequaliities of wealth, inequalities of power (to wit the recent US Supreme Court decision to grant immunity to Donald Trump and current and former presidents for “official” but not “unofficial" acts—a latter day version of the King’s two bodies ideology—turning them into monarchs who are now “officially" above the law), inequalities of gender, and inequalities of authority in America. There is the contradiction between the "these truths" rhetoric of an America originating out of a revolt against imperial tyranny and the reality that the US was born out of imperial conquest. a conquest, a manifest destiny, in fact, which has continued ever since. There is the contradiction between the "these truths" rhetoric of an America devoted to freedom of speech and the reality that the US has limited free speech and imprisoned those who engaged in it almost any time there was a war and beyond as recent successful attempts to limit freedom of speech by the populist right in Dixie, in the American Midwest, and in the American Intermountain West show. Finally, there is the contradiction between the "these truths" rhetoric that Enlightenment reason should and would guide the politics of the United States and the reality that the US has largely been ruled by demagogues, political, economic, and culture, who are adept at manipulating emotions, irrationalities, and unreasons.

Wonderfully written, Lepore's necessarily focused and selective book goes where other more bland and fragmented books generally fear to tread. Lepore's book, of course, hits most of the "high" points of American political, economic, and demographic including immigration history. Where Lepore excels, however,  is in her discussions of the rise of political consulting or professional demagogues with their essential public opinion polls and their impact on American political culture, in her exploration of the rise of hippie libertarian digitatopianism and its idiocies and dangers, and in her exploration of the rise and impact on the new digital and their impact on America and Americans. Lepore argues, rightly for the most part, in my opinion, that political consulting, opinion polls, and the new digital media have increasingly polarised the United States turning it into the dysfunctional nation-state that it is today. How long this rather tenuously bound together nation-state can survive is a question Lepore essentially and rightfully leaves unanswered even if one leaves the book with a heavy sense of foreboding given the recent history of the United States which Lepore details. Lepore nicely explores the rise of selective speech codes on college campuses—something foregrounded by the recent fascist like behaviour of university boards and their administrators toward pro-Palestinian protestors at places like Columbia University and NYU—speech codes demanded by those who apparently have chronic traumatisation disorder and who appear to have a limited grasp of satire, parody, universities as, at least in theory, bastions of free speech and freedom of inquiry, and the fact that all humans, given the realities of growing up, have been traumatised at some point in their lives but still manage somehow to get on with them and who often, despite this, are able to maintain a sense of humour and a sense of the absurd about it all. Needless to say the speech codes lionised by the post baby boom crowd are a world away, as Lepore notes, from the movement on college campuses in the 1960s reacting against limitations on free speech on college campuses.

I am not as weary of going where Lepore decides not to go: thinking about the future of a divided and dysfunctional United States. For me the answer to the question of whether a polarised at least a two nation-state America can survive. I, like Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, doubt that it can. This issue, one that Lepore decided not to answer, leads me on to a few other issues I had with These Truths. While Lepore is certainly correct that the rise of the American propaganda apparatus—advertising, political consulting, duelling mythhistories—has broadened the partisan divide in post Depression, post New Deal, and post Great Society America, in the America, in other words, after that brief consensus period which, at least on the surface, lasted from the Depression to the Great Society, I don't think Lepore reminds us as strongly as she should and could that these cultural and ideological divisions have been around since the advent of the United States. The US, in fact, has really never has been a unified nation with a common set of cultural and ideological meanings, a fact that made the US not only divided and dysfunctional before the Civil War but, for the most part, after it as well. It is these pre-existing conditions or divisions in the US that have been manipulated by the demagogues and pied pipered of the brave new digital world. Additionally, I have a problem with Lepore's contention that the US was and is a kind of a democracy. The US was, as Lepore notes, an oligarchy at its birth and given the presence of economic and political bureaucracies in the US at least since the Gilded Age, it has been an oligarchy ever since for, as Max Weber and Robert Michels noted long ago, modern bureaucracies of all types institutionalise hierarchical inequalities of power and authority in their very form and structure. Apparently, many are unable to rid ourselves of the myth of American and Western "democracy" (not to mention imperialism) for, like other myths, it provides some with a sense of cultural and ideological comfort just as the notion that god takes young people unto him after death comforts many emotionally traumatised human beings.

Very very highly recommended for anyone interested in American History. These Truths is, in my opinion, a wonderful purgative for all those awful bland, narratively anemic, and fragmented textbooks on US history (and beyond) that sadly dominate a college textbook market that seems to be more about image than content these days.