These Truths

 Yes, I have finished Jill Lepore's These Truths: A History of the United States (Norton, 2018) and was impressed as much by her end as by her beginning. She reminds me of Richard Hofstadter with intellectual seriousness and solid prose style that does flinch at being popular rather than merely academic. Yes, and Barbara Tuchman too, in her making herself understood by us who are not trained historians.

Kurt Andersen does refer to Hofstadter's “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”  and Lepore drops Hofstadter's name on page 562. That is in the context of Richard M. Nixon's Checker's speech. However ,neither refers to his Anti-Intellectualism in America.

I have quite a few quotes even though Lepore does write longish paragraphs. This will be taking as long as my notes for Fantasyland.

Lepore criticizes political pollsters for their feeding our political divisions. And she indicts one particular politician for feeding those divisions.

Nixon's machinations with Congress weren't all that much more cynical than those of other American  presidents. But his commitment to making sure the American people didn't trust one another rally was something distinctive. he often charged Agnew with the nastier part of this work, especially when it came to attacking the press and liberal intellectuals. 'Dividing the American people has been my main contribution to the national political scene, Agnew later said. "I not only plead guilty to this charge, but I am somewhat flattered by it."

 Chapter Fourteen: Rights and Wrongs, p.639 (footnotes omitted.)

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The constitutional rights of women and of fetus are not mere details. Nor were the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion "wedge" issues. The conservative takeover of the Republican Party - and, later, of Congress, the courts, and the White House - resulted from the use made by political strategists of issues that had come to be understood by advocates on both sides as matters of fundamental rights. As would be the case with the right to bear arms as well, politicians and political strategists needed these issue to remain unresolved: describing rights as vulnerable is what got out the vote.

 Chapter Fifteen: Battle Lines, p. 666

What's the song that's got the refrain: "Got to keep them separated?" [Offspring's Come Out and Play.] We're dividing and conquering ourselves; the Russians are only going along for the ride.

The United States had endured eras of heightened partisanship before, in the 1790s,say, or the 1850s. But beginning in the 1990s, the nation started a long fall into an epistemological abyss. The conservative media establishment, founded on the idea that the existing media establishment was biased, had built into its foundation a rejection of the idea that truth could come from weighing different points of view, which after all, is the whole point of partisan disputation. Instead, the conservative media establishment engineered a fail-safe against dissent. As one historian explained, "When an outlet like the New York Times criticized a liberal policy, conservative media activists presented it not as the paper's evenhandedness but evidence of the policy's failure. Even the liberal New York Times had to admit... Thus evidence that seemed to undermine the charge of liberal bias could be reinterpreted to support it."

p. 711 

I think Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland favors the idea that Americans have always been a little crazy and Ms. Lepore leans towards more towards us as victims of manipulation. I say it's time we wake up to being played before it kills us all.

A break for my hand and for your eyes. WXPN plays Doctor John's song about revolution.

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3/18/2020