These Truths

These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wow! Talk about ambitious! The whole history of the United States. It does have focus though. Lepore shows how the Constitution has evolved and the shifting of powers between the three branches of government. Most importantly, Lepore points out the role of journalism in disseminating truths (or untruths) to the people who make up the US democracy. Though it might be a long-winded argument for the validity and relevance of responsible news, she shows that the media are ultimately the watchdogs (and their vigilance or lack thereof can impede or encourage actual rule by the people) and now that news is mostly consumed in unregulated streaming services, the future for democracy seems shaky.

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Columbus had this difference from Marco Polo and Mandeville, too: he made his voyages not long after Johannes Gutenberg, a German blacksmith, invented the printing press.

The European extraction of the wealth of the Americas made possible the rise of capitalism: new forms of trade, investment, and profit.

Magna Carta wasn’t nearly as important as Coke made it out to be, but by arguing for its importance, he made it important,

This turn marked the beginning of a new era in the history of knowledge: it required a new doctrine of evidence and new method of inquiry and eventually led to the idea that an observed or witnessed act or thing—the substance, the matter, of fact—is the basis of truth.

Whitefield emphasized the divinity of ordinary people, at the expense of the authority of their ministers.

There were not one but two American revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century: the struggle for independence from Britain, and the struggle to end slavery. Only one was won.

Part Two: The People (1800–1865)

Opposition to free speech had long been the position of slave owners, a position taken at the constitutional convention and extended through the gag rule, antiliteracy laws, bans on the mails, and the suppression of speakers. An aversion to political debate also structured the Confederacy, which had both a distinctive character and a lasting influence on Americans’ ideas about federal authority as against popular sovereignty. Secessionists were attempting to build a modern, proslavery, antidemocratic state. In order to wage a war, the leaders of this fundamentally antidemocratic state needed popular support. Such support was difficult to gain and impossible to maintain. The Confederacy therefore suppressed dissent.

the Confederacy comprised fifteen states stretching over 900,000 square miles and containing 12 million people, including 4 million slaves, and 4 million white women who were disenfranchised. It rested on the foundational belief that a minority governs a majority.

Part Three: The State (1866–1945)

Mass democracy can’t work, Lippmann argued, because the new tools of mass persuasion—especially mass advertising—meant that a tiny minority could very easily persuade the majority to believe whatever it wished them to believe.

The best hope for mass democracy might have seemed to be the scrupulously and unfailingly honest reporting of news, but this, Lippmann thought, was doomed to fall short, because of the gap between facts and truth.

in the 1920s, Lee argued that facts don’t exist or, at least, they can’t be reported: “The effort to state an absolute fact is simply an attempt to achieve what is humanly impossible; all I can do is to give you my interpretation of the facts.”

For Lippmann, the battle between Bryan and Darrow wasn’t about evolution, it was about how people decide what’s true—does truth derive from faith or from reason?—and, more deeply, what happens in a democracy when people can’t agree about how they decide what’s true. Does the majority rule?

Part Four: The Machine (1946–2016)

computers, the product of long and deep study and experiment, would both explode and unsettle the very nature of knowledge.

During his administration, Congress mandated the inclusion of “In God We Trust” on all money and added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. 113

In some corners of the left, the idea that everything was a lie became a fashionable truth.

If everything is politics, and politics is a series of lies, then there is no truth.

“There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering his university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.”

“The squandering of energy on identity politics, the hardening of boundaries between groups, the insistence that individuals are no more than their labels, is an American tragedy,” Todd Gitlin wrote in 1995.

Entrenched partisanship in cable news eroded the institutions of democratic deliberation. The rise of cable news accelerated the polarization first of Congress and then of the electorate.

New sources of news tended to be unedited, their facts unverified, their politics unhinged.

nearly all political thinking became conspiratorial.

In a time of accelerating change, both the Far Left and the Far Right came to understand history itself as a plot, an understanding advanced by the very formlessness of the Internet, anonymous and impatient.

But in pursuing regime change in the Middle East, the Bush administration dismissed the advice of experts and took the radically postmodern view that all knowledge is relative, a matter of dueling political claims rather than of objective truth.

The means by which truth was to be established and justice secured, traditions established and refined over centuries, were deemed inconvenient.

The White House answered terrorism, an abandonment of the law of war, with torture, an abandonment of the rule of law.

public shaming as a mode of political discourse was every bit as much a part of the online Far Left as it was of the online Far Right, if not more.

Epilogue: The Question Addressed

The American experiment had not ended. A nation born in revolution will forever struggle against chaos. A nation founded on universal rights will wrestle against the forces of particularism. A nation that toppled a hierarchy of birth only to erect a hierarchy of wealth will never know tranquility. A nation of immigrants cannot close its borders. And a nation born in contradiction, liberty in a land of slavery, sovereignty in a land of conquest, will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history.

Barack Obama had urged Americans “to choose our better history,” a longer, more demanding, messier, and, finally, more uplifting story. But a nation cannot choose its past; it can only choose its future.