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Book report

I’ve mentioned in a couple of recent posts that I’ve been reading Jill Lepore’s These Truths, a history of the U.S. Given it’s subject, it’s a predictably long read, almost 800 pages not counting about 100 pages of footnotes. I’ve just finished it. I slowed down a bit toward the end, as, to be frank, it was a bit painful reading about times through which I’ve lived, knowing how they’ve turned out so far. There have been other times in our history when things have looked pretty bad, e.g.,1860, but not having been there, I can read about them with a bit more detachment.

My original statement that I highly recommend the book still stands, but I have to point out that the last chapters, documenting the years from Vietnam forwards, are a bit infested with an unwarranted and poorly documented both siderism, which sadly approaches the level of the “both sides are equally bad” meme spread by so many mainstream journalists.

Part of this meme arises from the idea that if there are two sides having trouble getting along and finding common ground, it must be the fault of both. This ignores the fact that if one side insists on a world view that dismisses real facts out of hand and insists on basing policy on “alternative facts”, e.g., denying global warming, denying the existence of racism, claiming tax cuts for the rich pay for themselves despite multiple such cuts that had no such effect, claiming that massive amounts of drugs are coming across the Southern border rather than ports of entry, etc., then it becomes impossible to find common ground, no matter how hard one tries. Obama spent about six years in a vain attempt to do just that, and look what it got him and us.

There is, in sum, such a thing as truth. If one side is insisting on adherence to truth, that is not the same as insisting on falsehood.

Additionally, just because one can identify some strain on the left that can be cast as a mirror image of something happening on the right, doesn’t mean they are actually equivalent. Being an academic, Lepore often “balances” descriptions of right wing extremism with some campus craziness like speech codes or claims of cultural appropriation. That claimed equivalence may make some people feel comfortable,but it ignores the fact that those campus movements have extremely little impact on society at large, while the right wing movements with which they are contrasted have a significant impact on public policy. The PC police don’t run the Democratic Party or have much influence in it; the latter day Nazis and racists most certainly have outsized influence in, and arguably control, the Republican Party.

In the world of the internet, for instance, it may be true that Tumblr is a left wing version of Reddit (I don’t read either), but there is no left wing equivalent to Infowars or the Drudge Report, nor do Democratic politicians take up any left wing fantasies equivalent to the right wing fantasies cooked up by the likes of Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh, nor do they, as Trump and other influential Republicans have done, give such fantasists credibility by genuflecting to them, as Republicans routinely do. No one, particularly no prominent Democrat, ever claimed, for instance, that Donald Trump is actually an android programmed to hand our foreign policy over to the Russians, though the evidence for that is stronger than the evidence that Obama was born anywhere but in Hawaii. Republican politicians either embraced that meme outright, or refused to dismiss it.

One paragraph particularly struck me. In one section of the book, Lepore discusses right wing internet fabrications at length, detailing them extensively. She concludes the section as follows:

Jaundiced journalists began to found online political fact-checking sites like PolitiFact, which rated the statements of politicians on a Truth-O-Meter. “I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books: they’re elitist,” the satirist Stephen Colbert said in 2005, when he coined “truthiness” while lampooning George W. Bush. “I don’t trust books. They’re all fact, no heart. And that’s exactly what’s pulling our country apart today.” But eventually liberals would respond to the conservative media by imitating them-two squirrels, chasing each other down a tree. (Emphasis added)

That’s the end of the discussion. After exhaustively documenting right wing media factual distortions and outright lies, she accuses liberals of doing the same thing, without specifying a single instance. None of the left wing squirrels are identified. I am sure if you dug deep enough you could find a left wing website that has spread lies, but I can’t think of one. Spreading the truth, larded with opinion, is not the same thing as spreading lies larded with opinion. If there is a left wing equivalent of InfoWars, I’m unaware of it, and I’m familiar with most of the left wing websites. You can probably find inaccuracies at both Daily Kosand Talking Points Memo, two of the most popular lefty on line sites, but you would be hard put to find anything that is simply made up, like Alex Jones allegation that Sandy Hook was a fake. Nor, again, will you find any Democratic politician lending credence to such a site or its creators. They’re too busy running away from their quite rational progressive base, so they don’t have the time to genuflect to extremists it would take them hours of research to find.

There’s no question in my mind, after reading her book, that Lepore would situate herself to the left of center if you asked her where she stood. It’s a shame she felt obliged to engage in an unwarranted both siderism.

Nonetheless, the book is worth reading. Like so many works of current history, it brings home the fact that at least in terms of historical writing, the North has finally won the civil war. When I learned American history in the ‘50s (I was a history fanatic early on) and ‘60s, it was a given that the “Radical” Republicans, who gave us the 13th through 15th Amendments (without which our democracy would have long since perished), were the bad guys, standing in the way of the reunification that the country so sorely needed. That meme, which sub silentiojustified the Klan, segregation, and the virtual re-enslavement of black Americans, has been overturned, and Lepore does a good job of dispensing with other myths that dominated the teaching of history in the past.

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