These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

Political consulting’s origins in journalism lie with William Randolph Hearst. Whitaker, thirty-four, started out as a newspaperman, or, really, a newspaper boy; he was already working as a reporter at the age of thirteen. By nineteen, he was city editor for the Sacramento Union and, two years later, a political writer for the San Francisco Examiner, a Hearst paper. In the 1930s, one in four Americans got their news from Hearst, who owned twenty-eight newspapers in nineteen cities. Hearst’s papers were all alike: hot-blooded, with leggy headlines. Page one was supposed to make a reader blurt out, “Gee whiz!” Page two: “Holy Moses!” Page three: “God Almighty!” Hearst used his newspapers to advance his politics. In 1934, he ordered his editors to send reporters to college campuses, posing as students, to find out which members of the faculty were Reds. People Hearst thought were communists not infrequently thought Hearst was a fascist; he’d professed his admiration for Hitler and Mussolini. Hearst didn’t mind; he silenced his critics by attacking them in his papers relentlessly and ferociously. Some fought back. “Only cowards are intimidated by Hearst,” Charles Beard said. In February 1935, Beard addressed an audience of a thousand schoolteachers in Atlantic City and said, of Hearst, “No person with intellectual honesty or moral integrity will touch him with a ten-foot pole.” The crowd gave Beard a standing ovation.71

Gallup’s method was to survey public opinion by asking questions of a sample of the population carefully chosen to represent the whole of it. He said he was taking the “pulse of democracy.” (Wrote a skeptical E. B. White: “Although you can take a nation’s pulse, you can’t be sure that the nation hasn’t just run up a flight of stairs.”)

Joseph Goebbels, who had completed his PhD in 1921, had been greatly influenced by Edward Bernays, and used the methods of American public relations in broadcasting messages by print, radio, film, and parades. Goebbels had a device installed in his office that allowed him to preempt national programming, and he deployed “radio wardens” to make sure Germans were listening to official broadcasts. The purpose of fascist propaganda is to control the opinions of the masses and deploy them in service of the power of the state. Germans had attempted to employ Bernays himself; he refused, but other American public relations firms had accepted commissions to produce pro-Nazi propaganda in the United States. Goebbels hoped to sow division in the United States, partly through a shortwave radio system, the Weltrundfunksender, or World Broadcasting Station, the Propaganda Ministry’s “long-range propaganda artillery.” By 1934 it was broadcasting pro-Germany English-and foreign-language propaganda to Africa, Latin America, the Far East, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and Australia, though its broadcasts to North America far outstripped the scale of all of its other programs. To the United States, where it broadcast in “American English,” the Weltrundfunksender sent false “news,” chiefly having to do with claims about a “Communist Jewish conspiracy.”

Roosevelt’s electoral coalition drew African Americans from the Republican Party; he consulted an informal group of advisers who came to be called his “black cabinet”; and he appointed the first African American federal judge. But New Deal programs were generally segregated, and Roosevelt failed to act to oppose lynching. After twenty-three lynchings in 1933, anti-lynching legislation was introduced into Congress. The next year, a man named Claude Neal, accused of rape and murder, was taken from a jail in Alabama and brought to Florida, where he was tortured, mutilated, and executed before four thousand spectators. In the Senate, southern Democrats waged a filibuster against the anti-lynching bill.102 “If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing,” Roosevelt told the NAACP’s Walter White. “Southerners, by reason of the seniority rule in Congress, are chairmen or occupy strategic places on most of the Senate and House committees.” The anti-lynching bill died.103

Dorothy Thompson, who once described Mein Kampf as “eight hundred pages of Gothic script, pathetic gestures, inaccurate German, and unlimited self-satisfaction,” had long been making the same argument. “The thing which we are all up against is propaganda,” she said. “Sometimes I think that this age is going to be called the age of propaganda, an unprecedented rise of propaganda, propaganda as a weapon, propaganda as a technique, propaganda as a fine art, and propaganda as a form of government.” The challenge to Western journalists, she said, was “to represent a theory of journalism, a theory of what journalism stands for, a thesis of journalism, a philosophy of journalism, in countries where this philosophy is fundamentally repudiated.”

Another fissure divided prewar from postwar liberals. Instead of arguing for and running public arts programs, public schools, public libraries, and public-minded radio and television programs, liberal intellectuals grew suspicious of mass culture, and, after the war, openly contemptuous of it. In the 1930s, it had been conservative intellectuals who were revolted by the masses; in the 1950s, it would be liberals—a trend that would only escalate over the following decades, and reach a crisis by the end of the century.

“Seldom if ever has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear,” CBS’s Edward R. Murrow said. “We know what the bombs did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” wrote the editors of Fortune. “But what did they do to the U.S. mind?”3

Against this campaign stood advocates for federal government funding of the new field of computer science, who launched their own publicity campaign, beginning with the well-staged unveiling of ENIAC. It had been difficult to stir up interest. No demonstration of a general-purpose computer could have the drama of an atomic explosion, or even of the 1939 World’s Fair chain-smoking Elektro the Moto-Man. ENIAC was inert. Its vacuum tubes, lit by dim neon bulbs, were barely visible. When the machine was working, there was no real way to see much of anything happening. Mauchly and Eckert prepared press releases and, in advance of a scheduled press conference, tricked up the machine for dramatic effect. Eckert cut Ping-Pong balls in half, wrote numbers on them, and placed them over the tips of the bulbs, so that when the machine was working, the room flashed as the lights flickered and blinked. It blinked fast. The Times gushed, “The ‘Eniac,’ as the new electronic speed marvel is known, virtually eliminates time.”

That growth was achieved, in part, by consumer spending, as factories outfitted for wartime production were converted to manufacture consumer goods, from roller skates to color televisions. The idea of the citizen as a consumer, and of spending as an act of citizenship, dates to the 1920s. But in the 1950s, mass consumption became a matter of civic obligation. By buying “the dozens of things you never bought or even thought of before,” Brides magazine told its readers, “you are helping to build greater security for the industries of this country.”

The G.I. Bill, for all that it did to build a new middle class, also reproduced and even exacerbated earlier forms of social and economic inequality. Most women who had served in the war were not eligible for benefits; the women’s auxiliary divisions of the branches of the military had been deliberately decreed to be civilian units with an eye toward avoiding providing veterans’ benefits to women, on the assumption that they would be supported by men. After the war, when male veterans flocked to colleges and universities, many schools stopped admitting women, or reduced their number, in order to make more room for men. And, even among veterans, the bill’s benefits were applied unevenly. Some five thousand soldiers and four thousand sailors had been given a “blue discharge” during the war as suspected homosexuals; the VA’s interpretation of that discharge made them ineligible for any G.I. Bill benefits.

Even after the Supreme Court struck down restrictive housing covenants in 1948, the Federal Housing Administration followed a policy of segregation, routinely denying loans to both blacks and Jews. In cities like Chicago and St. Louis and Los Angeles and Detroit, racially restrictive covenants in housing created segregated ghettos where few had existed before the war. Whites got loans, had their housing offers accepted, and moved to the suburbs; blacks were crowded into bounded neighborhoods within the city. Thirteen million new homes were built in the United States during the 1950s; eleven million of them were built in the suburbs. Eighty-three percent of all population growth in the 1950s took place in the suburbs. For every two blacks who moved to the cities, three whites moved out. The postwar racial order created a segregated landscape: black cities, white suburbs.

The New Deal’s unfinished business—its inattention to racial discrimination and racial violence—became the business of the postwar civil rights movement, as new forms of discrimination and the persistence of Jim Crow laws and even of lynching—in 1946 and 1947, black veterans were lynched in Georgia and Louisiana—contributed to a new depth of discontent. As a black corporal from Alabama put it, “I spent four years in the Army to free a bunch of Dutchmen and Frenchmen, and I’m hanged if I’m going to let the Alabama version of the Germans kick me around when I get home.” Langston Hughes, who wrote a regular column for the Chicago Defender, urged black Americans to try to break Jim Crow laws at lunch counters. “Folks, when you go South by train, be sure to eat in the diner,” Hughes wrote. “Even if you are not hungry, eat anyhow—to help establish that right.

What really changed Earl Warren was Campaigns, Inc. Whitaker and Baxter took a piece of legislation that enjoyed wide popular support and torpedoed it. Fifty newspapers initially supported Warren’s plan; Whitaker and Baxter whittled that down to twenty. “You can’t beat something with nothing,” Whitaker liked to say, so they launched a drive for private health insurance. Their “Voluntary Health Insurance Week,” driven by 40,000 inches of advertising in more than four hundred newspapers, was observed in fifty-three of the state’s fifty-eight counties. Whitaker and Baxter sent more than nine thousand doctors out with prepared speeches. They coined a slogan: “Political medicine is bad medicine.”27 They printed postcards for voters to stick in the mail: Dear Senator: Please vote against all Compulsory Health Insurance Bills pending before the Legislature. We have enough regimentation in this country now. Certainly we don’t want to be forced to go to “A State doctor,” or to pay for such a doctor whether we use him or not. That system was born in Germany—and is part and parcel of what our boys are fighting overseas. Let’s not adopt it here.28 When Warren’s bill failed to pass by just one vote, he blamed Whitaker and Baxter. “They stormed the Legislature with their invective,” he complained, “and my bill was not even accorded a decent burial.”29 It was the greatest legislative victory at the hands of admen the country had ever seen. It would not be the last.

Instead of a welfare state, the United States built a national security state. A peace dividend expected after the Allied victory in 1945 never came; instead came the fight to contain communism, unprecedented military spending, and a new military bureaucracy. During Senate hearings on the future of the national defense, military contractors including Lockheed, which had been an object of congressional investigation in the merchants-of-death era of the 1930s and had built tens of thousands of aircraft during the Second World War, argued that the nation required “adequate, continuous, and permanent” funding for military production, pressing not only for military expansion but also for federal government subsidies.

The new spending restructured the American economy, nowhere more than in the South. By the middle of the 1950s, military spending made up close to three-quarters of the federal budget. A disproportionate amount of this spending went to southern states. The social welfare state hadn’t saved the South from its long economic decline, but the national security state did. Southern politicians courted federal government contracts for defense plants, research facilities, highways, and airports. The New South led the nation in aerospace and electronics. “Our economy is no longer agricultural,” the southern writer William Faulkner observed. “Our economy is the Federal Government.”

Hiss appeared before the committee on August 25 in a televised congressional hearing. He deftly denied the charges and seemed likely to be exonerated, especially after Chambers, who came across as unstable, vengeful, and possibly unhinged, admitted that he had been a Soviet spy (at that point, Time publisher Henry Luce accepted his resignation). Chambers having presented no evidence to support his charges against Hiss, the committee was inclined to let it pass—all but Nixon, who seemed to hold a particular animus for Hiss.41 Rumor had it that in a closed session, not seen on television, Nixon had asked Hiss to name his alma mater. “Johns Hopkins and Harvard,” Hiss answered, and then added dryly, “And I believe your college is Whittier?”42 Nixon, who never forgave an Ivy League snub, began an exhaustive investigation, determined to catch his prey, the Sherlock Holmes to Hiss’s Professor Moriarty. Meanwhile, the press and the public forgot about Hiss and turned to the upcoming election, however unexciting it appeared.

Liberal intellectuals, refusing to recognize the right wing’s grip on the American imagination, tended to dismiss McCarthyism as an aberration, a strange eddy in a sea of liberalism. The historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., writing in 1949, argued that liberals, having been chastened by their earlier delusions about socialism and even Sovietism and their romantic attachment to the ordinary and the everyday, had found their way again to “the vital center” of American politics. Conservatives might be cranks and demagogues, they might have power and even radio programs, but, in the world of ideas, liberal thinkers believed, liberalism had virtually no opposition. “In the United States at this time, liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition,” insisted literary critic Lionel Trilling. “For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”

Liberals were disgusted, partly because it was something of a sham, but mostly because it was maudlin. Eisenhower was, at the time, president of Columbia University; twenty-three full professors at Columbia, including Allan Nevins, Lionel Trilling, and Richard Hofstadter, issued a statement in which they denounced the Checkers speech, which Nevins described as “so essentially dishonest and emotional an appeal that he confused a great many people as to the issues involved.”98 Walter Lippmann said that watching it was “one of the most demeaning experiences my country has ever had to bear.” But the overwhelming majority of people who watched it loved it. Nixon spoke to their experiences and their quiet lives, and to their grievances, too. Plainly, Nixon had saved his career, and more. “In 30 minutes,” Time reported, “he had changed from a liability to his party to a shining asset.”

For more reasons, too, conservatives had high hopes for Eisenhower, whose 1952 campaign had included a promise to repeal New Deal taxes that, he said, were “approaching the point of confiscation.”114 Eisenhower’s cabinet included the former president of General Motors. (With Eisenhower’s pro-business administration, Adlai Stevenson said, New Dealers made way for car dealers.) Eisenhower was also opposed to national health care, as was his secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, a longtime conservative Texas Democrat named Oveta Culp Hobby, who’d recently switched parties. She liked to say she’d come to Washington to “bury” socialized medicine. Both Eisenhower and Hobby considered free polio vaccinations socialized medicine, and Hobby argued against the free distribution of the vaccine, a position that would have exposed millions of children to the disease. In the end, after a related scandal, Hobby was forced to resign.

One journalist called the 1950s “the age of the slob.” It was also the age of the snob. Dwight Macdonald memorably lamented the rise of packed, boxed, and price-tagged, middlebrow mass culture—“masscult,” he dubbed it, as if it were a soft drink—especially in the form of trashy paperback novels and ticky-tacky TV shows produced for the sprawling and suburban middle class by corporations, arbitrated not by taste but by sales and ratings. Art is the creation of individuals in communities, Macdonald argued; middlebrow culture is a product manufactured and packaged for the masses. “Masscult is bad in a new way,” Macdonald wrote. “It doesn’t even have the theoretical possibility of being good.”

Kennedy prevailed, in part, because he was the first packaged, market-tested president, liberalism for mass consumption. Weighing the possible party nominees and its platform, the Democratic National Committee, uncertain how to handle the question of civil rights, turned to a new field, called “data science,” a term coined in 1960, to predict the consequences of different approaches to the issue by undertaking the computational simulation of elections. To that end, the DNC in 1959 hired Simulmatics Corporation, a company founded by Ithiel de Sola Pool, a political scientist from MIT. Pool and his team collected old punch cards from the archives of George Gallup and pollster Elmo Roper, the raw data from more than sixty polls conducted during the campaigns of 1952, 1954, 1956, 1958, and 1960, and fed them into a UNIVAC. Using high-speed computation and “a simulation model developed out of historical data,” Pool aimed to both advance and accelerate the measurement of public opinion and the forecasting of elections. “This kind of research could not have been conducted ten years ago,” Pool and his colleagues reported.

On October 19, two days before the last of the candidates’ four scheduled debates, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Atlanta during a lunch counter sit-in. He’d waited a long time before joining the sit-ins. But now he was in, and he was sentenced to four months of hard labor. Kennedy called King’s wife, Coretta Scott King. His brother Robert intervened, and got King out of jail. Nixon, who had a much stronger record on civil rights than Kennedy, did nothing. He later came to believe that this lost him the election, one of the closest elections in American history, Kennedy winning by a hairsbreadth, 34,221,000 to 34,108, 000.

Where King and Kennedy had called for love, Nixon, like Carmichael, knew the power of hate. His young political strategist, a number cruncher named Kevin Phillips, explained that understanding politics was all about understanding who hates whom: “That is the secret.”

Nixon’s machinations with Congress weren’t all that much more cynical than those of some other American presidents. But his commitment to making sure the American people didn’t trust one another really 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

In a brief, curt speech, he touted his foreign policy achievements, which were many, and of deep and abiding significance. He’d opened diplomatic relations with China, after a quarter century. For all that he’d done to prolong it, he had in fact ended the war in Vietnam. He’d improved U.S. relations in the Middle East. He’d negotiated arms limitation agreements with the Soviet Union, building on relationships he’d established on his trip to Moscow in 1959. He said nearly nothing about conditions in the United States, except to allude to “the turbulent history of this era”—a turbulence he had done little to alleviate and much to aggravate.

The men who wrote and ratified the Constitution had left women, sex, marriage out of it. “Remember the ladies,” Abigail Adams had warned her husband in 1776, advice he had ignored. The consequences of writing women out of the republic’s founding documents were both lasting and devastating. That the framers of the Constitution had not resolved the question of slavery had led to a civil war. That they regarded women as unequal to men nearly did the same. Over the course of American history, women had often written themselves into the Constitution by way of analogy. Discrimination by sex was like discrimination by race, and language that barred one could be understood to bar another.

In 1969, Nixon had asked Congress to increase federal funding for family planning, and in the House, George H. W. Bush, a decorated navy pilot and young Republican congressman from Texas, pressed the case. “We need to make family planning a household word,” Bush said. (So known was Bush for his support for family planning that he got the nickname “Rubbers.”) In 1972, in Eisenstadt v. Baird, the court extended Griswold’s notion of privacy from married couples to individuals. “If the right of privacy means anything,” Justice Brennan wrote, “it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.”

Stokely Carmichael, asked about the position of women in the Black Power movement, answered, “The only position for women in the movement is prone.” Radical feminists fought for liberation from the bondage of womanhood, the shackles of femininity. Their arguments, at first Marxist and economic, turned swiftly to culture.

Carmichael notwithstanding, radical feminism had been deeply influenced by the Black Power movement, with its disdain for liberalism and its emphasis on separatism and pride, and had close ties, too, to the nascent gay rights movement, which had begun in the 1950s but grew in strength and intensity over the course of the next decade.

Ginsburg began arguing equal rights cases before the Supreme Court in 1971, relying on and citing Pauli Murray’s strategy for using the Fourteenth Amendment to defeat discrimination by sex. Weren’t women, after all, “persons”? The next year, Ginsburg launched the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project. “I ask no favor for my sex,” she told the nine male justices in 1973, quoting the eloquent abolitionist Sarah Grimké. “All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.”

As the court neared a ruling on Roe, Nixon’s advisers saw a political opportunity. In 1971, Nixon speechwriter Patrick Buchanan told the president that abortion was “a rising issue and a gut issue with Catholics,” and suggested that the president’s prospects for reelection would be improved “if the President should publicly take his stand against abortion, as offensive to his own moral principles.” A week later, Nixon, jettisoning his previous support of abortion, issued a statement in which he referred to his “personal belief in the sanctity of human life—including the life of the yet unborn.” Exploiting Catholics’ opposition to abortion was a deliberate attempt to inject doctrinal absolutism into party politics. Nixon supporters complained, and asked whether Nixon might perhaps return to his original position. Buchanan waved that objection aside: “He will cost himself Catholic support and gain what, Betty Friedan?”

The Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe v. Wade on January 22, 1973, the day LBJ died, finding that the “right of privacy . . . is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.”23 It would turn out to be a monumental decision, salvation to some, sin to others. In the White House, the casual viciousness of the president was caught on tape the next day, when Nixon shared his thoughts on the ruling with an aide. “There are times when abortions are necessary,” he said, casting aside, in private, his public invocation of the “sanctity of life.” Abortion was necessary in case of rape, for instance, he said, or, here offering his frank, private views on race, in case of a pregnancy resulting from sex between “a black and a white.”

Ford’s vocal support of the ERA was equally well known. She spent a great deal of her time making calls to states debating ratification; protesters outside the White House carried signs that read “BETTY FORD, GET OFF THE PHONE.” This caused some strain between the East and West Wings of the White House, but the president refused to submit to pressure to quiet his wife and instead joked, “I say one wrong thing about women’s rights and the next state dinner is at McDonald’s.”

Schlafly, blond and petite, wore flawlessly pressed pink skirt suits and pumps. She liked to talk about herself as a housewife and mother of six. But she was also ruthless, and she was learned, and people who underestimated her nearly always regretted it.

Friedan, in particular, had been deeply hostile to the homosexual rights movement—she thought it would doom the fight for equal rights—and had publicly regretted any perceived ties between feminism and lesbianism.

Bryant, a Southern Baptist living in Florida, objected to a proposed Miami ordinance barring sexual preference–based discrimination in employment, warning of Sodom and Gomorrah. Bryant’s campaign backfired. By the time the women’s convention opened in Houston, Bryant’s crusade against what she described as “a well-organized, highly financed, and politically militant group of homosexual activists” had convinced many liberal feminists, previously reluctant, to throw their support behind homosexual rights.45

“This is a sham,” declared a delegate from Illinois. “This conference is run by lesbians and militant feminists.” The all-conservative Mississippi delegation knelt in prayer, raising signs that read KEEP THEM IN THE CLOSET.

Falwell would later maintain that this political crusade had begun, for him, in 1973, the moment he read of the court’s decision in Roe. But that was far from the case. Southern Baptists had, in fact, earlier fought for the liberalization of abortion laws. In 1971, the church’s national convention, meeting in Missouri, passed this resolution: “We call upon Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”

then he bowed his head and prayed.58 Reagan’s genuine warmth suffused that final night of the convention but its days had featured fiery speeches of bitter denunciation and cold calculation. Republican moderate and longtime supporter of equal rights George Romney was reduced to calling supporters of the ERA “moral perverts.” The party’s platform committee called for a constitutional ban on abortion. Reagan’s running mate, George H. W. Bush, in a dramatic turnabout, had changed his position about both ERA and abortion. When asked about his reversals, he waved the question aside: “I’m not going to get nickel-and-dimed to death with detail.”

Until the late 1980s, Republicans were more pro-choice than Democrats.64 But before long, the parties were sorted ideologically, and, while conservatives thought of themselves as perfecting targeted political messaging through emerging technologies and liberals believed that they were advancing identity politics, together they amounted to the same thing: a more atomized and enraged electorate, conveniently reached through computer-generated mailing and telephone lists.

Only after Carter became executive vice president of the NRA did it come out in the press that he had been convicted of murder in Laredo, Texas, in 1931, when he was seventeen years old.

Both reproductive rights and gun rights arguments rest on weak constitutional foundations; their very shakiness is what makes them so useful for partisan purposes: gains seem always in danger of being lost. But their foundations are weak for different reasons. And the conservative position on guns rose to the status of party doctrine partly because of the role it played in a conservative strategy to take over the judiciary—and to institutionalize a new way of reading the Constitution.

Brennan called the idea that modern judges could discern the framers’ original intention “little more than arrogance cloaked as humility.” As to originalists’ particular readings, historians tended to find them absurd. In a searing critique of the new interpretation of the Second Amendment, the historian Garry Wills pointed out that the Second Amendment had everything to do with the common defense and nothing to do with hunting: “One does not bear arms against a rabbit.”

It became something of a national myth, later, to describe the American people, long divided, as newly united after 9/11. More accurate would be to say that, in those first days, politicians and writers who expressed views that strayed far from the mournful stoicism that characterized the response of both Bush, on an international stage, and Obama, in a neighborhood newspaper, were loudly denounced. These included Susan Sontag, who traced the origins of the attack to U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East—the propping up of tyrants, the CIA toppling of Middle Eastern leaders, and the ongoing bombing of Iraq. “Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?” Sontag asked in The New Yorker. “In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards.”

Alex Jones, cluster-bomb radio host, flew in under the radar of this opprobrium. On the afternoon of the attacks, he broadcast across the country, live from Austin, to nearly a hundred affiliated stations, for five hours. He began, not with sympathy, not with grief, not with horror, but with gleeful self-congratulation: “Well, I’ve been warning you about it for at least five years, all terrorism that we’ve looked at from the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City to Waco, has been government actions,” Jones crowed. “They need this as a pretext to bring you and your family martial law. They’re either using provocateur Arabs and allowing them to do it or this is full complicity with the federal government: the evidence is overwhelming.” (Earlier that summer, Jones had issued a warning. “Please!” he’d screamed. “Call Congress. Tell ’em we know the government is planning terrorism.”) On September 11, he reported the morning’s events as if reading from an incidents log, adding details of his own—“dead bodies up to six blocks away, arms, legs, you name it”—interrupting with updates, and cutting to eyewitnesses, in coverage that sounded straight out of Orson Welles’s The War of the Worlds.

Hillary Clinton, having lost the Democratic nomination to Obama in 2008, won it in 2016 and hoped to become the first female president. Her campaign misjudged Trump and not only failed to address the suffering of blue-collar voters but also insulted Trump’s supporters, dismissing half of them as a “basket of deplorables.” Mitt Romney had done much the same thing as the Republican nominee in 2012, when, with seething contempt, he dismissed the “47 percent” of the U.S. population—Obama’s supporters—as people “who believe they are victims.”31 Party politics had so far abandoned any sense of a national purpose that, within the space of four years, each of the party’s presidential nominees declared large portions of the population of the United States unworthy of their attention and beneath their contempt.

solution for the industrial age, and this was an age of knowledge.55 One of the first casualties of disruptive innovation, from the vantage of American democracy, was the paper newspaper, which had supplied the electorate with information about politics and the world and a sense of political community since before the American Revolution. “Printers are educated in the Belief, that when Men differ in Opinion,” Benjamin Franklin had once written, “both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.”56 There had been great newspapers and there had been lousy newspapers. But the Republic had never known a time without newspapers, and it was by no means clear that the Republic could survive without them, or at least without the freedom of the press on which they were established, the floor on which civil society stands.

“God help this country when someone sits in this chair who doesn’t know the military as well as I do,” Eisenhower once said. George H. W. Bush was the last president of the United States to have served in the U.S. military, to fear and loathe war because of knowing war.66

During the Vietnam War, George W. Bush had avoided combat by serving in the Texas Air National Guard. Bill Clinton and Donald Trump had dodged the draft. Obama came of age after that war was over. None of these men had sons or daughters who served in the military.67

The war on terror had its dissenters: among them were those who fought it. A 2011 Pew study reported that half of veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq thought the war in Afghanistan wasn’t worth fighting, nearly 60 percent thought the war in Iraq wasn’t worth it, and a third thought neither war was worth what it cost.