These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

After 9/11, when Fox News anchors and reporters began wearing flag pins, some journalists, including CBS’s Morley Safer, condemned the practice. Ailes brushed him off: “I’m a little bit squishy on killing babies, but when it comes to flag pins I’m pro-choice.”

Other administrations, of course, had lied, as the Pentagon Papers had abundantly demonstrated. 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.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Ashcroft said when he read a draft of the order. He’d expected the prosecution of people involved in planning the attacks on 9/11 to be handled criminally, by his department—as had been done successfully with earlier terrorism cases, with due process. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell only learned that Bush had signed the order when they saw it on television. In the final draft, the Department of Justice was left out of the prosecutions altogether: suspected terrorists were to be imprisoned without charge, denied knowledge of the evidence against them, and, if tried, sentenced by courts following no established rules. The order deemed “the principles of law and the rules of evidence generally recognized in the trial of criminal cases in the United States district courts” to be impractical. The means by which truth was to be established and justice secured, traditions established and refined over centuries, were deemed inconvenient. “Now, some people say, ‘Well, gee, that’s a dramatic departure from traditional jurisprudence in the United States,’” Vice President Cheney said, but “we think it guarantees that we’ll have the kind of treatment of these individuals that we believe they deserve.”

Rumsfeld was a veteran; he served as a navy pilot in the 1950s.)82 As hundreds of men were rounded up abroad, the Bush administration considered where to put them. Taking over the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, and reopening Alcatraz, closed since 1963, were both considered but rejected because, from Kansas or California, suspected terrorists would be able to appeal to American courts and under U.S. state and federal law. Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean, was rejected because it happened to be a British territory, and therefore subject to British law. In the end, the administration chose Guantánamo, a U.S. naval base on the southeastern end of Cuba. No part of either the United States or of Cuba, Guantánamo was one of the known world’s last no-man’s-lands. Bush administration lawyer John Yoo called it the “legal equivalent of outer space.”

And yet on college and university campuses, students continued to protest not for but against free speech. Every hate speech code that had been instituted since the 1990s that had been challenged in court had been found unconstitutional.115 Some had been lifted, others disavowed. In 2014, the University of Chicago issued a report on freedom of expression: “The University’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed.”116 Nevertheless, a generation of younger Americans who had been raised with hate speech codes rejected debate itself. They attempted to silence visiting speakers, including not only half-mad provocateurs but scholars and serious if controversial public figures, from Condoleezza Rice to longtime political columnist George Will to former FBI director James Comey.

Conservatives based their claim to power on liberalism’s failure, which began in the 1960s, when the idea of identity replaced the idea of equality. Liberals won gains in the courts while losing state houses, governors’ offices, and congressional seats. By the 1990s, conservative Robert Bork insisted, “Modern liberalism is fundamentally at odds with democratic government because it demands results that ordinary people would not freely choose. Liberals must govern, therefore, through institutions that are largely insulated from the popular will.”8 But the problem wasn’t that liberals did not succeed in winning popular support; the problem was that liberals did not try, spurning electoral politics in favor of judicial remedies, political theater, and purity crusades.