These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

Even that most precious possession of Western Man, freedom of thought and expression, is threatened by the spread of creeds which, claiming the privilege of tolerance when in the position of a minority, seek only to establish a position of power in which they can suppress and obliterate all views but their own.”

Only about a fifth of the prisoners at Buchenwald, Ohrdruf, and Dachau were, in fact, Jews; the rest were political prisoners and prisoners of war. The death camps, like Auschwitz, where nearly all the prisoners were Jews, had been closed before the Allies arrived, or else liberated by the Soviets. American reporters did not generally see them.112 The extent of the genocide—the murder of six million Jews—would not reach the American public for years to come.

human beings had learned how to destroy the entire planet but had not learned how to live together in peace.

the great acceleration—the speeding up of every exchange—had begun. And so had the great atomization—the turning of citizens into pieces of data, fed into machines, tabulated, processed, and targeted, as the nation-state began to yield to the data-state.

By 1948, the cost of the G.I. Bill constituted 15 percent of the federal budget. But, with rising tax revenues, the G.I. Bill paid for itself almost ten times over.

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.18 African American veterans were excluded from veterans’ organizations; they faced hostility and violence; and, most significantly, they were barred from taking advantage of the G.I. Bill’s signal benefits, its education and housing provisions. In some states, the American Legion, the most powerful veterans’ association, refused to admit African Americans, and proved unwilling to recognize desegregated associations. Money to go to college was hard to use when most colleges and universities refused to admit African Americans and historically black colleges and universities ha...

the American Political Science Association’s Committee on Political Parties issued a report called “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System.” The problem with American democracy, the committee argued, is that the parties are too alike, and too weak. The report recommended strengthening every element of the party system, from national leadership committees to congressional caucuses, as well as establishing a starker difference between party platforms. “If the two parties do not develop alternative programs that can be executed,” the committee warned, “the voter’s frustration and the mounting ambiguities of national policy might set in motion more extreme tendencies to the political left and the political right.”55

“Yesterday the people surprised the pollsters, the prophets, and many politicians,” Murrow said. “They demonstrated, as they did in 1948, that they are mysterious and their motives are not to be measured by mechanical means.” The election, he thought, had returned to the American voter his sovereignty, stolen by “those who believe that we are predictable.” Murrow said, “we are in a measure released from the petty tyranny of those who assert that they can tell us what we think, what we believe, what we will do, what we hope and what we fear, without consulting us—all of us.”

The way to tell the difference between a mass society and a community of publics is the technology of communication: a community of publics is a population of people who talk to one another; a mass society receives information from the mass media. In a mass society, elites, not the people, make most decisions, long before the people even know there is a decision to be made.

“Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply religious faith, and I don’t care what it is,” Eisenhower said. During his administration, Congress mandated the inclusion of “In God We Trust” on all money and added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance.

“If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love,” King promised his followers, “when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, ‘There lived a great people—a black people—who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.’” The historians have obliged: under King’s leadership, and by the courage of those who followed him, and those who’d paved the way for him, a commitment to civil rights became not only postwar liberalism’s core commitment but the nation’s creed.

the more a voter knows about politics, the more likely he is to vote in an ideologically consistent way, not just following a party but following a set of constraints dictated by a political ideology.

When Indochina began attempting to overthrow French colonial rule, the United States supported France. The United States had been much admired after the war because of FDR’s staunch opposition to colonialism; its aid to France led to growing anti-Americanism. France lost the war in 1954. A treaty divided independent Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel; Ho Chi Minh and the Communist Party came to power in the North and U.S.-backed Catholic nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem in the South. Beginning in 1955, South Vietnam became the site of the largest state-building experiment in the world, training a police force and civil servants, building bridges, roads, and hospitals, under the advice of the Michigan State University Vietnam Advisory Group.30 In 1958, Kennedy was among a group of senators who handed out to every colleague a copy of Burdick and Lederer’s The Ugly American, which told the story of American diplomats and military men stationed in the fictional Asian country of Sarkhan, lost in a mire of misunderstanding and failure. In a factual epilogue, Lederer and Burdick reported “a rising tide of anti-Americanism” around the world arguing that the United States could hardly hope to wield political influence when, for one thing, American ambassadors to Asia did not speak the language. “In the whole of the Arabic world—nine nations—only two ambassadors have language qualifications. In Japan, Korea, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and elsewhere, our ambassadors must speak an...

Johnson, leveraging the nation’s sympathy for the martyred president, pressed Congress for legislation. The next year, he signed the Economic Opportunity Act and the Food Stamp Act. He believed poverty would be eradicated within a decade. He had more ambitions, too. Wrangling congressmen like cattle, as ever, he secured passage of the Civil Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; gave the attorney general power to enforce desegregation; allowed for civil rights cases to move from state to federal courts; and expanded the Civil Rights Commission. “No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long,” Johnson said, in a canny piece of political rhetoric.51 Both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X went to Washington to watch the congressional debates over the civil rights bill, a rare bringing together of the two men. Malcolm X had fallen out with the leadership of the Nation of Islam. He’d mocked the August 1963 March on Washington but, disobeying the explicit orders of Elijah Muhammad, had attended anyway. In December, he’d answered reporters who asked him to comment on Kennedy’s assassination—despite specific instructions from Muhammad not to speak on the subject. He said Kennedy’s assassination sounded to him like “chickens coming home to roost.” In the ensuing controversy, Muhammad had ordered Mal...

More Americans would be sent to prison in the twenty years after LBJ launched his war on crime than went to prison in the entire century before. Blacks and Latinos, 25 percent of the U.S. population, would make up 59 percent of the prison population, in a nation whose incarceration rate would rise to five times that of any other industrial nation.

Only in 1980 did the leadership of the two parties place legalized abortion on their platforms, Republicans against and Democrats in favor (in their 1976 platforms, both parties equivocated on the issue).6 But by the 1990s, abortion had become an overwhelmingly partisan issue—a defining issue of a widening divide.

MAKING SOCIAL ISSUES into partisan issues took a great deal of work, much of it done by political strategists and well-paid political consultants and made easier by mainframe and desktop computers. By the 1970s, the Lie Factory that had begun manufacturing public opinion in the 1930s when Campaigns, Inc., opened its doors and George Gallup started conducting polls had grown into a billion-dollar industry that divided the electorate by inciting outrage, having demonstrated that, the more emotional the issue, the likelier voters were to turn up at the polls. And the most emotional issues—those most likely to get out the vote—turned out to be abortion and guns.

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, the Internet would come to function as a polarization machine, fast, efficient, and cheap, and all but automated.

Before the 1980s, neither the ERA nor women’s health were partisan issues, except insofar as Republicans had historically offered more support to equal rights and family planning than had Democrats. Planned Parenthood, the birth control organization founded by Margaret Sanger in 1916, had forced her out decades before her death in 1966, objecting to her feminism. Beginning in the 1920s, its leaders had been more Republican than Democrat. By the 1950s, many were conservatives—Barry Goldwater and his wife served on the board of Planned Parenthood of Phoenix—family planning having become, politically speaking, a family value. In campaigning for the legalization of contraception, Planned Parenthood also enjoyed the broad support of both doctors and clergymen. In 1958, Alan F. Guttmacher, chief of obstetrics at Mount Sinai Hospital, clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia, and a member of Planned Parenthood’s medical advisory board, challenged New York City municipal hospitals to reverse an institutional policy that forbade doctors from giving out contraceptives or contraceptive information. Hospital chaplains lined up behind him. In 1960, Planned Parenthood’s Clergymen’s National Advisory Council issued a statement, “The Ethics of Family Planning,” describing family planning as fulfilling “the will of God” by allowing married couples to enjoy intercourse for the sake of love.10 Efforts to legalize abortion were begun in the 1960s, not by women’s rights acti...

Beginning in 1973, and well into the 1990s, real earnings for all but the very wealthiest Americans remained flat, or declined. The real wages of the average male worker dropped by 10 percent. To make up for shrinking family income, more married women began working outside of the home. They began arguing for government-supported child care. Soon, three out of four women between twenty-five and fifty-four were working for pay.33 More women worked, but, for most Americans, family incomes did not rise as a result. Liberals blamed conservatives, conservatives blamed liberals, and Schlafly convinced a lot of people to blame feminists. “Women’s lib is a total assault on the role of the American woman as wife and mother, and on the family as the basic unit of society,” she wrote in 1972.

Unable to defeat mandatory desegregation, whites in many cities either sent their children to private schools or left for the suburbs; between 1974 and 1987, the number of white students in Boston’s public schools dropped from 45,000 to 16,000.

Broader concerns about polling that had been raised in the 1930s reemerged in the 1970s. In 1972, political scientist Leo Bogart demonstrated that most of what polls do is manufacture opinion, given that a sizable portion of Americans know nothing or nearly nothing or else hold no opinion about the subjects and issues raised.

A subsequent congressional investigation into the industry raised, once again, a series of troubling questions about the accuracy of polls, and about their place in a democracy, but a proposed Truth-in-Polling Act failed. Instead, polling grew and spread, as media corporations, equipped with computers, began conducting their own polls. In Precision Journalism: A Reporter’s Introduction to Social Science Methods, published in 1973, Philip Meyer, Washington correspondent for an Akron, Ohio, newspaper, urged reporters to conduct their own polls: “If your newspaper has a data-processing department, then it has key-punch machines and people to operate them.” Two years later, the New York Times and CBS released a joint poll—the first media-made poll. Critics pointed out that, ethically, the press, which is supposed to report news, can’t also produce it, but media-run polls exploded all the same.62

“One set of hatreds gives way to the next,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote, wearily. By no means were all Americans animated by ideology; in fact, not very many were. But those who thought ideologically exerted disproportionate influence over American political culture. In their terms, political opponents were no longer mere partisans, equally loyal to the United States; they were enemies of the state.

Liberals engaged in a politics of grievance and contempt: anyone who disagreed with them was racist, sexist, classist, or homophobic—and stupid. On college campuses, they passed “hate speech” codes, banning speech that they deemed offensive. They would brook no dissent.

By the 1990s, wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneurs would lead a Democratic Party that had restructured itself around their priorities. Beginning in 1972, the DNC instituted quotas for its delegations, requiring numbers of women, minorities, and youth but establishing no quotas for union members or the working class. The new rules made it possible for affluent professionals to take over the party, a change of course much influenced by longtime Democratic strategist Frederick Dutton’s Changing Sources of Power (1971). Dutton argued that the future of the party was young professionals, not old union members.130 Colorado senator Gary Hart, in 1974, took to mocking “Eleanor Roosevelt Democrats” as fusty and old-fashioned, not hip to the young computer people. The press called Hart’s constituency “Atari Democrats.”131 Personal computing enthusiasts liked to invoke “the power of the people,” but they meant the power of the individual person, fortified with a machine. Republicans, the party of big business, remained closely associated with IBM; Democrats, the party of the people, attached themselves to Apple, and jettisoned people without the means or interest in owning their own computer.

BILL CLINTON, FORTY-SIX when he entered the White House and gone already gray, stood six foot two. He had a grin like a 1930s comic-strip scamp, the cadence of a southern Baptist preacher, and the husky voice of a blues singer. He’d grown up poor in Hope, Arkansas—the boy from Hope—and he climbed his way to the White House by dint of charm and hard work and good luck. During the Vietnam War, he’d dodged the draft. After a Rhodes Scholarship and an education at Yale Law School, he’d begun a career in politics, with his young wife at his side. Like many a president before and since, he liked to be liked and he yearned to be admired, although, unlike most presidents, Clinton wore his neediness on his face; he had, all his life, the face of a boy. He was only thirty-two in 1978 when he was elected governor of Arkansas. He appeared to serve as a bridge between the Old Democrats and the New Democrats. A white southerner from a humble background, he appealed to the party’s old base. An Ivy League–educated progressive with a strong record on civil rights, he appealed to the party’s new base. And yet he was, all along, a rascal. In 1992, Clinton’s campaign for the Democratic nomination had nearly been felled by his reputation as a philanderer. After allegations of one extramarital affair hit the tabloids, he and his wife appeared on 60 Minutes, sitting together stiffly, and he admitted to “causing pain in my marriage.” Citing his right to privacy, he refused to directly answer any ...

Clinton attempted to deflect inquiries about his alleged years-long affair with a woman named Gennifer Flowers by piously suggesting that public discourse had been demeaned by televised hearings, proposing to elevate it by refusing to provide details. “This will test the character of the press,” Clinton said on 60 Minutes. “It’s not only my character that has been tested.” The claim lacked the merest plausibility, not least because on other occasions Clinton had been perfectly willing to discuss matters that other presidential candidates and officeholders would have scorned as demeaning to the dignity of the office. Asked by a high school student at an MTV-sponsored event in 1994 whether he wore boxers or briefs, for instance, he’d not hesitated to supply an answer: “Usually briefs.”136 Clinton’s two terms in office frustrated the Left, enraged the Right, and ended in scandal. He won the 1992 election with the lowest popular vote—43 percent—since Woodrow Wilson. He set as his first task health care reform, which had been on the progressive docket for nearly a century. “If I don’t get health care done, I’ll wish I didn’t run for President,” he said. He handed this initiative over to his wife, assigning her to head the Task Force on National Health Care Reform, and calling her his Bobby Kennedy.137 Before her husband took office, Hillary Rodham Clinton, a chronic overpreparer, read forty-three biographies of presidential wives to equip herself for her role. After the adminis...

The First Lady, still a neophyte in the capital, urged her husband to make no compromises; in his 1994 State of the Union address, he promised to veto any bill that did not provide for universal coverage. By the midterm elections, when Republicans took over Congress, winning majorities in both houses for the first time in decades, the proposal, much derided for its intricacies and hobbled by conservatives’ distaste for the president’s wife, had failed. Felled by the unyielding partisanship of a new political culture, it never even reached a vote.139 The failure of Clinton’s health care proposal crippled his presidency. His lasting legacy, as a liberal, came in 1993, when he appointed Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court. But Clinton, who had more millionaires in his cabinet even than Bush had, moved to the right—even before the midterms—and much of his agenda amounted to a continuation of work begun by Reagan and Bush.140 He secured the ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), against the opposition of labor unions. He took up the War on Drugs waged by Nixon in 1971 and continued by Reagan with the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act. In 1994, the year Newt Gingrich issued a conservative “Contract with America,” Clinton signed a new crime bill that lengthened mandatory sentencing and instituted a 100:1 ratio between sentences for possession of crack and of cocaine. (The bill also included an assault weapons ban, set to expire after ten years.) Some members...

“the Left, which once stood for universal values, seems to speak today for select identities, while the Right, long associated with privileged interests, claims to defend the common good.”150

In 1987, the Reagan administration finally succeeded in its long-sought repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, after the president vetoed a congressional effort to block the repeal. The repeal meant that broadcasters, operating with federal licenses, had no obligation either to dedicate programming to the public interest or to represent opposing points of view.

In 1980, when John Anderson ran as an Independent against Carter and Reagan, the League of Women Voters, which sponsored the debates, ruled that to participate in a general election debate, a candidate had to have earned at least 15 percent in a national poll. As even pollsters admitted, this was indefensible, since polls are simply not reliable enough to support that decision.

“The debates are part of the unconscionable fraud that our political campaigns have become,” Cronkite said in 1990. “Here is a means to present to the American people a rational exposition of the major issues that face the nation, and the alternate approaches to their solution. Yet the candidates participate only with the guarantee of a format that defies meaningful discourse. They should be charged with sabotaging the electoral process.”

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. During the reign of broadcast television, between 1950 and 1980, when there were only three major networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, polarization was the lowest it had ever been, both before and since. Cable news made voters more partisan, by reinforcing their views and limiting their exposure to other views, but cable television had another effect, too: when the only channels on television were ABC, CBS, and NBC, and each network broadcast the news at 6:30 p.m., people who weren’t particularly interested in politics, who tended to be moderates, had usually watched, and, as a result, they’d tended to vote.

When cable stations offered choices aside from the news, people who weren’t interested in the news watched something else, and tended not to vote. The people least interested in politics, and least partisan, dropped out of the electorate.164

the rise of round-the-clock cable news produced a veritable army of political commentators and pundits, and gave officeholders and office seekers nearly endless airtime, creating a political class of television celebrities. “It created a high-profile blur of People on TV whose brands overtook their professional identities,” wrote the New York Times’s Mark Leibovich. “They were not journalists or strategists or pols per se, but citizens of the green room.” They were pretty and handsome and they looked alike, and they sounded alike, too. They never said, “I don’t know,” or “Let me think about that.” They scowled and flared their nostrils and attacked one another, cocks in a cockfight. The White House became a cockfight pit, too. In 1995, Michael McCurry, Clinton’s press secretary, began opening daily press briefings to televised coverage. The Clinton campaign was chronicled in The War Room and his White House, in a way, on West Wing. When people from Clinton’s campaign and from his administration left politics, they made piles of money, hawking their access to policymakers. In the two and a half years between when senior adviser Rahm Emanuel left the Clinton White House and when he ran for Congress, he pocketed more than $18 million, chiefly working for an investment banking firm. The opportunities for corruption and ethics violations were endless. The opportunities for ratings, driven by scandal, were limitless. In 1996, CNN had 60 million subscribers; MSNBC, 25 million; an...

Watergate had inaugurated an era of politics by other means, where political opponents attempted, instead of defeating one another’s arguments, or winning elections, to oust each other from office by way of ethics investigations. Between 1970 and 1994, the number of federal indictments of public officials rose from virtually zero to more than thirteen hundred. These often meaningless battles, waged in televised hearings, on television talk shows, and in the courts, brought down a great many politicians. They also eroded the public’s faith in the institutions to which those politicians belonged, mainly Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court.

The Lewinsky scandal indelibly left something else in its aftermath. It diminished liberalism. Liberals defended Clinton almost at all cost, depicting him as a victim. Steinem and other prominent feminists who had crusaded against Clarence Thomas as a perpetrator of sexual harassment waved aside Clinton’s dalliances, often with young women, including women in his employ, at some sizable cost to the cause of feminism. Thomas had at one point suggested he was being subjected to “a high-tech lynching.” Writing about the Lewinsky investigation in The New Yorker, Toni Morrison said that, “white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President”—he was so cool, so hip, so long-suffering—and compared the investigation to a lynching. “Serious as adultery is, it is not a national catastrophe,” Morrison said.175 Adultery is not a national catastrophe, but Bill Clinton was no more subjected to a lynching than was Clarence Thomas.

The most that many Americans began to expect Congress to accomplish in any given session was, possibly, to avoid a shutdown and, at best, to agree on a budget. The government had been reduced to a shambles. Attempting to stage a coup d’état became an ordinary part of every American presidency. Opponents of each of the next three presidents, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald J. Trump, would call them “unconstitutional.” Members of the House of Representatives would call for impeachment proceedings. Collectors of political paraphernalia interested in documenting this turn could have compiled, by attending political rallies during any year after 1994, calls for an end to each American presidential administration. IMPEACH CLINTON! The signs came in every color. IMPEACH BUSH! They came in block letters and cursive. IMPEACH OBAMA! They were staked in front yards. IMPEACH TRUMP! They were duct-taped to mailboxes. In the summer of 1999, in a nation consumed by the politics of scandal, celebrity, pettiness, and vengeance, rumors began to spread that Donald Trump, fifty-three, intended to run for president. Born in 1946, Trump was the son of a real-estate man from Queens. In 1964, he graduated from military school, where he’d been known as a “ladies’ man.” He considered going to the University of Southern California, to study film, but ended up studying first at Fordham University, then business at Wharton, graduating in 1968.178 He spent most of his time reading the listings...

But Trump knew that Americans were disillusioned. “I am considering a run only because I am convinced that the major parties have lost their way,” he explained. “The Republicans, especially those in Congress, are captives of their right wing. The Democrats are captive of their left wing. I don’t hear anyone speaking for the working men and women in the center. There is very little contact between the concerns and interests of ordinary people and the agendas of politicians.”

On the final day of his presidency, Clinton made one last deal in which, in exchange for immunity from prosecution, he admitted to having lied under oath. He and his wife left the White House with more than $190,000 in gifts. An editorial in the Washington Post urged George W. and Laura Bush to count the White House spoons and described the Clintons as having “no capacity for embarrassment.” Hillary got an $8 million book deal; she and Bill bought two multimillion-dollar homes.

New sources of news tended to be unedited, their facts unverified, their politics unhinged. “Alternative” political communities took the 1990s culture wars online; Tumblr on the left and 4chan on the right, trafficking in hysteria and irony, hatred and contempt, Tumblr performing the denunciation of white privilege with pious call-outs and demanding trigger warnings and safe spaces, 4chan pronouncing white supremacy and antifeminism by way of ironic memes and murderous trolls.17 In a throwback to the political intrigues of the Cold War, Russia-sponsored hackers and trolls, posing as Americans, created fake Twitter and Facebook accounts whose purpose was to undermine the authority of the mainstream news, widen the American partisan divide, stoke racial and religious animosity, and incite civil strife. Under these circumstances, the fevered rants of deranged conspiracy theorists reached a new and newly receptive audience but, in a much broader and deeper sense, in an age of ceaseless online spectacle and massive corporate and government surveillance, nearly all political thinking became conspiratorial.

Obama’s American family was every color, and part of a very big world. “I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”

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.”

Over the course of the twentieth century, the United States had assumed an unrivaled position in the world as the defender of liberal states, democratic values, and the rule of law. From NATO to NAFTA, relations between states had been regulated by pacts, free trade agreements, and restraint. But, beginning in 2001, with the war on terror, the United States undermined and even abdicated the very rules it had helped to establish, including prohibitions on torture and wars of aggression.

On February 8, 1996, in an event broadcast live and over the Internet, Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act in the reading room of the Library of Congress; he signed on paper and he also signed online, at a computer terminal.47 If little noticed at the time, Clinton’s approval of this startling piece of legislation would prove a lasting and terrible legacy of his presidency: it deregulated the communications industry, lifting virtually all of its New Deal antimonopoly provisions, allowing for the subsequent consolidation of media companies and prohibiting regulation of the Internet with catastrophic consequences.

The Internet, a bottomless sea of information and ideas, had profound effects on the diffusion of knowledge, and especially on its speed and reach, both of which were accelerated by smartphones. If not so significant to human history as the taming of fire, it was at least as significant as the invention of the printing press. It accelerated scholarship, science, medicine, and education; it aided commerce and business. But in its first two decades, its unintended economic and political consequences were often dire. Stability, in American politics, had depended not on the wealth of the few but on the comfort of the many, not on affluence but on security, and a commitment to the notion of a commonwealth. The Internet did not destroy the American middle class, but it did play a role in its decline. It fueled economic growth and generated vast fortunes for a tiny clutch of people at a time when the poor were becoming poorer and the middle class disappearing. It turned out that the antimonopoly regulations of the industrial era, far from being obsolete, were sorely needed in the information age. And the vaunted promise of Internet connection, the gauzy fantasy of libertarians and anarchists who imagined a world without government, produced nothing so much as a world disconnected and distraught.

Innovation might make the world a better place, or it might not; the point was, innovation was not concerned with goodness; it was concerned with novelty, speed, and profit.

With the Internet, that model yielded to a model of citizenship driven by the hyperindividualism of blogging, posting, and tweeting, artifacts of a new culture of narcissism, and by the hyperaggregation of the analysis of data, tools of a new authoritarianism. Data collected online allowed websites and search engines and eventually social media companies to profile “users” and—acting as companies selling products rather than as news organizations concerned with the public interest—to feed them only the news and views with which they agreed, and then to radicalize them. Public opinion polling by telephone was replaced by the collection and analysis of data. Social media, beginning with Facebook, moving fast and breaking things, exacerbated the political isolation of ordinary Americans while strengthening polarization on both the left and the right, automating identity politics, and contributing, at the same time, to a distant, vague, and impotent model of political engagement.60 In a wireless world, the mystic chords of memory, the ties to timeless truths that held the nation together, faded to ethereal invisibility.

In 1998, bin Laden called for a fatwa against all Americans, describing the murder of Americans as the “individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country,” in the name of a “World Islamic Front.”62 After 9/11, the Bush administration demanded that the Taliban hand over bin Laden. The Taliban refused. On October 7, 2001, the United States began a war in Afghanistan. The immediate end of the war, aided by coalition partners, was to defeat al Qaeda; its more distant aim was to replace the Taliban with a democratically elected, pro-Western government.63 It became the longest war in American history.