These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

For all his fierce rhetoric, Bush took great pains and care not to denounce Islam itself, steering clear of inciting still more hatred. “All Americans must recognize that the face of terror is not the true face of Islam,” he said later that year. “Islam is a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world. It’s a faith that has made brothers and sisters of every race. It’s a faith based upon love, not hate.”

By no means had the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq gone unquestioned, but one reason there had been relatively little debate had to do not only with a widening gap between the civilian and the military populations but also with the consequences of disruptive innovation. In many parts of the country, the daily paper, with its side-by-side op-ed essays, had vanished. Voters had been sorted into parties, the parties had been sorted, ideologically, and a new political establishment, the conservative media, having labeled and derided the “mainstream media” as biased, abdicated dispassionate debate.

WHAT DID HE know and when did he know it? had been the pressing question of the Watergate investigation. What does anyone know anymore, and what is knowledge, anyway? became the question of the Bush era.

The United States’ position as the leader of a liberal world order based on the rule of law entered a period of crisis when, pursuing its war on terror, the country defied its founding principles and flouted the Geneva Conventions, international law, and human rights through the torture of suspected terrorists and their imprisonment without trial.

In November 2001, Bush signed a military order concerning the “Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War Against Terrorism.” Suspected terrorists who were not citizens of the United States were to be “detained at an appropriate location designated by the Secretary of Defense.” If brought to trial, they were to be tried and sentenced by military commissions. The ordinary rules of military law would not apply. Nor would the laws of war, nor the laws of the United States.79 The conduct of war will always challenge a nation founded on a commitment to justice. It will call back the nation’s history, its earlier struggles, its triumphs and failures. There were shades, during the war on terror, of the Alien and Sedition Acts passed in 1798 during the Quasi-War with France, of the Espionage Act of the First World War, and of FDR’s Japanese internment order during the Second World War. But with Bush’s November 2001 military order, the war on terror became, itself, like another airplane, attacking the edifice of American law, down to its very footings, the ancient, medieval foundations of trial by jury and the battle for 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.

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.”83 On January 9, 2002, Yoo and a colleague submitted to the Department of Defense the first of what came to be called the torture memos, in which they concluded that international treaties, including the Geneva Conventions, “do not apply to the Taliban militia” because, although Afghanistan had been part of the Geneva Conventions since 1956, it was a “failed state.” International treaties, the memo maintained, “do not protect members of the al Qaeda organization, which as a non-State actor cannot be a party to the international agreements governing war.” Two days later, the first twenty prisoners, shackled, hooded, and blindfolded, arrived at Guantánamo. More camps were soon buil...

Torture wasn’t confined to Guantánamo. In Iraq, American forces inflicted torture at Abu Ghraib, and in Afghanistan, in a CIA prison in Kabul and at Bagram Air Base, where, in 2002, two men died while chained to the ceiling of their cells. Within the legal academy and among civil liberties organizations, opposition both to provisions of the Patriot Act and to the treatment of suspected terrorists had been ongoing. During Barack Obama’s 2003 Senate bid, he called the Patriot Act “a good example of fundamental principles being violated,” and objected to the lack of due process in the arrest and trials of suspected terrorists. Glimpses of what was happening only reached the American public in 2004, after The New Yorker and 60 Minutes reported on abuses at Abu Ghraib and the ACLU published the torture memos. In June 2006, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court ruled that, without congressional authorization, the president lacked the power to establish the military commissions. Six months later, Congress authorized the commissions, but in 2008, the court found this act unconstitutional as well.86 Still, something crucial about the fundamental institutions on which the nation had been founded had been very badly shaken.

insiders like DeLay had a financial stake in heightened partisanship: the more partisan the country, the more money they could raise for reelection, and the more money they could make after they left office. Before the 1990s, “change elections,” when a new party took over Congress or the White House or both, meant that politicians who were thrown out of office left town, along with their staff. That stopped happening. Instead, politicians stayed in Washington and became pundits, or political consultants, or management consultants, or, most likely, lobbyists, or—for those with the least scruples—all of the above. They made gargantuan sums of money, through speaking fees, or selling their memoirs, or hawking their connections, or appearing on television: the cable stations, compelled to fill twenty-four hours of airtime, needed talking heads at all hours of every day, the angrier and more adversarial the talk, the higher the ratings.

Wall Street totters from the top. Most of the suffering happens at the bottom.

Obama had promised hope and change. He seemed, at first, poised to deliver both. He swept into office with majorities in both the House and the Senate and the wind of history at his back. It proved a fickle wind. To address the global financial collapse that had torqued the markets during Bush’s last months in office, he asked Congress to approve a stimulus program of $800 billion that reporters dubbed the New New Deal. The Economist announced “Roosevelt-mania.” But Obama was no FDR. His administration did not prosecute the people whose wrongdoing had led to the financial disaster. His economic program rescued the banks, but it didn’t rescue people who’d lost their savings. During Obama’s first year in office, while ordinary Americans lost their jobs, their houses, and their retirement money, executives at Wall Street’s thirty-eight largest companies earned $140 billion and the nation’s top twenty-five hedge fund managers earned an average of $464 million.

Occupy, for all its rhetoric, was not a coming together of a representative array of working people. It was overwhelmingly and notably urban and white, and most protesters were students or people with jobs. It also had no real leadership, favoring a model of direct democracy, and lacked particular, achievable policy goals, preferring loftier objectives, like reinventing politics. Demand nothing. But it did propel Sanders to national prominence, and established the foundations for a movement that would lead him to one of the most remarkable progressive presidential campaigns since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.

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.

All that money bought nothing so much as yet more rage. Liberal columnist E. J. Dionne detected a pattern: candidates and parties made big promises, and when they gained power and failed to make good on those promises, they blamed some kind of conspiracy—any sort of conspiracy: a conspiracy of the press, a conspiracy of the rich, a conspiracy of the “deep state” (including, during Trump’s first term, a conspiracy of the FBI). Then they found media organizations willing to present readers with evidence of such a conspiracy, however concocted. Conservative commentator David Frum offered a not dissimilar diagnosis: “The media culture of the U.S. has been reshaped to become a bespoke purveyor of desired facts.”118 Under these circumstances, it was difficult for either party to hold a majority for long. Democrats lost the House in 2010, the Senate in 2014, and the White House in 2016.

“Election polling is in near crisis,” a past president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research had written just months before the 2016 election. When George Gallup founded the polling industry in the 1930s, the response rate—the number of people who answer a pollster as a percentage of those who are asked—was well above 90. By the 1980s, it had fallen to about 60 percent. By the election of 2016, the response rate had dwindled to the single digits. Time and again, predictions failed. In 2015, polls failed to predict Benjamin Netanyahu’s victory in Israel, the Labour Party’s loss in the United Kingdom, and a referendum in Greece. In 2016, polls failed to predict Brexit, the vote to withdraw Great Britain and Northern Ireland from the European Union.150 The more unreliable the polls became, the more the press and the parties relied on them, which only made them less reliable. In 2015, during the primary season, Fox News announced that, in order to participate in its first prime-time debate, Republican candidates had to “place in the top 10 of an average of the five most recent national polls,” and that where the candidates would be placed on the debate stage would be determined by their polling numbers. (Standing in the polls had earlier been used to exclude third-party candidates from debates—a practice that had led to a raft of complaints filed with the Federal Election Commission—but not major-party candidates.) The Republican National Committee didn’t obj...

Every major polling organization miscalled the 2016 election, predicting a win for Hillary Clinton. It had been a narrow contest. Clinton won the popular vote; Trump won in the Electoral College. The Kennedy School post-election debrief served as one of the earliest formal reckonings with what, exactly, had happened. After the Republican campaign managers finished taking stock, the Democrats spoke. “Hillary, a lot of people don’t recall, came to electoral politics late in her career,” her campaign manager, Robby Mook, said. “She got her start with the Children’s Defense Fund . . .” Clinton’s campaign had failed to say much of anything new about Hillary Clinton, a candidate Americans knew only too well. Mook apparently had little to add. Bernie Sanders’s manager looked wan. He shook his head. “We almost did it.”154 The more obvious explanations for Clinton’s loss went, on the whole, unstated. Obama had failed to raise up a new generation of political talent. The Democratic National Committee, believing Clinton’s nomination and even her victory to be inevitable, had suppressed competition. Clinton, dedicating her time to fund-raising with wealthy coastal liberals from Hollywood to the Hamptons, failed to campaign in swing states and hardly bothered to speak to blue-collar white voters. After Trump won the nomination, she failed to do much of anything except to call out his flaws of character, even though Trump’s most vocal supporters had pointed out, from the very beginning,...

Facebook had hardly any strategy at all, smart or otherwise, except to maximize its number of users and the time they spent on Facebook. “Where’s news judgment?” called out someone from the audience, directing the question at the entire panel. Zucker shrugged. “At the end of the day, it is up to the viewer.”177 He was answered by groans.

Carroll, a longtime eminence in the profession of journalism and a member of the Pulitzer board, summed up the discussion. “I know that there are some organizations or some journalists or some observers who feel like the media ought to put on a hair shirt,” she said. “I think that’s crap.”178 And the evening ended, with no one from any of the campaigns, or from cable news or social media or the wire services, having expressed even an ounce of regret, for anything. The election had nearly rent the nation in two. It had stoked fears, incited hatreds, and sown doubts about American leadership in the world, and about the future of democracy itself. But remorse would wait for another day. And so would a remedy.