by Jill Lepore
Long before the Atari Democrats’ financial system failed, and notwithstanding Bill Clinton’s forced-grin centrism, the center would not hold. The heated rhetoric of the gun rights and anti-abortion movements fanned rage among extremists. And a new kind of politics came to characterize those on both the Left and the Right.
Identity politics, by other names, goes all the way back to the founding of the Republic. The Constitution, which, for purposes of representation, counted some Americans as worth three-fifths of other Americans, rested on a politics of identity: white supremacy. “This Government was made by our fathers on the white basis,” Stephen Douglas had said, debating Abraham Lincoln. “It was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever.” Lincoln, of course, had disagreed. “There is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” he’d answered. “I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man.” Overthrowing Stephen Douglas’s brand of identity politics—the identity politics of slaveholders and, later, of the Klan, and of immigration restrictionists, had been the work of more than a century of struggle—for abolition, emancipation, suffrage, and civil rights.
Another self-described identity politics emerged in the middle of the twentieth century, out of the Black Power movement and the gay pride movement, and especially out of feminism. The term was coined in 1977, in a manifesto written by a collective of black lesbian feminists in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression,” they wrote.145 Earlier in the twentieth century, political change from the left had come from coalitions of farmers and laborers. In the 1970s, as animus toward immigrants rose, ethnic groups that had been subjected to longstanding discrimination, including Chicanos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans, found political solidarity, both within and across groups, by emphasizing their difference, not, as with the older identity politics, as racially superior, but as particularly and distinctively oppressed.
By the 1980s, influenced by the psychology and popular culture of trauma, the Left had abandoned solidarity across difference in favor of the meditation on and expression of suffering, a politics of feeling and resentment, of self and sensitivity. The Right, if it didn’t describe itself as engaging in identity politics, adopted the same model: the NRA, notably, cultivated the resentments and grievances of white men, feeding, in particular, both longstanding resentment of African Americans and newly repurposed resentment of immigrants. Together, both Left and Right adopted both a politics and a cultural style animated by indictment and indignation.146
A nation divided over guns and abortion bred a new generation of domestic terrorists. Between 1977 and 2001, anti-abortion activists, some affiliated with an organization called Operation Rescue, invaded 372 medical clinics that provided abortions, bombed 41 clinics, set 166 clinics on fire, and murdered 7 clinic staff, guards, and volunteers.147 Groups of white men purporting to defend the right to bear arms formed private militias. In Waco, Texas, in 1993, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms laid siege to a religious compound to seize illegal weapons, leading to the brutal deaths of 76 members of a sect headed by a man named David Koresh, including 25 children. Two years later, Timothy McVeigh, who’d fought in the U.S. Army as an infantryman in Kuwait, blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 15 babies and small children in a day care center. McVeigh said he’d bombed the building in retaliation for the federal government’s actions at Waco. Three years before the bombing, he’d written a letter to the editor of a small New York newspaper: “The American Dream of the middle class has all but disappeared, substituted with people struggling just to buy next week’s groceries,” he wrote. “What is it going to take to open up the eyes of our elected officials? AMERICA IS IN SERIOUS DECLINE.”148
Meanwhile, the go-go nineties were boom times for dot-commers and hedge fund managers, for Hollywood moguls and global traders. Under Clinton, incomes rose across the board. But the middle class, especially the rural white middle class, really was in decline. What were the causes of that decline? Conservatives blamed liberals, liberals blamed conservatives. Conspiracy theorists blamed a nefarious government of elites. Oklahoma City and Waco launched conservative talk radio host Alex Jones, who started a program called The Final Edition in 1996, on which he alleged that the government was behind the Oklahoma City bombing and that the Justice Department had set about to murder Koresh and his followers. Jones professed nonpartisanship. He said, “I don’t care if it’s Bill Clinton or Governor Bush, they’re all elitist filth if you ask me.”149
Jones’s lunatic conspiracy theories lay well outside ordinary political conversation. But the boundaries that separated ordinary political conversation from mayhem and incitement were crumbling. Both new ideas and new forms of political communication cultivated a growing intolerance for differing political opinions and for difference more broadly.
Left identity politics grew especially strong in the academy, where to disagree with the distinctive status of someone belonging to a particular identity group was to violate what conservatives, in an allusion to Stalinism, liked to deride as “political correctness.” In his 1987 jeremiad The Closing of the American Mind, University of Chicago literary critic Allan Bloom lamented the evisceration of truth: “There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering his university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.” Veterans of the New Left lamented these developments, too. “The squandering of energy on identity politics, the hardening of boundaries between groups, the insistence that individuals are no more than their labels, is an American tragedy,” Todd Gitlin wrote in 1995. Gitlin, who had been president of SDS in the 1960s, pointed out the irony of this tragedy: “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
The Left’s commitment to open debate unraveled. A “no-platform movement”—the turn during which the Left started sounding like the Right—was founded in 1974 by a British student group that prohibited providing a platform to anyone “holding racist or fascist views.” One influence was the German-born American intellectual Herbert Marcuse, who argued in a widely read essay that liberals’ commitment to open debate was absurd because free speech had become a form of oppression. Another influence, beginning in the 1980s, was the field of trauma studies, which understood words as harm. By the early 1990s, mostly due to the influence of critical race theory, a theory of unequal speech advanced by black legal scholars including Derrick Bell, more than 350 American colleges and universities adopted hate speech codes. Other black scholars objected. “To be sure, blacks are still on the front lines of First Amendment jurisprudence—but this time we soldier on the other side,” Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote ruefully in 1996. “The byword among many black activists and black intellectuals is no longer the political imperative to protect free speech; it is the moral imperative to suppress ‘hate speech.’” Campus hate speech codes were often used against the very people they were designed to protect. The suppression of hate speech, which, a generation before, had been the project of FBI agents who investigated civil rights activists, became the work of the university. In less than two years under the University of Michigan’s speech code, more than twenty white students accused black students of racist speech.151
At nearly the same time, both the Left and the Right, unwilling to brook dissent, began dismantling structures that nurture fair-minded debate: the Left undermining the university, the Right undermining the press. 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 bro
adcasters, operating with federal licenses, had no obligation either to dedicate programming to the public interest or to represent opposing points of view. Along with the creation of national toll-free telephone numbers and the opening of the FM band—which meant that music stations largely abandoned AM, opening those stations for other programming—the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine made possible a new kind of conservative talk radio. In 1987, there were some 240 talk radio stations in the country; by 1992, there were 900.152
The best-known among the talk radio hosts was the energetic Rush Limbaugh, who began broadcasting nationally, on fifty-six stations, in the summer of 1988. Limbaugh did not generally have guests; he ranted, and he raved, and he fielded phone calls from the public. Caustic and provocative, he gave vent to hatreds and resentments that had been considered unspeakable on the air. “He’s saying what I think,” listeners said. His popularity could be seen in bumper stickers that read “Rush is Right.” Republican political strategist and television producer Roger Ailes met Limbaugh in 1990 and soon began producing a Limbaugh television show, and, although it failed, it convinced Ailes to find a home for conservative television news. In 1992, when Ailes and Limbaugh together visited the White House, President Bush saw fit to carry Limbaugh’s bag.153
Leone Baxter, who died in 2001 at the age of ninety-five, had worried about men like Ailes, whose early rise she’d witnessed.154 The Ohio-born Ailes had been working in television when he became an adviser to Richard Nixon in 1968. He soon moved from entertainment to politics, though what he pioneered was bringing the two together. Between 1980 and 1986, he’d aided the campaigns of thirteen Republican senators and eight members of Congress, including Phil Gramm and Mitch McConnell.155 At the beginning of the age of talk radio and cable television but a decade before the rise of the Internet and twenty years before social media, Ailes developed a new and prescient theory of communication, which he elaborated on in 1988, in the cowritten book You Are the Message. Ailes argued that polling, market research, and the television ratings industry demonstrated that the most saleable pitches are simple, instant, and emotional. This insight applied not only to detergents and sitcoms but also to people. Remote controls for television had become commonplace in the late 1970s, just when cable programming was beginning, and viewers took to flipping through the channels. (The term “sound bite” was coined in the 1970s when, armed with a remote, viewers couldn’t be counted on to catch much more than a sentence or a phrase before changing channels.) People are like television programs, Ailes explained: a person has only seven seconds to be likable before someone changes the channel. “It’s what I call the like factor,” he wrote.156
The Like Factor, like the Lie Factory before it, came to drive American political communication, decades before the rise of Facebook, with its “likes.” In effect, the Like Factor replaced the Fairness Doctrine. In a transformation long sought by conservatives, ratings trumped the public interest, a change that was perhaps first made evident in televised debates between presidential candidates. After the Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960, no general election presidential debate had taken place for the sixteen years until Ford agreed to debate Carter in 1976. (Ford believed he had no choice but to agree because after pardoning Nixon, he’d fallen 30 points behind in the all-important polls.) 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. Meanwhile, as part of its campaign to deregulate the FCC, the Reagan administration was determined to allow television broadcasters, rather than nonprofits, to sponsor the debates, notwithstanding a prophetic warning issued by the head of the League of Women Voters, Dorothy Ridings. She told a Senate committee that broadcasters, keen for the highest ratings, would pander both to the candidates and especially to the audience in an attempt to make the debates as zippy and as watchable as possible, without regard to whether or not they would help voters learn about either the candidates or the issues.157
As a result of that push, television broadcasters gained control of the primary debates, which grew more raucous, while sponsorship of the general election debates was taken over by a nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates. The tone of the debates, though, was set by Ailes. He coached Reagan to disarm Mondale by promising not to make age an issue: “I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience,” Reagan said. He calmed George H. W. Bush’s nerves before his first 1988 debate against Michael Dukakis who, as governor of Massachusetts, had supported the repeal of a state law that banned sodomy and bestiality. “If you get in trouble out there, just call him an animal fucker,” Ailes whispered to Bush backstage. Even as Bush prepared to take the stage, that night’s moderator, Texas-born television newsman Dan Rather, who styled himself in the mold of Edward R. Murrow, looked straight into the camera and apologized to his audience: “This will not be a debate in the sense the word is often used in the English language because all of this is so tightly controlled by the candidates themselves and their managers.”158
The League of Women Voters issued a press release, denouncing the debates as “a fraud on the American voter.” But the debates only got worse. Ratings rose and zingers got zippier. In 1992, the Bill Clinton campaign made sure the candidates were given very big stools, so that Ross Perot would look like a child. Clinton, gregarious and charismatic and quick on his feet, loved a new “town hall” format, in which the candidates take questions from the audience. Reserved, New England–bred Bush did not. Caught on camera looking at his watch, Bush later admitted that he’d been thinking, “only ten more minutes of this crap.”159
The fiercest indictment came from seventy-four-year-old Walter Cronkite. “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.”160
Cronkite and other veterans of the golden age of television news lamented the new age: the rise of cable news. CNN, which provided news twenty-four hours a day, was launched in 1980 and posted its first profits by 1985. By 1990, it reached fifty-three million households, a number that only rose after 1991, with its on-the-ground, real-time coverage of the Persian Gulf War, a U.S.-led operation to push the Saddam Hussein–led Iraqi army out of neighboring Kuwait. MSNBC started in July 1996, followed later that year by Fox News, run by Ailes and owned by an Australian tabloid newspaper tycoon and notable conservative named Rupert Murdoch. The year before, Murdoch had funded a new conservative magazine, the Weekly Standard, published in Washington and coedited by Bill Kristol. With funding from Murdoch, Ailes started Fox News from scratch. “We had no news gathering operation,” he later recalled. “We had no studios, no equipment, no employees, no stars, no talent, and no confidence from anybody.”161
Many found Ailes’s venture surprising, since he had no background in journalism and frequently said that he did not respect journalists. A news organization run by a political operative—a Republican kingmaker—would seem to violate basic standards of journalism, and yet Ailes insisted that Fox News aimed to rescue journalism. “We’d like to restore objectivity where we find it lacking,” he said at a press conference. “We expect to do fine, balanced, journalism.”162
Liberals shuddered. Senior adviser to the president George Stephanopoulos, asked why Bill Clinton, who had appeared on MSNBC on its opening day, would not do the same for Fox News, said, “Well, for one thing, MSNBC’s not owned by Rupert Murdoch and run by Roger Ailes.”163 But MSNBC was not less partisan than Fox Ne
ws; it was merely differently partisan.
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. Conservatives denounced broadcast news as liberal, but in fact it was pitched to the widest possible mass audience, made even-handedness its priority, and provided a political education to voters who had not previously been interested in politics. 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
Meanwhile, 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; and Fox, 17 million. Two years later, a news story broke that led to a 400 percent increase in Fox’s prime-time ratings.165