These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  “I know there’s not a parent in America who doesn’t feel the same overwhelming grief that I do,” Obama said at the White House. He could not stop himself from weeping. “Our hearts are broken.”133 And yet the Obama administration had no success getting gun safety measures through a Republican Congress, which staunchly defended the right to bear arms at all costs, calling the massacre of little children the price of freedom.

  OBAMA’S SECOND TERM was marked by battles over budgets and the mire of the Middle East. In 2011, U.S. forces had found and killed Osama bin Laden, and Obama withdrew the last American troops from Iraq. Yet Obama’s foreign policy looked aimless and haphazard and tentative, which diminished both his stature and that of his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. While war in Afghanistan wore on, Islamic militants attacked U.S. government facilities in Libya in 2012, and by 2014 a new terrorist group, calling itself the Islamic State, had gained control of territory in Iraq. America’s nation-building project in the Middle East had failed. Obama, who had been an early critic of the Patriot Act, of the prison at Guantánamo, and of the Iraq War, led an administration that stepped up surveillance through a secret program run by the National Security Agency, prosecuted whistle-blowers who leaked documents that revealed U.S. abuses in the Middle East, and used drones to commit assassinations. Critics argued that the war on terror had been an unmitigated disaster, that occupying Arab countries had only produced more terrorists, and that the very idea of a war on terror was an error. Terrorism is a criminal act, historian Andrew Bacevich argued, and required police action and diplomacy, not military action.134

  With a massive defense budget, the federal government proved unmovable on tax policy and all but unable even to discuss its spending priorities. House leader Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, proposed capping the top income tax rate at 25 percent, a rate not seen in the United States since the days of Andrew Mellon. Of 248 Republican members of Congress and 47 Republican senators, all but 13 signed a pledge swearing to oppose any income tax increase. The Obama administration wanted to raise the top rate to 39 percent, a recommendation supported by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. But Senate Republicans objected to the CRS’s report (finding, for instance, the phrase “tax cuts for the rich” to be biased) and, in a move without precedent in the century-long history of the Congressional Research Service, forced the report’s withdrawal.135

  While Congress fought over the implications of the phrase “tax cuts for the rich,” political scientists raised a distressing question: how much inequality of wealth and income can a democracy bear? In 2004, a task force of the American Political Science Association had concluded that growing economic inequality was threatening fundamental American political institutions. Four years later, a 700-page collection of scholarly essays presented its argument as its title, The Unsustainable American State. A 2013 report by the United Nations reached the conclusion that growing income equality was responsible not only for political instability around the world but also for the slowing of economic growth worldwide. The next year, when the Pew Research Center conducted its annual survey about which of five dangers people in forty-four countries considered to be the “greatest threat to the world,” most countries polled put religious and ethnic hatred at the top of their lists, but Americans chose inequality.136

  As the 2016 election neared, inequality seemed poised to gain the candidates’ full attention. Bernie Sanders, seeking the Democratic nomination, would make inequality the centerpiece of his campaign, leading a movement that called for Progressive-style economic reform. But Hillary Clinton, the eventual Democratic nominee, would fail to gain any real traction on the problem. And the unlikely Republican nominee, Donald Trump, would blame immigrants.

  A movement to fight gun violence began during Obama’s second term, but it wasn’t a gun control movement; it was a movement for racial justice. In 2013, after a jury in Florida acquitted George Zimmerman of all charges related to the death of Trayvon Martin, organizers began tweeting under the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. African Americans had been fighting against domestic terrorism, state violence, and police brutality since before the days of Ida B. Wells’s anti-lynching crusade. Black Lives Matter was Black Power, with disruptively innovative technologies: smartphones and apps that could capture and stream candid footage live over the Internet. If stand your ground laws encouraged vigilantism, data service providers encouraged do-it-yourself reporting. Newt Gingrich insisted that the Second Amendment was a human right, but data plans promoted the idea that all users of the Internet were reporters, every man his own muckraker, and that uploading data was itself a human right. “A billion roaming photojournalists uploading the human experience, and it is spectacular,” said the voice-over in an ad for a data plan, over images of a vast mosaic of photographs. “My iPhone 5 can see every point of view, every panorama, the entire gallery of humanity. I need, no, I have the right, to be unlimited.”137

  Black Lives Matter made visible, through photography, the experience of African Americans, maybe even in the very way that Frederick Douglass had predicted a century and a half earlier. With photography, witnesses and even the victims themselves captured the experiences of young black men who for generations had been singled out by police, pulled over in cars, stopped on street corners, pushed, frisked, punched, kicked, and even killed. In 2014, police in Ferguson, Missouri, not far from St. Louis, shot and killed eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in the middle of the street. Witnesses captured the shooting on their smartphones. All over the country, witnesses captured one police shooting after another. Police shot and killed Tamir Rice, age twelve, in a city park in Cleveland; he was carrying a toy gun. Minnesota police shot and killed Philando Castile in his car; he had a licensed handgun in his glove compartment and was trying to tell them about it. Castile’s girlfriend livestreamed the shooting. “Social media helps Black Lives Matter fight the power,” announced Wired. Yet legal victories eluded the movement. One killing after another was captured on film and posted on the Internet, but in nearly all cases where officers were charged with wrongdoing, they were acquitted.138

  Black Lives Matter called urgent attention to state-sanctioned violence against African Americans, in forms that included police brutality, racially discriminatory sentencing laws, and mass incarceration. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the movement did not make gun control legislation a priority, not least because its forebears included the Black Panthers, who had argued that black men had to arm themselves, and advanced that argument by interpreting the Second Amendment in a way that would later be adopted by the NRA. Meanwhile, hair-trigger fights along the battle lines first drawn in the 1970s, over guns and abortion, continued to be waged on the streets and at the ballot box, but especially in the courts. A pattern emerged. Second Amendment rights—a de facto rights fight led for and by white men—gathered strength. Civil rights for black people, women, and immigrants stalled and even fell back. And gay rights advanced.

  In the early years of the twenty-first century, while other civil rights claims failed, the gay rights movement, newly styled the LGBT movement, won signal victories, chiefly by appropriating the pro-family rhetoric that had carried conservatives to victories since Phyllis Schlafly’s STOP ERA campaign. In 2003, in Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court overruled its 1986 decision in Bowers by declaring a Texas sodomy law unconstitutional. In a concurring opinion, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said she based her decision on a Fourteenth Amendment equal protection argument, asserting that the Texas law constituted sex discrimination: a man could not be prosecuted for engaging in a particular activity with a woman but could be prosecuted for engaging in that same activity with a man. O’Connor’s reasoning marked the way forward for LGBT litigation, which turned, increasingly, to marriage equality. Less than a year after the ruling in Lawrence, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court made the commonwealth the first state to guarantee same-sex marriage as a constitutional right.139

  The Brown v. Board for same-sex m
arriage came in the spring of 2015, fifty years after the court’s landmark decision on contraception in Griswold v. Connecticut. The case, Obergefell v. Hodges, consolidated the petitions of four couples who had sought relief from state same-sex marriage bans in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee. In 2004, Ohio had passed a law stating that “Only a union between one man and one woman may be a marriage valid in or recognized by this state.” Ohioans James Obergefell and John Arthur had been together for nearly twenty years when Arthur was diagnosed with ALS, a wrenching and terminal illness, in 2011. In 2013, they flew to Maryland, a state without a same-sex marriage ban, and were married on the tarmac at the airport. Arthur died four months later, at the age of forty-eight. To his widower he was, under Ohio law, a stranger.140

  In its ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court declared state bans on same-sex marriage unconstitutional. At New York’s Stonewall Inn, the movement’s holy site, people gathered by candlelight, hugged one another, and wept. It had been a long and dire struggle and yet the victory, when it came, felt as unexpected and as sudden as the fall of the Berlin Wall. One minute there was a wall; the next, sky.

  A triumph for a half century of litigation over reproductive and gay rights, Obergefell marked, for conservative Christians, a landmark defeat in a culture war that had begun with the sexual revolution in the 1960s. Between Griswold and Obergefell, Christians had joined and transformed the Republican Party and yet had not succeeded in stopping a tectonic cultural shift. Many felt betrayed, and even abandoned, by a secular world hostile to the basic tenets of their faith. Conservative Christians had long identified Hollywood, for its celebrating sex and violence on film and television, as an agent of that change. But as entertainment, including pornography, moved online, conservative Christians, like everyone else, began to wonder about the effects of the Internet on belief, tradition, and community. In a book outlining “a strategy for Christians in a post-Christian nation,” Rod Dreher, an editor at the American Conservative, wrote, “To use technology is to participate in a cultural liturgy that, if we aren’t mindful, trains us to accept the core truth claim of modernity: that the only meaning there is in the world is what we choose to assign it in our endless quest to master nature.”141

  Exactly what role the Internet had played in the political upheaval of the first decades of the twenty-first century remained uncertain, but in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Americans believed in conspiracies and feared invasions. Different people feared different conspiracies, but their fears took the same form: intruders had snuck into American life and undermined American democracy. Wasn’t that invader the Internet itself? Cyberutopians said no, and pointed to Obama’s 2008 campaign, the Tea Party, the Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter, the Arab Spring, and political hackers from Anonymous to WikiLeaks as evidence that the long-predicted democratization of politics had at last arrived. “A new Information Enlightenment is dawning,” Heather Brooke wrote, in The Revolution Will Be Digitised. “Technology is breaking down traditional social barriers of status, class, power, wealth and geography, replacing them with an ethos of collaboration and transparency.”142

  Instead, social media had provided a breeding ground for fanaticism, authoritarianism, and nihilism. It had also proved to be easily manipulated, not least by foreign agents. On the Internet, everything looked new, even though most of it was very old. The alt-right, a term coined in 2008 by Richard Spencer, was nothing so much as the old right, with roots in the anti–civil rights Ku Klux Klan of the 1860s and the anti-immigration Klan of the 1920s. It stole its style—edgy and pornographic—from the counterculture of the 1960s. The alt-right, less influenced by conservatism than by the sexual revolution, considered itself to be transgressive, a counterculture that had abandoned the moralism of the Moral Majority—or any kind of moralism—and deemed the security state erected by neoconservatives to be insufficient to the clash of civilizations; instead, it favored authoritarianism.143

  Spencer had been a History PhD student at Duke before leaving in 2007 to become an editor and a leader of what he described as “a movement of consciousness and identity for European people in the 21st century.” The alt-right, fueled by the ideology of white supremacy and by disgust with “establishment conservatism,” turned misogyny into a rhetorical style and made opposition to immigration its chief policy issue. In 2011, Spencer became the president of the National Policy Institute, whose website announced in 2014, “Immigration is a kind of proxy war—and maybe a last stand—for White Americans who are undergoing a painful recognition that, unless dramatic action is taken, their grandchildren will live in a country that is alien and hostile.”144

  About the only thing that was new about the alt-right was the home it found online, on forums like Reddit and especially 4chan, where users, mostly younger white men, mocked PC culture, bemoaned the decline of Western civilization, attacked feminism, trolled women, used neo-Nazi memes, and posted pornography, and also on new, disruptive media sites, especially Breitbart, which was started in 2007 and was for a time one of the most popular websites in the United States.145

  Supporters of Bernie Sanders, many of them also affiliated with the Occupy movement, insisted on their right to protest outside the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. The alt-right’s online counterpart, sometimes called the alt-left, had one foot in the online subculture of Tumblr and other platforms, and the other foot in the campus politics of endless pieties over smaller and smaller stakes. If the favored modes of the alt-right were the women-hating troll and the neo-Nazi meme, the favored modes of the alt-left were clickbait and the call-out, sentimental, meaningless outrage—“8 Signs Your Yoga Practice Is Culturally Appropriated”—and sanctimonious accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. In 2014, Facebook offered users more than fifty different genders to choose from in registering their identities; people who were baffled by this were accused online of prejudice: public shaming as a mode of political discourse was every bit as much a part of the online Far Left as it was of the online Far Right, if not more. After fourteen people were killed in a terrorist attack on a gay nightclub in San Bernardino, California, the alt-left spent its energies in the aftermath of this tragedy attacking one another for breaches of the rules of “intersectionality,” which involve intricate, identity-based hierarchies of suffering and virtue. “One Twitter-famous intersectionalist admonished those who had called it the worst mass shooting in US history by reminding them that ‘the worst was wounded knee,’” the writer Angela Nagle reported. “Other similar tweeters raged against the use of the term Latina/o instead of Latinx in the reporting, while still others made sure to clarify that it was the shooter’s mental illness, not his allegiance to ISIS and the caliphate, that caused the shooting. Not to be outdone, others then tweeted back angrily about the ableism of those who said the shooter had a mental illness.”146

  Millennials, a generation of Americans who grew up online, found their political style on the Internet. At the time of the 2016 election, a majority of younger eligible voters got their news from Facebook’s News Feed, which had been launched in 2006. Not many of them—fewer than in any generation before them—believed in political parties, or churches, or public service. The mantra of the counterculture, “question authority,” had lost its meaning; few institutions any longer wielded authority. Sellers of data plans suggested that people could upload all of themselves onto the Internet, a self of selfies and posts, an abdication of community and of inquiry. Sellers of search engines suggested that all anything anyone needed to know could be found out with a click. “Eventually you’ll have an implant,” Google cofounder Larry Page promised, “where if you think about a fact, it will just tell you the answer.”147 But online, where everyone was, in the end, utterly alone, it had become terribly difficult to know much of anything with any certainty, except how to like and be liked, and, especially, how to hate and be hated.

  III.

  “I’VE SAT AROUND these tabl
es with some of these other guys before,” Jeb Bush’s campaign manager said. In a room about the size of a tennis court, its walls painted martini-olive green, the campaign managers of the candidates for president of the United States in 2016 sat around a broad conference table to debrief after the election. They were warriors, after the war, standing atop a mountain of dead, remorseless. They had gathered at Harvard’s Kennedy School, as campaign managers had done after every presidential election since 1972, for a two-day tell-all. Most of what they said was shop talk, some of it was loose talk. No one said a word about the United States or its government or the common good. Sitting in that room, watching, was like being a pig at a butchers’ convention: there was much talk of the latest technology in knives and the best and tastiest cuts of meat, but no one pretended to bear any love for the pig.

  Not long after his 2017 inauguration, President Trump greeted visitors to the White House in front of a portrait of Hillary Clinton. The election of 2016 was a product of technological disruption: the most significant form of political communication during the campaign was Donald Trump’s Twitter account. It involved a crisis in the press, whose standards of evidence and accountability were challenged by unnamed sources and leaks, some of which turned out to have been part of a campaign of political interference waged by the Russian government, in what came to be called troll factories. The election dredged from the depths of American politics the rank muck of ancient hatreds. It revealed the dire consequences of a dwindling middle class. It suggested the cost, to the Republic’s political stability, of the unequal constitutional status of women. It marked the end of the conservative Christian Coalition. And it exposed the bleak emptiness of both major political parties.