Jill Lepore, like all historians, faces a challenge. Readers of her magnificent new book, These Truths: A History of the United States, know how her story ends, so how can she keep us in suspense? She makes our foreknowledge work to her advantage, because she keeps implicitly and explicitly addressing the questions, How the hell did we get here? How could a vulgar, mendacious bully who emboldens racists and sexists, who denounces “fake news” and is a fount of it, possibly become President?
Trump’s ascent isn’t surprising, in the light of Lepore’s narrative. She traces our battles over race, gender, immigration and economic inequality — and over truth, whatever that is — back to their roots. Her title alludes to the ideal enshrined in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” That line has always been terribly ironic, because from the start, this country’s commitment to equality excluded women, Native Americans, slaves, and white men too poor to own land.
I can’t do justice to the scope of Lepore’s 933-page epic, so I’ll dwell on one strand of it, which traces the effects, pro and con, of mass media. The Bill of Rights, drafted in 1791, protects freedom of the press, which Benjamin Franklin and others saw as vital to the health of the newborn democracy. At its best, the press informed readers and hence made them better citizens, but it also deceived, inflamed, and divided.
Optimists kept hoping advances in mass media would help us overcome our differences. “The newspaper would hold the Republic together; the telegraph would hold the Republic together; the radio would hold the Republic together; the Internet would hold the Republic together,” Lepore notes. “Each time, this assertion would be both right and terribly wrong.” Samuel Morse, inventor of the Morse code, predicted in 1855, six years before the Civil War, that the telegraph would “bind man to his fellow man in such bonds of amity as to put an end to war.”
Early on “cyberutopians” promised that the Internet would unify the nation. WIRED declared in 2000 that “religion, geography, race, gender and other traditional political divisions are giving way to a new standard—wiredness.” The Internet, Lepore says, has indeed “accelerated scholarship, science, medicine, and education” and “aided commerce.” But it has also exacerbated economic inequality and political instability and undermined traditional media and their quaint commitment to “facts.”
“New sources of news tended to be unedited,” Lepore notes, “their facts unverified, their politics unhinged.” Social media “provided a breeding ground for fanaticism, authoritarianism and nihilism. It had also proved to be easily manipulated, not least by foreign agents.”
This situation was ripe for exploitation by Trump, whom Lepore calls “a huckster chronically in and out of bankruptcy court but a reliable ratings booster on the talk show circuit.” Trump had a knack for preying on the public’s fears and the media’s desperation for drama. Trump’s election, Lepore laments, has “sown doubts about American leadership in the world, and about the future of democracy itself.” Lepore cannot offer assurances that all will end well. “A nation born in revolution,” she writes, “will forever struggle against chaos.”
If you are worried about fake news — and you should be — consider checking out Lepore’s book. And come to a lecture this Wednesday, February 13 from 4 to 5 p.m. in BC 122. Philosophers Cailin O’Connor and James Weatherall (a Stevens alumnus!) will discuss their fascinating and important new book The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread, which examines how fake news proliferates and what we can do to stop it. I hope to see you there.
John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings, which is part of the College of Arts & Letters. This column is adapted from one post on his Scientific American blog “Cross-check.”
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