In These Truths, author Jill Lepore paints the landscape of American history focusing on how Americans acted on the values that were described in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and other key historical documents and how the ongoing struggle over these truths shaped—and continues to shape—American politics and culture.
Toward the end of the book, she describes the social changes that began in the 1960s, many rooted in interpretations of the Constitution, that have continued to shape American culture and politics over the past few decades, in the process creating the divisions that plague our culture. She writes:
In the waning decades of the twentieth century, liberals and conservatives alike cast the lingering divisions of the 1960s less as matters of law and order than as matters of life and death. Either abortion was murder and guns meant freedom or guns meant murder and abortion was freedom. How this sorted out came to depend upon party affiliation. ‘The economy, stupid’ became the mantra of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, when he tried to set aside the guns and abortion divide. That proved impossible. Especially after the Cold War came to an end, a domestic cold war began uncompromising, all-or-nothing, murder or freedom, life or death (p. 648).
She goes on to examine the issues that began to divide the country in the waning days of the Cold War and that have continued to shape society for the past 50 years as three generations have tried to adapt to a society increasingly affected by technology and by an increasingly diverse culture. With each issue, we may have found a middle ground, but in each case, the uncompromising extremes have driven us further apart.
The list of issues that have created our divided society is long. It begins with the longstanding issue of women’s rights, from voting rights to a woman’s control over her own body to issues of sexual freedom. Lepore also discusses a wide range of other factors that have contributed to today’s oppositional politics:
· Removing religion from public life
· Race and Segregation
· Taxation and the role of central government versus local government versus business
· Gun control and interpretation of the Second Amendment
· Immigration
· “Originalism” in the judicial system
· Nuclear weapons freeze
· LGBTQ Rights
· Personal Privacy Rights
· Voting Rights
These are issues that people of my generation, who came of age in the sixties, have lived with all of our adult lives. They have been part of the texture of daily life in America and beyond for decades, with one result being that we tend take them for granted as part of the environment rather than seeing them together in context and understanding their impact on the health of our overall democratic political and social cultures.
Another key issue that Lepore notes is the evolution of communications technologies and the impact of ending the Fairness Doctrine, which forced media outlets to present current events objectively. The days of Walter Cronkite and Huntley & Brinkley are long gone. Rather than seek out fairness in the news, we all tend to drift to news sources that reflect and reinforce our own biases, making it even harder to find a common understanding and shared values that brings our increasingly diverse population into a unified community based on shared values and truths, in which our differences allow us more ways to understand new phenomena rather than keep us at odds with other. By the time of the Clinton Administration’s scandals, Lepore writes, “The nation had lost its way in the politics of mutually assured epistemological destruction. There was no truth, only innuendo, rumor, and bias. There was no reasonable explanation; there was only conspiracy” (These Truths, p. 711).
Our Common Purpose
This increasingly volatile environment is what spurred the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to establish a Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship in 2018, with the goal “to explore how best to respond to the weaknesses and vulnerabilities in our political and civic life and to enable more Americans to participate as effective citizens in a diverse 21st-century democracy.” They published their report, Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century , in June 2020. As Academy President David Oxtoby notes in his introduction:
Throughout our country’s history, the American people have confronted moments of crisis with resilience and an openness to reinvention, enabling our nation to become a better version of itself. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the members of this Commission recognized that we found ourselves at a similar crossroads. The recommendations in this report touch all sectors of American life and offer a bold path that will require all of us to commit to reinventing aspects of our constitutional democracy. The realities of a disruptive media and information environment, outdated political institutions, economic and social inequality, and hyper-partisan political leadership have laid bare the urgency of this imperative. The Commission challenges us to achieve significant progress toward its recommendations by 2026, our nation’s 250th anniversary (Our Common Purpose, Section 1, para. 3).
The Commission identified 31 recommendations gathered within six strategies:
1. Achieve Equality of Voice and Representation – This strategy includes eight recommendations, including enlarging the House of Representatives and the Electoral College to make them more representative of the population, setting limits on Supreme Court appointments, eliminate gerrymandering, and making election funding fairer.
2. Empower Voters – The goals are to make the voting process less burdensome by giving voters more opportunity to vote—making election day a national holiday, for instance—automatically register eligible voters, and make voter participation in the election process mandatory.
3. Ensure the Responsiveness of Political Institutions – Expand opportunities for citizen participation in the political process beyond voting so that citizens can better shape decision-making, budgeting, and policy at all levels; and provide better citizen access to elected officials so that citizens have more effective input into governance.
4. Dramatically Expand Civic Bridging Capacity – This strategy calls for the creation of a National Trust for Civic Infrastructure to improve leadership at all levels and to build bridges to those who previously had little access to civic leadership opportunities.
5. Build Civic Information Architecture that Supports Common Purpose—This strategy focuses on what the report calls, “the intersection of digital platforms, academic research, policy-making, jurisprudence, and economics” with the goal of re-designing our information technology-based platforms to better support constitutional democracy and our sense of purpose as a society. This includes requiring for-profit social media outlets to provide “public-friendly digital spaces” on their media platforms.
6. Inspire a Culture of Commitment to American Constitutional Democracy and One Another –The five recommendations in this strategy are focused on ensuring the future. They “aim to inspire a culture of commitment to American constitutional democracy and to one another. They imagine a future in which every American is expected to perform a year of national service and is paid for doing so. They envision national conversations to reconcile the noble aspects of our history with our greatest sins; a vibrant ecosystem of gatherings, rituals, ceremonies, and public debates in which Americans discuss what it means to be a citizen; and public media efforts that support grassroots engagement. They demand that we invest in civic education and educators for all ages.
Jill Lepore has reminded us that, for the last half-century or more, we have seen our democracy gradually pulled apart by issues that led us to take sides rather than to find common cause with our fellow citizens. It has happened bit by bit, issue by issue, but over the past few years, it has also been a clear strategy of a political movement committed to pushing “these truths” aside in favor of gaining absolute power. The report of the Academy of Arts and Sciences makes an excellent case that it is time for us to stop and forge a path of government that respects and builds on the core values—the truths—that define American democracy.
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Lepore, Jill. These Truths. New York: W.W. Norton, 2018.
Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship. Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century. American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2018. Retrieved from the web at: https://www.amacad.org/ourcommonpurpose
