An asymmetrical history
“In the waning decades of the 20th century, liberals and conservatives alike cast the lingering divisions of the 1960s less as a matter of law-and-order than as a matter of life-and-death. Either abortion was murder and guns meant freedom, or guns meant murder and abortion was freedom. How these sorted out came to depend upon party affiliation.”
So writes Jill LePore in her wonderful new book, “These Truths: A History of the United States.”
A professor of American history at Harvard, LePore had a goal of writing an “asymmetrical” history of the country. She succeeded. There’s not much here about U.S. involvement in either world war. A special quibble of mine, she provides only the barest glimpse of the American labor movement.
There’s not a word about George C. Marshall, John L. Lewis or Earl Warren. Douglas MacArthur is mentioned once.
On the other hand, there’s plenty about Jane Franklin, Benjamin’s stay-at-home sister; Harry Washington, who joined the British army during the Revolutionary War to escape enslavement by that champion of American independence, George Washington; and Frederick Douglass, another former slave who became (at first) a fierce critic of Abraham Lincoln and then his steadfast friend and defender.
LePore provides special insights into our own troubled times. She writes: “‘It’s 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.”
“The character of (political) partisanship changed,” she contends.
LePore, who was born in 1966 to school teacher parents, quotes Paul Weyrich, the founder of the Heritage Foundation, that U.S. politics was henceforth “a war of ideology … a war about our way of life. And it has to be fought with the same intensity … and dedication as you would fight a shooting war.”
Welcome to Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination fight.
LePore is pretty clear on political polarization: it’s a curse. She noted sharp party divisions, as measured by roll call votes in Congress, declined steadily following the Civil War until well into the 20th century. “In the 1970s, polarization began to surge.”
LePore accounts for the change to the migration of Southern Democrats into the Republican party. Much of it also had to do with reactions to the Roe vs. Wade abortion decision by the Supreme Court in 1972. Between 1978 and 1984, she notes, “pro-life Democrats and pro-choice Republicans were purged from their parties.”
Equally decisive as abortion has been guns. Over NRA headquarters in Washington, D.C., throughout the 1950s and 1960s were these words: “Firearms Safety Education, Markmanship Training, Shooting for Recreation.”
The 1970s saw this non- political message replaced by something far different: “The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms Shall Not Be Infringed.”
Turning itself into “a powerhouse special interest group,” the NRA and its conservative allies in Congress and out set about to convert the 2nd Amendment from a placeholder for government militias into a sacred bastion of individual rights, off-limits to government interference.
The right to own, use, and display a gun became sacrosanct under this new interpretation, itself a product of originalism, a way of understanding and interpreting the Constitution based on the Founders’ original intent.
“Originalism was … an answer to the Supreme Court’s privacy-based decisions about contraception and abortion; if the left could find rights … the right would find them,” too.
According to LePore, both Roe vs. Wade and the Supreme Court’s more recent reinterpretation of the Second Amendment in favor of individual gun ownership rest on flimsy Constitutional grounds, which makes it necessary for their supporters to cling to them still tighter.
In her history of the country, LePore has hit on an essential truth: “A nation born in revolution will forever struggle against chaos…. A nation born in contradiction … will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books: Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation and Our People. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.