These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  The numbers were staggering. In 1928, the top 1 percent of American families earned 24 percent of all income; in 1944, they earned 11 percent, a rate that remained flat for several decades but began to rise in the 1970s. By 2011, the top 1 percent of American families was once again earning 24 percent of the nation’s income. In 2013, the U.S. Census Bureau reported a Gini index of .476, the highest ever recorded in any affluent democracy. Nations with income inequality similar to that in the United States at the time included Uganda, at .447, and China, at .474.108

  Sanders was a socialist; his hero was Eugene Debs. He’d once made a recording of Debs delivering his most famous speech, during the First World War: “I am opposed to every war but one,” Debs had said then. “I am for that war, with heart and soul, and that is the worldwide war of the social revolution. In that war, I am prepared to fight any way the revolution the ruling class may make necessary, even to the barricades.” Sanders, nearly a century later, offered his echo, as if history were a reel of tape, winding and rewinding and winding again: “There is a war going on in this country,” Sanders said. “I am not referring to the war in Iraq or the war in Afghanistan. I am talking about a war being waged by some of the wealthiest and most powerful people against working families, against the disappearing and shrinking middle class of our country.”109

  In 2010, in a series of deals that made possible the passage of health care reform, Democrats agreed to extend the Bush-era tax cuts, and Sanders was one of the few members of Congress to object. “President Obama has said he fought as hard as he could against the Republican tax breaks for the wealthy and for an extension in unemployment,” he said during his eight-hour speech. “Well, maybe. But the reality is that fight cannot simply be waged inside the Beltway. Our job is to appeal to the vast majority of the American people and to stand up and to say: Wait a minute.”110

  By 2011, Sanders was no longer a lone voice in the wilderness. Protests against the bailout and against tuition hikes and budget cuts had started at the University of California in 2009, where students occupying a campus building carried signs that read “Occupy Everything, Demand Nothing.” The Occupy movement spread on social media, adopting the slogan, “We are the 99%.” Occupy Wall Street, an encampment in Zuccotti Park in downtown New York, begun in September 2011, drew thousands. Within months, Occupy protests had been staged in more than six hundred American communities and in hundreds more cities around the world. “We desperately need a coming together of working people to stand up to Wall Street, corporate America, and say enough is enough,” Sanders said during Occupy Wall Street. “We need to rebuild the middle class in this country.”111

  Occupy, for all its rhetoric, was not a coming together of a representative array of working people. It was overwhelmingly and notably urban and white, and most protesters were students or people with jobs. It also had no real leadership, favoring a model of direct democracy, and lacked particular, achievable policy goals, preferring loftier objectives, like reinventing politics. Demand nothing. But it did propel Sanders to national prominence, and established the foundations for a movement that would lead him to one of the most remarkable progressive presidential campaigns since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.

  If the Tea Party married populism to originalism, Occupy married populism to socialism. The Tea Party on the right and Occupy on the left together offered an assault on Washington, sharing the conviction that the federal government had grown indifferent to the lives of ordinary Americans. Neither Republicans nor Democrats were able to unseat that conviction.

  Obama’s team had gone to Washington disdainful of “insider Washington,” with its moneymakers and its dealmakers and its partisanship-for-hire. This piety did not last. David Plouffe, Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, called the GOP “a party led by people who foment anger and controversy to make a name for themselves and to make a buck.” In 2010, Plouffe earned $1.5 million; his income included management consulting work for Boeing and GE and speaking gigs booked through the Washington Speakers Bureau. Nor did the press, on the whole, hold politicians to account. Reporters had become “embedded” journalists in Iraq; more were embedded in Washington. So breezily did the press socialize with White House and congressional staff that a politician’s wife issuing an invitation to a child’s birthday party might take pains to announce that it would be “off the record.” But, in truth, hardly anything was off the record, and the record was blaring. The race-car pace of online news—the daily email newsletters, the blogs, and then Twitter—made for frantic, absurd fixations and postures, both grand and petty. “Never before has the so-called permanent establishment of Washington included so many people in the media,” reported Mark Leibovich. “They are, by and large, a cohort that is predominantly white and male.” They held iPhones in their hands and wore wireless receivers in their ears. They reported in breathless bursts. “They are aggressive, technology-savvy, and preoccupied by the quick bottom lines,” wrote Leibovich. “Who’s winning? Who’s losing? Who gaffed?”112

  The mantras of Obama’s University of Chicago Law School syllabus were not the watchwords of a jacked-up, Bluetoothed, wallet-stuffed Washington. “Draw out the full spectrum of views on the issue you’re dealing with,” he’d instructed his students. “Display a thorough examination of the diversity of opinion that exists on the issue or theme.” House members raising money for reelection and booking their next television appearance didn’t think that way. Obama’s administration, unsurprisingly, found it difficult to gain traction with Congress, and the new president’s commitment to calm, reasoned deliberation proved untenable in a madcap capital.

  The president’s aloofness kept him from the fray. Then, too, his signature health care act was a complicated piece of legislation, a feast for people who could make money by mocking it or explaining it, or both. Sarah Palin said that Obama’s health care plan would lead to “death panels,” which, while both absurd and untrue, was simply put. This, and the Democratic response, was the sort of outrageous assertion that generated a lot of web traffic, which had become a kind of virtual currency. Madness meant money. “We get paid to get Republicans pissed off at Democrats, which they rightfully are,” one Republican lobbyist told the Huffington Post. “It’s the easiest thing in the world. It’s like getting paid to get you to love your mother.” The intricacies of reforming health care insurance, which constituted a fifth of the American economy, chiefly served the interests of lobbyists. “Complication and uncertainty is good for us,” said Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta, the brother of Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff, John Podesta.113 It meant more clients.

  More money was made by more people interested in profiting from political decay after the Supreme Court ruled, in a 2010 case called Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, that restrictions on spending by political action committees and other groups were unconstitutional. Roscoe Conkling’s fateful maneuver of 1882—telling the Supreme Court that when he’d helped draft the Fourteenth Amendment, the committee had changed the word “citizens” to “persons” in order to protect the rights of corporations—would make judicial history, time and time again. Where earlier rulings had granted corporations, as “persons,” certain liberties (especially the Lochner-era liberty of contract), Citizens United granted corporations a First Amendment right to free speech. By 2014, the court would grant corporations First Amendment rights to freedom of religious expression. In a landmark case, corporations owned by people who objected to contraception on religious grounds were allowed to refuse to provide insurance coverage for birth control to their employees, citing their corporation’s First Amendment rights.114

  And yet on college and university campuses, students continued to protest not for but against free speech. Every hate speech code that had been instituted since the 1990s that had been challenged in court had been found unconstitutional.115 Some had been lifted, others disavowed. In 2014, the University of Chicago issued a report on freedom of expression: “The University�
�s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed.”116 Nevertheless, a generation of younger Americans who had been raised with hate speech codes rejected debate itself. They attempted to silence visiting speakers, including not only half-mad provocateurs but scholars and serious if controversial public figures, from Condoleezza Rice to longtime political columnist George Will to former FBI director James Comey.

  While campus protesters squashed the free speech rights of people, the Supreme Court protected the free speech rights of corporations. When Citizens United demolished the constitutional dam, money flooded the vast plains of American politics, from east to west. The Tea Party movement was soon overwhelmed by political grifters. Within five years of the movement’s founding, its leading organizations, including the Tea Party Express and the Tea Party Patriots, were spending less than 5 percent of their funds on campaigns and elections.117

  All that money bought nothing so much as yet more rage. Liberal columnist E. J. Dionne detected a pattern: candidates and parties made big promises, and when they gained power and failed to make good on those promises, they blamed some kind of conspiracy—any sort of conspiracy: a conspiracy of the press, a conspiracy of the rich, a conspiracy of the “deep state” (including, during Trump’s first term, a conspiracy of the FBI). Then they found media organizations willing to present readers with evidence of such a conspiracy, however concocted. Conservative commentator David Frum offered a not dissimilar diagnosis: “The media culture of the U.S. has been reshaped to become a bespoke purveyor of desired facts.”118 Under these circumstances, it was difficult for either party to hold a majority for long. Democrats lost the House in 2010, the Senate in 2014, and the White House in 2016.

  WHEN DONALD TRUMP was out of the White House, he railed at the government. When he was in the White House, he railed at the press. He railed at Congress. He railed at immigrants. He railed at North Korea. He railed at his staff. He grew red in the face with railing.

  Well known in the world of professional wrestling, Trump brought to politics the tactics of the arena, which borrowed its conventions of melodrama from reality television, another genre with which Trump was well acquainted, having starred, beginning in 2004, in a reality program called The Apprentice. On The Apprentice, Trump’s signature line was “You’re fired.” In professional wrestling, a hero known as a face battles his exact opposite, a villain known as a heel; every time they meet, they act out another chapter of their story together. They say their lines, they take their bows.

  Not long into Obama’s presidency, Trump began staging bouts, as if he were the face and the president his heel. He taunted. He smirked. He swaggered. He wanted Obama to be fired. Early in 2011, he called for Obama to release to the public his “long-form” birth certificate, intimating that the president had something to hide. “He doesn’t have a birth certificate, or if he does, there’s something on that certificate that is very bad for him,” Trump said. “Now, somebody told me—and I have no idea if this is bad for him or not, but perhaps it would be—that where it says ‘religion’ it might have ‘Muslim.’”119

  These performances reached a ready-made audience. If the polls could be trusted, a dubious proposition, even before Trump began his imaginary bout with Obama, more than two in five Republicans believed that the president was either definitely or probably born in another country. Another difficult-to-credit poll reported that more than one in three Americans believed, about that time, that it was either “somewhat likely” or “very likely” that “federal officials either participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, or took no action to stop them.”120

  Both the truther conspiracy theory and the birther conspiracy theory had long been peddled by Alex Jones. By 2011, by which time the Drudge Report had begun linking to Infowars, Jones’s audience was bigger than the audiences of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck put together. (Jones had no use for either man. “What a whore Limbaugh is,” he said). “Our investigation of the purported Obama birth certificate released by Hawaiian authorities today reveals the document is a shoddily contrived hoax,” Jones wrote after the White House released the long-form certificate at the end of April 2011. The Drudge Report linked to the story. After the release, another Gallup poll reported—again, dubiously—that nearly one in four Republicans still believed that Obama was definitely or probably born outside of the United States.121

  On February 26, 2012, in a national atmosphere of racial incitement, a twenty-eight-year-old man named George Zimmerman, prowling around the neighborhood outside Orlando, Florida, called 911 to report seeing “a real suspicious guy.” He’d seen seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, who was walking to a nearby store. Zimmerman got out of his car and shot Martin, who was unarmed, with a 9mm handgun. Zimmerman told the police that Martin attacked him. Zimmerman weighed 250 pounds; Martin weighed 140. Martin’s family said that the boy, heard over a cellphone, had begged for his life. Martin did not survive. Zimmerman was not charged for six weeks. On March 8, Trayvon Martin’s father, Tracy Martin, held a press conference in Orlando and demanded the release of recordings of calls to 911. “We feel justice has not been served,” he said.122

  Martin’s death might not have gained national attention if it had not been for yet another shooting. The day after George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year-old boy named T. J. Lane walked into the cafeteria at Chardon High School, about thirty miles outside of Cleveland, pulled out a .22-caliber pistol, and fired, killing three students and badly injuring two more.123

  By then, the United States had the highest rate of private gun ownership in the world, twice that of the country with the second highest rate, which was Yemen. The United States also had the highest homicide rate of any affluent democracy, nearly four times higher than France or Germany, six times higher than the United Kingdom. In the United States at the start of the twenty-first century, guns were involved in two-thirds of all murders.124 None of these facts had dissuaded the Supreme Court from ruling, in 2008, in District of Columbia v. Heller, that DC’s 1975 Firearms Control Regulations Act was unconstitutional, Justice Scalia writing, “The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia.” Anticipating openings on the court, the new head of the NRA told American Rifleman that the 2012 presidential election was “perhaps the most crucial election, from a Second Amendment standpoint, in our lifetimes.”125

  There were shootings on street corners, in shopping malls, in hospitals, in movie theaters, and in churches. The nation had been mourning shootings in schools since 1999, when two seniors at a high school in Columbine, Colorado, shot and killed twelve students, a teacher, and themselves. In 2007, twenty-three-year-old Seung Hui-Cho, a senior at Virginia Tech, shot fifty people in Blacksburg, killing thirty-two people before he killed himself.126 The shooting in an Ohio high school, the day after Martin was killed in Florida, was, by comparison with Virginia Tech, a lesser tragedy, but it cast in a very dark light the claims coming out of Florida that George Zimmerman had a right to shoot Trayvon Martin.

  Between 1980 and 2012, forty-nine states had passed laws allowing gun owners to carry concealed weapons outside their homes for personal protection. (Illinois was the sole holdout.) In 2004, Bush had allowed the 1994 Brady Bill’s ban on the possession, transfer, or manufacture of semiautomatic assault weapons to expire. In 2005, Florida passed a “stand your ground” law, exonerating from prosecution citizens who use deadly force when confronted by an assailant, even if they could have safely retreated. More states followed.127 Carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense came to be understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, law and order, man by man.

  Obama refused to cede this argument. “If I had a son,” the president said at a pre
ss conference on March 23, visibly shaken, “he’d look like Trayvon.”128 Later that day, Rick Santorum, a Republican presidential aspirant, spoke outside at a firing range in West Monroe, Louisiana, where he shot fourteen rounds from a Colt .45. He told the crowd, “What I was able to exercise was one of those fundamental freedoms that’s guaranteed in our Constitution, the right to bear arms.” A woman called out, “Pretend it’s Obama.”129

  On April 2, thousands of students rallied in Atlanta, carrying signs that read “I am Trayvon Martin” and “Don’t Shoot!”130 Even as they were rallying, a forty-three-year-old man named One Goh walked into a classroom in a small Christian college in Oakland, took out a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol, lined the students against the wall, said, “I’m going to kill you all,” and fired. That same morning, in Tulsa, five people were shot on the street. An investigation called “Operation Random Shooter” led the Tulsa police to Jake England, nineteen, whose father had been shot to death two years before. By Easter Sunday, two college students had been shot to death in Mississippi.131

  On March 20, the U.S. Justice Department announced that it would conduct an investigation into the death of Trayvon Martin. On April 7, Martin’s parents appeared on Good Morning America. Five days later, Newt Gingrich, seeking the 2012 Republication nomination, called the Second Amendment a “universal human right.” Trump found this a suitable moment to cast doubt, once more, on the president’s birth certificate. “A lot of people do not think it was an authentic certificate,” Trump said that May, just before endorsing Mitt Romney as the GOP nominee.132

  Obama won reelection in 2012, even as Democrats lost control of the Senate. Weeks later, on a woeful day in December in the snow-dusted New England town of Newtown, Connecticut, a mentally ill twenty-year-old shot his mother and then went to his former elementary school, fully armed. He shot and killed six teachers and staff and twenty very young children, as young as five, a massacre of first graders.