These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  60.Kenneth Janda, “Innovations in Information Technology in American Party Politics Since 1960,” in Guy Lachapelle and Philippe J. Maarek, eds. The Political Parties in the Digital Age: The Impact of New Technologies in Politics (Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2015).

  61.Viguerie, The New Right, 12, 21, 32, 35, 91–93.

  62.Wuthnow, Inventing American Religion, 99–100; Leo Bogart, Silent Politics: Polls and the Awareness of Public Opinion (New York: Wiley and Sons, 1972), 101; Philip Meyer, Precision Journalism: A Reporter’s Introduction to Social Science Methods (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973)—quotation, 191; David W. Moore, The Opinion Makers: An Insider Exposes the Truth Behind the Polls (Boston: Beacon, 2008), xvii.

  63.Nolan M. McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, “Polarized Politicians,” in Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 15–70; Sinclair, Party Wars, 16; Self, All in the Family, 371; Rymph, Republican Women, 231.

  64.Greg D. Adams, “Abortion: Evidence of an Issue Evolution,” American Journal of Political Science 41 (1997): 718, 723; Greenhouse and Siegel, “Before (and After) Roe,” 2069–70.

  65.Hartman, War for the Soul of America, 134.

  66.Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1981; Crichtlow, Conservative Ascendancy, 199.

  67.Michelmore, Tax and Spend, 122, 138–39; Brownlee, Federal Taxation in America, 134; Patterson, Restless Giant, 66–69.

  68.H. W. Brands, Reagan: The Life (New York: Doubleday, 2015), 179; Alan O. Ebenstein, Milton Friedman: A Biography (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 208; Reagan’s introduction to Friedman’s television series, “President Reagan on Dr. Friedman and Free to Choose,” YouTube video, 1:09, posted by “Free to Choose Network,” July 18, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um-p3ZhiO60; Eamonn Butler, Milton Friedman: A Guide to His Economic Thought (New York: Universe Books, 1985).

  69.Larissa MacFarquhar, “The Gilder Effect,” TNY, May 29, 2000. For a skeptical view of the rise of supply-side economics, see Jonathan Chait, The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007).

  70.MacFarquhar, “The Gilder Effect”; George F. Gilder, Sexual Suicide (New York: Quadrangle, 1973), 5–6, 92–93, 131, 241–42.

  71.George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Regnery, 2012), foreword by Steve Forbes, x, 27, 15, 17.

  72.Patterson, Restless Giant, 48–49.

  73.Daniel Wirls, Irrational Security: The Politics of Defense from Reagan to Obama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 19; Michelmore, Tax and Spend, 141, 147.

  74.Patterson, Restless Giant, 158–59, 165, 175.

  75.Winkler, Gunfight, 65, 248, 253, but see Siegel, “Dead or Alive,” n58.

  76.Winkler, Gunfight, 233–235.

  77.William Safire, “An Appeal for Repeal,” NYT, June 10, 1999. Nixon Library, White House Tapes, Nixon to H. R. Haldeman, June 1, 1971, tape 256; Nixon Oval Office Conversation with Aides, May 19, 1972, tape 726; Nixon phone calls, June 15, 1972, tape 256.

  78.Patterson, Restless Giant, 25–6, 293–95.

  79.Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors, ch. 6 (quotation, 203); Ngai, Impossible Subjects, ch. 7.

  80.Winkler, Gunfight, 67–68.

  81.John M. Crewdson, “Hard-Line Opponent of Gun Laws Wins New Term at Helm of Rifle Association,” NYT, May 4, 1981.

  82.Ronald Reagan, Kiron K Skinner, Annelise Graebner Anderson, and Martin Anderson, Reagan: A Life in Letters (New York: Free Press, 2003), 368. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Ronald Reagan: 1981–1988/89 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1992), 388.

  83.Steven M. Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008) and Amanda Hollis-Brusky, Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

  84.The Right to Keep and Bear Arms: Report of the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Ninety-seventh Congress, Second Session (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982).

  85.Robert A. Sprecher, “The Lost Amendment,” American Bar Association Journal 51 (1965): 665–69. Both party platforms supported gun control in 1968. The Republican platform only began to oppose gun control in 1980. On polling, see Carl T. Bogus, “The Hidden History of the Second Amendment,” U.C. Davis Law Review 31 (1998): 312.

  86.Carl T. Bogus, “The History and Politics of Second Amendment Scholarship: A Primer,” in The Second Amendment in Law and History, edited by Carl T. Bogus (New York: New Press, 2000), 1, 4.

  87.Michael Avery and Danielle McLaughlin, The Federalist Society: How Conservatives Took the Law Back from Liberals (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2013), 2. And see Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement.

  88.Edwin Meese, Address to the Federalist Society’s Lawyers Division, Washington, DC, November 15, 1985.

  89.Steven F. Hayward, The Age of Reagan. The Conservative Counterrevolution, 1980–1989 (New York: Crown Forum, 2009), 414; William J. Brennan, “The Constitution of the United States: Contemporary Ratification,” reprinted in Interpreting the Constitution: The Debate over Original Intent, ed. Jack N. Rakove (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990); Garry Wills, “To Keep and Bear Arms,” New York Review of Books, September 21, 1995.

  90.Jamal Greene, “Selling Originalism,” Georgetown Law Journal 97 (2009): 708.

  91.Reva B. Siegel, “Dead or Alive: Originalism as Popular Constitutionalism in Heller,” Faculty Scholarship Series, 2008, Paper 1133, 216.

  92.Warren Burger, “2nd Amendment Fraud,” YouTube video, 0:57, from an interview on The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, televised by PBS on December 16, 1991, posted by “Frank Staheli,” August 28, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eya_k4P-iEo.

  93.Patterson, Restless Giant, 123–26.

  94.Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1962); President’s Science Advisory Committee, Environmental Pollution Panel, Restoring the Quality of Our Environment (Washington, DC: White House, 1965), appendix, “Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.”

  95.S. Fred Singer, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Global Effects of Environmental Pollution; a Symposium Organized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Held in Dallas, Texas, December 1968 (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1970).

  96.FitzGerald, The Evangelicals, 321–32.

  97.Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), 45.

  98.Badash, A Nuclear Winter’s Tale, 66, 122; Edward Teller, “Widespread After-Effects of Nuclear War,” Nature 310 (August 23, 1984): 621–24.

  99.Nicole Hemmer, Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 115–17.

  100.Singer is quoted in Badash, Nuclear Winter’s Tale, 142. His career is discussed at some length in Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt. For Singer’s more recent views, see Ashley Thorne, “The Father of Global Warming Skepticism: An Interview with S. Fred Singer,” National Association of Scholars, January 3, 2011, https://www.nas.org/articles/The_Father_of_Global_Warming_Skepticism_An_Interviewwith_S_Fred_Singer.

  101.“Climate Change,” Heartland Institute, July 27, 2016, https://www.heartland.org/top ics/climate-change/, accessed August 28, 2017; Jastrow is quoted in Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt, 59.

  102.Reagan-Bush ’84, “Prouder, Stronger, Better,” 1984, Museum of the Moving Image; Gingrich quoted in Ronald Brownstein, The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America (New York: Penguin, 2007), 143.

  103.Patterson, Restless Giant, 174.

  104.Antonin
Scalia, “Originalism: The Lesser Evil,” University of Cincinnati Law Review 57 (1989): 849–65.

  105.Patterson, Restless Giant, 179; Buchanan is quoted in Crichtlow, Conservative Ascendancy, 217; Randy Shilts, And the Band Played on: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 173, 294–99; on spending: Craig A. Rimmerman, From Identity to Politics: The Lesbian and Gay Movements in the United States (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 93.

  106.Jeffrey Toobin, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 218–19; Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986), Blackmun, dissenting.

  107.See, for example, Elizabeth M. Schneider, “The Synergy of Equality and Privacy in Women’s Rights,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 137 (2002): 137–154, especially 140n12.

  108.Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Privacy v. Equality: Beyond Roe v. Wade (1983),” in Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 93–102 (quotations, 100, 93); Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “Some Thoughts on Autonomy and Equality in Relation to Roe v. Wade,” North Carolina Law Review 63 (1984–85): 375–86 (quotation, 383).

  109.Self, All in the Family, 385, 391–93. And see Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

  110.Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986). And on the place of historical analysis in the court during this era, see Erwin Chemerinsky, “History, Tradition, the Supreme Court, and the First Amendment,” Hastings Law Journal 44 (1993): 919.

  111.Thurgood Marshall, Bicentennial Speech, Annual Seminar of the San Francisco Patent and Trademark Law Association, Maui, Hawaii, May 6, 1987.

  112.Robert Bork, Saving Justice: Watergate, the Saturday Night Massacre, and Other Adventures of a Solicitor General (New York: Encounter Books, 2013), 86; Robert Bork, “The Great Debate,” University of San Diego Law School, San Diego, California, November 18, 1985; guns: Reva B. Siegel, “Dead or Alive: Originalism as Popular Constitutionalism in Heller,” Bork quoted on 224.

  113.United States Congress, Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Nomination of Robert H. Bork to Be Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court: Hearings before the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, One Hundredth Congress, First Session, on the Nomination of Robert H. Bork to Be Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1987), 2818.

  114.The People for the American Way, Anti-Bork Commercial, 1987, www.pfaw.org.

  115.John Corry, “Evaluating Bork on TV,” NYT, September 17, 1987; Linda Greenhouse, “The Bork Battle: Visions of the Constitution,” NYT, October 4, 1987. Footage from the PBS NewsHour at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ffTtOMIJAk.

  116.Michael Avery and Danielle McLaughlin, The Federalist Society: How Conservatives Took the Law Back from Liberals (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2013), 26–27.

  117.Patterson, Restless Giant, 214–16.

  118.Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (New York: Norton, 1991, 1992, 1998), 11; Irving Kristol, “My Cold War,” National Interest 31 (1993): 141–44. On the history of hate speech codes, see Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman, Free Speech on Campus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017).

  119.Maureen Dowd, “The 1992 Campaign,” NYT, May 18, 1992.

  120.Patrick Buchanan, “Culture War,” Republican National Convention, Houston, Texas, August 17, 1992.

  121.Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (New York: ReganBooks, 1996), 2.

  122.Carl Bernstein, A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 30–38, 54–56, 69; Mark Leibovich, “In Turmoil of ’68, Clinton Found a New Voice,” NYT, September 5, 2007; on the history of her name, see Janell Ross, “The Complicated History Behind Hillary Clinton’s Evolving Name,” Washington Post, July 25, 2015.

  123.The term was coined by Peter Drucker in 1962 (Saval, Cubed, 197, 201).

  124.Lily Geismer, Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 1–9.

  125.Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 2.

  126.Ibid., 81; The Last Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools (Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, distributed Random House, 1971), 344, 248–49, 225, 389.

  127.Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 38, 76–77, 98. And see, for example, “Kibbutz: Venture in Utopia,” Whole Earth Catalog (San Rafael, CA: Point Foundation, 1998), 42.

  128.Isaacson, The Innovators, 268–81.

  129.Patterson, Restless Giant, 59–60.

  130.Frederick G. Dutton, Changing Sources of Power: American Politics in the 1970s (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), ch. 7.

  131.Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2016), 46–53.

  132.Crichtlow, Conservative Ascendancy, 203; Al From and Alice McKeon, The New Democrats and the Return to Power (New York City: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), especially ch. 5; Patterson, Restless Giant, 190.

  133.Michael Rothschild, “Beyond Repair: The Politics of the Machine Age Are Hopelessly Obsolete,” New Democrat, July/August 1995, 8–11.

  134.Patterson, Restless Giant, 249; “Stories of Bill,” Frontline, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/choice/bill/greenberg.html, accessed August 28, 2017.

  135.Davis and Clark, Thurgood Marshall, 5.

  136.Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, interview by Steve Kroft, 60 Minutes, CBS, January 26, 1992; Patterson, Restless Giant, 256.

  137.Patterson, Restless Giant, 253; Bob Woodward, The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 117.

  138.Margaret Carlson, “A Hundred Days of Hillary,” Vanity Fair, June 1, 1993. On the name, see Ross, “The Complicated History Behind Hillary Clinton’s Evolving Name.”

  139.“Harry and Louise on Clinton’s Health Plan,” YouTube video, 1:00, aired 1994, posted by “danieljbmitchell,” July 15, 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt31nhleeCg; William Kristol to Republican Leaders, December 2, 1993, Memo, https://www.scribd.com/document/12926608/William-Kristol-s-1993-Memo-Defeating-President-Clinton-s-Health-Care-Proposal; Brownstein, Second Civil War, 155; Patterson, Restless Giant, 328–30.

  140.Frank, Listen, Liberal, 78–79.

  141.Biden quoted in Frank, Listen, Liberal, 93; Elizabeth Hinton, Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, and Vesla M. Weaver, “Did Blacks Really Endorse the 1994 Crime Bill?,” NYT, April 13, 2016.

  142.Kleiman, When Brute Force Fails, 1; Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010, 2012), 3–60.

  143.William J. Clinton, “Statement on Signing the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996,” Washington, DC, August 22, 1996.

  144.Stephen Labaton, “A New Financial Era,” NYT, October 23, 1999; Frank, Listen, Liberal, 119.

  145.“What We Believe,” Combahee River Collective, April 1977, http://circuitous.org/scraps/combahee.html. Combahee is a river associated with Harriet Tubman’s rescue missions.

  146.On the rise of trauma, see Anne Rothe, Popular Trauma Culture: Selling the Pain of Others in the Mass Media (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), and especially Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). And for a jaundiced view, see Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (New York: Harper, 2017).

  147.Gordon, Moral Property, 309.

  148.Mark Hamm, Apocalypse in Oklahoma: Waco and Ruby Ridge Revenged (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), 158.

  149.Jonathan Kay, Among the Truthers: A Journey into the Growing Conspiracist Undergrou
nd of 9/11 Truthers, Birthers, Armagheddonites, Vaccine Hysterics, Hollywood Know-Nothings and Internet Addicts (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 27–29; Lee Nichols, “Libertarians on TV,” Austin Chronicle, August 7, 1998.

  150.Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (1987; New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 25; Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1995), 35–36; and on the history of political correctness, 169–71.

  151.Chemerinsky and Gillman, Free Speech on Campus, 71; Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore Jr., and Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon, 1965); Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Critical Race Theory and the Freedom of Speech,” The Future of Academic Freedom, ed. Louis Menard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), ch. 5.

  152.Hemmer, Messengers of the Right, 258–59; Daly, Covering America, 412.

  153.Philip Seib, Rush Hour: Talk Radio, Politics, and the Rise of Rush Limbaugh (Fort Worth, TX: The Summit Group, 1993), 4, 27, 59; Ze’ev Chafets, Roger Ailes: Off Camera (New York, New York: Sentinel, 2013), 62–63; Charles J. Sykes, How the Right Lost Its Mind (New York: St. Martin’s, 2017), 135.

  154.Baxter, oral history, 1972, 17, 22–4.

  155.Sherman, Loudest Voice, 115–16.

  156.Roger Ailes with Jon Kraushar, You Are the Message: Getting What You Want by Being Who You Are (New York: Crown Business, 1988, 1995), 17, 82.

  157.Minow and Sloan, For Great Debates, 28; Dorothy S. Ridings to Editorial Page Editors and Writers, September 23, 1983, Dorothy Ridings Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe, Box 1.

  158.Ailes, You Are the Message, 23–24; Chafets, Roger Ailes, 48; George Farah, No Debate: How the Republican and Democratic Parties Secretly Control the Presidential Debates (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004), 89.

  159.Bush in an interview with James Lehrer, Debating Our Destiny: 40 Years of Presidential Debate (Washington, DC: MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, 2000).

  160.Cronkite made his original remarks in the 1990 Theodore H. White lecture at Harvard’s Kennedy School; Farah, No Debate, 32–33, 90, 93.