Book Review: Jill Lepore's "This America"

Back in the spring of this year, I had the pleasure of reading Harvard historian Jill Lepore's highly ambitious, yet riveting single-volume of American history, These Truths: A History of the United States (2018). In These Truths, Lepore takes a critical look at the American project and asks if it has lived up to its "truths," or the tenets of "equality, sovereignty, and consent" of a country's citizens before the law, and their accession to a governmental authority to protect those rights, respectively (Lepore, 2018, p. 787). Of course, the government didn't initially look out for all of its citizens, namely Native Americans, African-Americans, women, immigrants, and those in the LGBTQ community. Essentially, American history has been the story of America's gradual rectifying of past injustice (mind you, not exactly a linear process), with much work remaining today to ensure the continuance of such rights and protections for as many as possible.

Coinciding with this ongoing reckoning, starting in the 1960s, intellectuals and scholars soured by the many examples of American hypocrisy in protecting the rights of certain classes of citizens over others, and in regards to the scourge of twisted nationalism that produced Nazism and countless other atrocities, increasingly trended towards discarding the ideas of nationalism and the nation-state altogether. In her follow-up to These Truths, This America: The Case for the Nation (2019), Lepore warns against this wholesale ignoring of nationalism, arguing that within this scholarly vacuum, reactionary forces can (and will) fill that void with a dangerous redefinition of nationalism that threatens the very liberal-democratic foundations of the country.

How did we get to this point?

Part civics primer as well as a call to action, This America first takes us back to the 18th and 19th centuries, when the idea of a nation-state as we understand it in modern times, a collective of individuals bound together by common laws into a "political community," became cemented through its inseparability with nationalism, one's sense of pride in their country and people (Lepore, 2019, p. 26). Laws and a government aren't enough to bind together diverse groups of people. You need a national origin story, you need national histories. In the case of the USA, that came to be a story about a nation that fought a bloody revolution to secure for itself the universal values of equality, liberty, and freedom from a tyrannical regime, and then went on to continue that fight on behalf of the rest of humanity through its foreign policy of spreading the blessings of democracy (with, to put it mildly, mixed results).

However, there is a duality that remains within American nationalism, a dark side, one that is "less a love for your own country than a hatred of other countries and their people and a hatred of people within your own country who don't belong to an ethnic, racial, or religious majority" (Lepore, 2019, p. 23). To best fight these ever-present demons, most recently manifested in Trumpism's animosity towards immigrants and globalists, Lepore argues that since nation-states remain a central organizing principle of geopolitics today, the state's liberal democratic institutions remain the best tool for protecting its citizens' rights, and in concert with the nation's intellectuals, can be a powerful advocate of a more positive vision of Americanism.

What is this more positive vision of American nationalism? One that recommits to the liberal project of the expansion of "equality and liberty, tolerance and inquiry, justice and fairness," within the national consciousness and governmental institutions alike, a nationalism that must reckon with its past while boldly striding forward into a future requiring innovative solutions to the big issues of our day, such as environmental degradation, climate change, mass migration, and income inequality (Lepore, 2019, p. 137). As long as the metaphorical better angel is able to hold greater sway within American social life and politics can the evils of nationalism be kept at bay, and the body politic retain its relative stability.

In her conclusion, Lepore calls for no less than a vigorous re-commitment to the embattled liberal American project. While no doubt a massive undertaking on both the part of citizens and the government in an era where liberalism's center-of-the-road approach has been maligned from all sides as enabling the status quo, Lepore says that it will be worth it. That through the fruits of our labors, our nation can achieve more of what W.E.B. DuBois called "great and beautiful things" and continue to bend the proverbial arc of history closer to justice for all, away from the "hideous mistakes" and the "frightful wrongs" of the past (Lepore, 2019, p. 137).


Works Cited:

Lepore, Jill. (2018). These Truths: A History of the United States. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Lepore, Jill. (2019). This America: The Case for the Nation. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation.

Book Review: Adam Gopnik's "A Thousand Small Sanities"

Is liberal democracy dead? A considerable amount of literary, journalistic, and scholarly attention has been expended in trying to answer that question in an era of rising partisanship, demagoguery, and the increasing prominence of no-longer-ignorable global issues like climate change and mass-migration. New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik adds his two cents to the discussion, saying that the rumors of liberal democracy's death have been greatly exaggerated, but that without a resurgence behind the embattled system of governance from the grassroots and up, we could very well lose it if we're not careful. In this vein of trying to rekindle a popular embrace of a governing concept that is increasingly being attacked for its reliance on compromise and incremental change from both the left and right wings, Gopnik takes readers on a journey through history to rediscover liberalism in A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (2019).

Everyone knows about the philosophers of the Enlightenment, figures like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Voltaire, John Locke, Montesquieu, Immanuel Kant, and more, whose ideas about individualism, reform, scientific reason, self-government, and the inherent natural rights of life, liberty, and property inspired our Founding Fathers to include such ideas in our Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights.

However, liberalism as it presents today is not the exclusive domain of the latter 18th century thinkers. Gopnik reaches all the way back to the 16th century to the present to show readers that other, less well-known figures also constitute the complex tapestry of attitudes, ideas, and principles that make up liberalism, from unofficial founder Michel de Montaigne to John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor, G.H. Lewes, George Eliot, Frederick Douglass, Robert Putnam, and anarchist-turned-liberal Emma Goldman. Their contributions included critical ideas about community, compassion, the dual nature of humanity, pluralism, and a belief in an ongoing project of "radical change through practical measures" achieved via an intense commitment to the parliamentary procedures established by governmental institutions with an aim towards minimizing societal cruelty (Gopnik, 2019, p. 80).

At the end of the day, is liberalism perfect? No, not at all.

Critics from both the right and the left have plenty to critique about liberalism. From its closest ally the left-wing comes a profound frustration with incremental change, in liberalism's reluctance to engage in full-scale, system-overturning revolution to address entrenched, systemic injustices like income inequality, classism, racism, sexism, neo-imperialism and colonialism, and environmental degradation. Meanwhile, the right-wing decries liberalism's attack on traditional communities, values, and modes of authority and order, its hedonism made visible in its promotion of materialism over spiritualism.

Liberalism's response? "What liberalism can say on its own behalf is that no system of power in human history has tried so hard to inject a corrective conscience into its institutions," Gopnik writes (Gopnik, 2019, p. 195). Instead of being godless, materialistic and atomizing, liberalism has introduced into society new modes of community and spiritual wellbeing outside the traditional nuclear family, and prefers that a "thousand small sanities" quietly chipping away at injustice in a Sisyphean-perpetuity gradually achieve critical mass within society in order to finally realize large-scale, positive change (Gopnik, 2019, p. 239). In this way, liberalism is advantageous in being derived from real-life experience necessitating cooperation, compromise, empathy, and toleration of diverse groups within larger societies, in a recognition that "good change happens step by step" and not via a harmful "stampede" of society by a utopianism bent on immediate, revolutionary change (Gopnik, 2019, p. 238-239).

All in all, this doesn't make middle-of-the-road liberalism any less frustrating for those like myself exasperated by liberalism's cling to slow reform of a very imperfect system, but Gopnik's treatise makes it more understandable. Liberalism doesn't favor one group over another, but tries to accommodate all, with all the confusing dualities and conflicting local, state, and federal legislative and political impulses this entails. In the conclusion of A Thousand Small Sanities, Gopnik makes an urgent appeal to embrace again this liberalism, not one that seems to blindly accommodate large scale injustice, but one that continually recognizes and works against injustice while bringing America's diverse populace together as much as possible starting at the local, grassroots level through activism and public education. In this way, Gopnik writes, we can push the American project ever closer towards utopia.

An admirable sentiment, but are we willing to put in the work? That is the question.

Works Cited:

Gopnik, Adam. (2019). A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism. New York: Basic Books.