A Less Perfect Union
This Week: The Jill Lepore School of History. Listen today at 2pm on WBUR or anytime on our website.
MM and RP: We lucked out with the timing of this one, folks. With an interview we’d recorded earlier in the week with the wonder woman historian Jill Lepore, we were able to avoid the spectacle in our nation’s capital and try instead to explain it. Indeed, Jill opens her book with an epigraph from Lincoln’s second inaugural: “We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.” We’ll drink to that.
It turns out the American story isn’t the one we’ve been told. Maybe it shouldn’t come as such a shock that our history is just as full of contradictions, lofty ideals and empty promises as our present is. But with These Truths, Jill Lepore has traced the grand sweep of those contradictions, from Columbus through to Trump — and in under a thousand pages. And this week, she talked us through a small fraction of her insights.
A nation born in revolution will forever struggle against chaos. A nation founded on universal rights will wrestle against the forces of particularism. A nation that toppled a hierarchy of birth only to erect a hierarchy of wealth will never know tranquility. A nation of immigrants cannot close its borders. And a nation born in contradiction, liberty in a land of slavery, sovereignty in a land of conquest, will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history.
One that rang true this week was Jill’s reflections on the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982, which she says explains a lot of what we’re seeing now. This could be the subject of another show.
It passed Congress in 1972 after being first introduced to Congress in 1923, finally passes in 1972, goes to the states. Phyllis Schlafly, the brilliant leader of the modern conservative movement, just organizes its defeat with a campaign called Stop ERA. I think that political settlement, the failure of that political settlement polarizes American politics; it involves an extraordinary realignment of the parties, the Republican Party before that was the party of women, the Democratic Party was the party of men, that switch introduces all kinds of disequilibrium in American politics, and a lot of the instability that we see now, the vicious call-out culture of the left, the kind of defense of all kinds of shenanigans on the part of the right. The moral intensity and piety, the religious revival feel of the #metoo movement, a lot of these things many people would think of as triumphs, triumphant social movements, are deeply unstable politically, and they are the consequence of women actually not having equal rights under the Constitution.
Jill sees the big picture, of course, but she also has a feminist eye on the stories unfolding in the moment and the near past: she sees the worship of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs as a deep anti-feminist backlash. (She also says she was wary of the manifestos written by anarchists and libertarians in the early 90’s and could see then that the internet wouldn’t be understood as a public utility.) She’s also deeply suspicious of disruption culture, “an illogical religion” that worships 20-year-olds (dudes mostly) who know how to code and disregards experts. The whole ideology of disruptive innovation, she says, promotes the idea that you shouldn’t study the problem—just, you know, “move fast and break things,” to quote Facebook’s old motto.
Some of our favorite Lepore pieces in The New Yorker:
And don’t forget Jill’s interview with us about her Wonder Woman book.
But we digress. About the news of the moment, Kurt Vonnegut spoke the truest words: “True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.”
Vonnegut wasn’t exactly a model of fairness or kindness toward the women in his life, but he had a point. And true terror, turns out, is waking up and watching your high school bully confirmed to the Supreme Court.
Here’s some pieces we liked on the story: Doreen St. Félix on Ford-Kavanaugh and patriarchal resentment. Nathan J. Robinson’s obsessive, methodical proof that Brett Kavanaugh perjured himself. Lili Loofbourow’s argument that Kavanaugh used women as props for homosocial bonding:
If these allegations are true, one of the more shocking things about them is the extent to which the woman being mistreated exists in a room where the men are performing for each other — using the woman to firm up their own bond. The Kavanaugh yearbook is littered with dumb codes that seem to speak to exactly this tendency — stuff like “boofing” and “devil’s triangle” all suggest that what mattered to Kavanaugh was displaying club membership. The question is: At whose expense?
And SNL’s rarely good these days, but Matt Damon as Brett Kavanaugh cracked us up.
More Bad News:
Chris interviewed Chris Hedges in Cambridge the other night. Chris Hedges is actually a nicer person than the guy on the doom and gloom beat. His Monday Truthdig column is a tough way to start the week, and there’s not a lot more hope offered here. The conversation was fascinating though; we’ll put it up soon.
Coming Soon:
Chris will be interviewing Michael Lewis and Andre Dubus III in the next week or so.
In other literary news, Deborah Eisenberg is the coolest short story writer around. Daniel Mendelsohn read all 6 books in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series and watched all of “Suits.”
Til Next week, keep the faith!
The OSers.
