Discerning Fact from Fiction in American History

Just out last month is a collection of essays edited by two Princeton historians, Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past. An excellent contribution to public education (despite its too-twee title), the book’s premise is that these myths derange our politics and undermine sound public policy. Although the authors address a few “bipartisan myths,” they focus on myths of the Right.

Geo. Washington, Cherry Tree

For example, Akhil Reed Amar argues that the Constitution was not designed to restrain popular democracy but was instead a remarkably populist document for its time. Daniel Immerwahr debunks the sanctimony that the U.S. has not pursued empire; just ask the Tejanos, Sioux, Hawaiians, Filipinos, etc.. Michael Kazin criticizes the depiction of socialism as a recent infection from overseas. He recounts the long history of popular support for socialist ideas like curbing corporate trusts and he describes the respectability of the Socialist Party a century ago. Elizabeth Hinton challenges the view that harsh police suppression is typically a reaction to criminal violence. She chronicles the long history, especially but not only in the South, of authorities aggressively policing even quiescent communities.

The contributors may have, however, foregone an opportunity to increase public confidence in professional history.[1] They might have done so by conceding the kernels of truths that are found in some conservative stories and also by addressing myths on the Left. There is recent precedent for such balanced fact-checking: Liberal academics pointed out the historical errors in the “1619 Project” and in the blockbuster show, Hamilton. What might have been done with Myth America?

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Grounding Political Polarization: Move or Stay Put?

The multiple dimensions of political polarization have become familiar to most informed Americans. One dimension that has become increasingly evident is geography. More Americans are living in communities where the great majority of residents share their politics.

People are not staying in or moving to places according to local party registration rates so much as they are staying or moving based on cultural and lifestyle preferences, those preferences having become more strongly associated with political party. So, if you are into church, hunting, and tackle football, you’re disproportionately likely to be in red, especially rural, places, while if you are into museums, unusual ethnic food, and touch football, you’re more likely to be in blue places.

Now, two recent studies reveal in closer detail what has been happening to foster political and cultural segregation over the last 20 or so years. And that segregation is connected with another major trend of the last generation: the accelerating tendency of Americans to stay in their homes and communities, as shown in this graph.[1]

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The Southern Baptist Convention Displays the Clash of Politics and Religion

The Southern Baptist Convention’s annual gathering in New Orleans just expelled or “disfellowshipped” member churches that allowed women to hold pastoral positions. Among the expelled was the amazingly successful Saddleback Church of Southern California, founded by superstar-Pastor Rick Warren, a church that had grown from a six-person Bible study group in 1980 to 15 campuses and over 20,000 weekly attendees. Warren’s books, notably The Purpose-Driven Life (2002), brought the evangelical message to tens of millions more. What the SBC delegates cared about, however, was that Saddleback and similar churches had breached a rule against women pastors. Yet other SBC churches had “been disfellowshipped for their stances on LGBT and racial issues.” The Convention bid Saddleback and Warren and similar churches, ministers, and members good riddance. (Update: Rick Warren’s response to the “Shrinking Baptist Convention” appeared in the Washington Post two days after this blog post.)

Saddleback Church, Anaheim Campus (from website)

The SBC has increasingly followed new, more fundamentalist leaders who were determined to stop what they see as the Convention’s (and America’s) submission to liberal social positions—on feminism, homosexuality, gender identity, patriarchy, and other fronts of the culture wars. One activist was quoted, “They are trying to make sissies out of our boys and . . . boys out of our girls.”

This episode encapsulates two linked trends discussed before in this blog: that Americans’ substantial shift toward the left on social and cultural issues (including the nature of masculinity) has spurred a determined backlash from the traditional right; and that many other Americans have rejected organized religion because so many churches and church leaders have taken right-wing positions on precisely those social issues. The SBC episode crystallizes this recent history.

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Why Red v. Blue Became Me v. You: Polarization, Part II

(Updated April 26, 2023)

A political identity–being a liberal or Democrat (a “D”) versus being a conservative or Republican (an “R”)–has become viscerally more important to more Americans, reaching partisan intensities not seen for at least a century and not seen elsewhere in the western world. R’s and D’s have increasingly and heatedly differed on public issues and on private ones as well, such as who to marry, who to befriend, where to live, what to buy, and the nature of faith. It is the era of the great polarization.

Source.

My previous post, Part I, described how so many Americans became so divided over the last 40 or so years. In this post, I try to explain why, evaluate the consequences, and consider what might be done. The short answer to why is that the nation’s political leaders first sorted themselves into separate and increasingly well-defined camps. Politically-attuned Americans could more clearly see where the parties stood on their big concerns, first race and then later “culture war” arguments. Different sorts of people became D’s or R’s and identifying as a D or R made people different. Peer influences, mass media, and social media did not create polarization, but accelerated it, particularly raising the emotional heat. In several ways, these forces all fed one another. One can argue that by now the fervor of the rank and file drives leaders to further polarize.

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The Right’s Reaction to Americans’ Leftward Shift: A Supreme Example

The previous post presented evidence that over the last generation or two Americans have moved leftward on a wide front of social and cultural issues from marriage and manliness to race and language. Alarmed, conservatives have sprung to arms and are vigorously prosecuting a culture war.

This follow-up post presents a specific example. It was sparked by Margaret Talbot’s recent New Yorker article on new Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Talbot’s piece illustrates both the impetus for the right’s political mobilization and its likely futility.

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The Political Census

Just two days before the end of Trump’s reign, his appointed Director of the Census Bureau resigned following Bureau professionals’ resistance to his efforts to issue premature numbers in the waning hours of the administration. This was just the latest battle in the political warfare that enveloped the 2020 Census.

It’s not as if previous censuses avoided politics–they didn’t, as I discuss below–but 2020 was notable. For one, the Trump administration tried to add a citizenship question for the first time in 70 years, everyone understanding that its purpose was to scare immigrants, both documented and un-, into evading the count. The Supreme Court blocked that tactic. The administration also shortened the time available to complete the census even as inadequate funding and the Covid-19 pandemic made the work much more difficult. These moves would all produce underestimates of the population, especially in heavily Democratic districts and states. For the same purpose, the Trump administration asserted that House seats should be apportioned, for the first time ever, based only on the number of citizens and legal immigrants rather than of the number of “persons” as stipulated in the constitution (Art. I, Sec. 2).

But census politics goes back a long time–indeed, to the Constitutional Convention, where one of the North-South compromises ended up counting slaves as three-fifths of a person in the census, although, of course, without allowing slaves, nor women, nor Indians, nor the poor, even three-fifths of a vote. In late 1890, to take another example, the superintendent of the Census was compelled to write a ferocious defense against attacks on the validity of census, fending off charges about undercounting in New York (with all its immigrants) and overcounting in the South.

A review of recurrent political issues in the census puts this year’s chaos in perspective.

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Explaining Trump: The Next-to-Last Time (I Hope)

This blog has periodically summarized some of the hundreds of studies analyzing Trump’s 2016 success and of his continuing popularity. This particular post will be, I trust, the almost-final one. (I’ll no doubt be sucked into reading the studies following up on the 2020 election.)  

New women voters circa 1920

My last update was about a year ago. The research then basically confirmed even earlier findings that Trump effectively combined a blatant appeal to the cultural anxieties of native-born, white Christians, together with overwhelming Republican party loyalty in this era of polarization and with the Founding Father’s kludge, the electoral college, to eke out a win. New research largely elaborates that explanation. So, after a brief review, I’ll turn to asking what this recent history might say about the forthcoming election. 

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Bernie: The Left is Still Waiting for the Proletariat Vote

Bernie Sanders often declared that his is “a campaign of the working class, by the working class, and for the working class,” calling for that class to rise up, vote for him, and make the democratic socialist revolution. He was sorely disappointed. At this writing, soon after the second “Super Tuesday” primaries, it is clear that Sanders mobilized hardly any of the black working class and not that many of the white working class either.

Sanders thus joins a long list of well-educated lefties (University of Chicago, 1964) whom the working class seems to have disappointed. Long ago William Jennings Bryan–who, in his 1896 “you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold” speech, asked “Upon which side will the Democratic Party fight; upon the side of ‘the idle holders of idle capital’ or upon the side of ‘the struggling masses’?”–lost repeatedly. Soon after, Eugene V. Debs, a hero to Sanders, ran several times for president–explicitly as a socialist on a Socialist ticket–and topped out, in 1912, at only six percent of the popular vote. Compare that to eccentric, conservative businessman Ross Perot who won 19% as a third-party candidate in 1992. Crushing disappointment.

The major exception to the working class’s spurning of the Left was, of course, Roosevelt’s successful 1932 campaign and then, his 1936 re-election. FDR’s New Deal created a couple of generations of working-class loyalty to the Democratic party. But it took the onset of the Great Depression to get that first win (much like it took the onset of the Great Recession to elect the first black president).

For the most part, the call of socialism, or of democratic socialism, or even of basic European-style welfare-state-ism has done surprisingly poorly with the American working class. Repeatedly, their passivity and even opposition has posed a frustrating puzzle for those of us on the Left: Cannot working-class Americans see where their interests lie? Repeatedly, as well, many of us had faith that, with just the right message or just the right messenger, the masses would rise up, vote the Wall Street bastards out, and vote social justice in. What’s gone wrong?

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AG Barr says attacks on religion are loosening the hounds of hell. Are they?

Last October, Attorney General William Barr drew attention for a fiery speech he gave at the University of Notre Dame. Barr asserted that “virtually every measure of social pathology continues to gain ground” in America–measures such as illegitimacy, violence, and suicide rates. This has happened because Americans are losing their self-control. People are naturally “subject to powerful passions and appetites” and thus to “licentiousness.” In a free society, restraining licentiousness requires an “internal controlling power.” Only religion, faith in “an authority independent of men’s will . . . a transcendent Supreme Being,” can inhibit these passions. In the last 50 years, Barr contended, we have experienced a loss of inhibition because “the steady erosion of our traditional Judeo-Christian moral system.” Organized forces of secularism have promoted the “destruction” of religion, especially through government by, for example, restricting prayer in school, legalizing abortion, and inserting LGBT curricula into the schools.

Moral duty, Barr concluded, required using the Department of Justice to protect religious freedom. That would restore Americans’ self-control and thus reverse the tide of pathology. “We cannot have a moral renaissance unless we succeed in passing to the next generation our faith and values in full vigor.”

Source: South Bend Tribune

The howls from the Left over this speech focused on the specter of Barr using the DOJ’s powers to weigh in on the conservative side of the great Culture Wars. My concern here is simply to ask, How factually correct is Barr’s story? His is a sweeping, powerful, and consequential description of recent American history. Is it true?

I address Barr’s argument from first cause to final result: Are religion and faith in decline and, if so, because of secularists’ attacks? Does religion provide and is it necessary for free people’s self-control? Has Americans’ self-control weakened? Has there been increasing social pathology and, if there has, is weakening self-control the explanation?

I approach this topic with some empathy. Barr is a serious Catholic; I am an active member (and past president) of my synagogue. We are on the same side of the divide between organized religion and mobilized secularists. However, the historical facts are clear and they are not on Barr’s side.

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[Bracket] Political Commentary [End Bracket]

[Note to readers: I started this blog not for political comments but for reporting social science, especially American social history. But I will scratch the itch… and then return to “regular programming.”]

Premise: Removing Trump is America’s number one priority, because his re-election would make us fall further behind in addressing priorities number two through n–slowing climate change, tamping down war, moderating inequality, repairing the infrastructure, learning to live with growing diversity, and more.

Strategies: They largely boil down to hard-nosed pragmatics: We on the left should not shoot ourselves in the foot.

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