Revealed: What the UK public really thinks about the future of science

It’s impossible to think about the sexual-assault allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh without thinking about Anita Hill. In October 1991, the law professor quietly gave the Senate Judiciary Committee an affidavit describing multiple instances of sexual harassment by Clarence Thomas, a federal judge under consideration to replace Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. The fight over her account transformed Thomas’s nomination into the most caustic confirmation battle to date.

Hill told the committee that Thomas had made sexual advances towards her on multiple occasions during the two years she worked as his secretary in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and that he frequently described his sexual proclivities and his interest in pornography. Thomas denounced Hill’s allegations and told the committee that he was the victim of a “high-tech lynching.” Enough senators ultimately sided with Thomas, confirming him in a 52-48 vote—including 11 Democrats.

Twenty-seven years later, another Supreme Court nominee’s confirmation has been thrown in doubt by sexual misconduct allegations. Christine Blasey Ford, a professor at the Palo Alto University, sent a confidential and anonymous letter to a high-ranking Democratic senator in late July describing an encounter with Kavanaugh when they were in high school in the early 1980s. She wrote that Kavanaugh “physically and sexually assaulted me” during a house party in suburban Maryland.

Kavanaugh physically pushed me into a bedroom as I was headed for a bathroom up a short stair well from the living room. They locked the door and played loud music precluding any successful attempt to yell for help.

Kavanaugh was on top of me while laughing with [name redacted by CNN], who periodically jumped onto Kavanaugh. They both laughed as Kavanaugh tried to disrobe me in their highly inebriated state. With Kavanaugh’s hand over my mouth I feared he may inadvertently kill me.

Ford wrote that she managed to escape soon thereafter and hasn’t seen Kavanaugh in person since the encounter. Rumors about her letter first became public last week after Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings had already wrapped up. As its release appeared to become inevitable, Ford allowed The Washington Post to disclose her identity on Sunday. “These are all the ills that I was trying to avoid,” she told the newspaper. “Now I feel like my civic responsibility is outweighing my anguish and terror about retaliation.” She reportedly is willing to testify before the Senate.

Kavanaugh has flatly denied Ford’s account. “This is a completely false allegation,” he said in a statement on Monday. “I have never done anything like what the accuser describes—to her or to anyone. Because this never happened, I had no idea who was making this accusation until she identified herself yesterday.” Kavanaugh added that he is “willing to talk to the Senate Judiciary Committee in any way the Committee deems appropriate to refute this false allegation, from 36 years ago, and defend my integrity.” The White House is also standing by its nominee. “What a ridiculous question,” Trump replied when asked on Monday if Kavanaugh had offered to withdraw.

Many observers have noted the similarities between 1991 and today. But it’s also worth examining the differences, and what they mean not only for Ford and Kavanaugh, but for the Senate, the Supreme Court, and ultimately the country.

The most significant change between Hill’s experience in 1991 and Ford’s today is the Senate itself. When Hill arrived to testify at the Capitol almost three decades ago, she was greeted by a chamber that was 98 percent male, including every member of the Judiciary Committee. The Senate operated akin to an old boys club, where personal relationships between the senators could carry more weight than partisan or practical concerns. Joe Biden, who chaired the committee at the time, came under intense criticism in the years that followed for letting the chummy, backslapping environment shape his response to Hill’s allegations.

“We went to see Biden, because we were so frustrated by [the process],” then-Colorado Representative Pat Schroeder, one of Hill’s supporters during the hearing, recounted last year. “And he literally kind of pointed his finger and said, you don’t understand how important one’s word was in the Senate, that he had given his word to [Danforth] in the men’s gym that this would be a very quick hearing, and he had to get it out before Columbus Day.”

The Senate has lost a great deal of that collegiality over the past three decades. It has also become more diverse: 21 women now serve as senators, a tenfold increase from 1991. Kavanaugh now needs the support of Maine’s Susan Collins and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, two moderate Republicans who received the lion’s share of pressure from activists on both sides, just to be confirmed. And while Hill testified before an all-male committee three decades ago, Ford’s questioners would include four Democratic women if she makes a similar appearance. (No Republican women serve on the Senate Judiciary Committee.)

That gender shift can be traced back to Hill herself. The Senate’s treatment of her, as well as the optics of the all-male committee’s harsh questioning, sparked a backlash among women voters nationwide. The ensuing 1992 midterm elections became known as the “Year of the Woman” after voters elected an unprecedented number of women candidates to Congress, including four new senators. Among them was San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein, who now serves as the Judiciary Committee’s ranking Democratic member (and to whom Ford sent her letter, via her local congresswoman).

American politics is again experiencing a “Year of the Woman,” and changing cultural perceptions around sexual harassment and assault—sparked by Hill’s testimony and strengthened by the #MeToo movement—appear to be affecting how senators are processing Ford’s allegations. Hill’s account was met with disbelief and disdain from many of Thomas’s supporters. Missouri’s John Danforth, Thomas’s chief backer in the Senate, complained on the Senate floor that the confirmation process “been turned into the worst kind of sleazy political operation with no effort spared to assassinate the character of Clarence Thomas.” Utah’s Orrin Hatch floated the theory during Hill’s testimony that she invented the allegations using details from a minor federal court case and the plot of The Exorcist.

Top Republican leaders today appeared more cognizant of, if nothing else, appearing to be sympathetic. “Anyone who comes forward as Dr. Ford has deserves to be heard, so I will continue working on a way to hear her out in an appropriate, precedented and respectful manner,” Chuck Grassley, the Judiciary Committee’s chairman, said in a statement. White House adviser Kellyanne Conway also struck a warm tone. “This woman should not be insulted and she should not be ignored,” she said during a Fox News interview. The aesthetic shift should not be mistaken for a substantive one, however: Grassley has not announced any plans to delay Thursday’s vote, and the White House isn’t backing down from Kavanaugh’s nomination.

There’s a broader social and cultural context that shapes how women’s stories of sexual misconduct are heard. In Ford’s case, her account will be filtered through one of the most political lenses possible. Supreme Court nominations are now significantly more contentious than they were a generation ago. After Thomas joined the court—with the votes of 11 Democrats, no less—the Senate went on to approve Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a 96-3 vote in 1993 and Stephen Breyer in an 87-9 vote in 1994. Nominees stopped receiving near-unanimous support after Bush v. Gore, and while John Roberts was confirmed by a 78-22 margin, no other nominee has received more than three-quarters of the chamber’s support since then. Neil Gorsuch, the most recent successful nominee, received just 54 yes votes.

This makes Kavanaugh’s nomination a moment of genuine political peril for the Trump administration. His confirmation would be a crowning triumph for Republicans and the conservative legal movement. It would mark the culmination of a four-decade campaign to build a five-justice majority on the Supreme Court that would not only advance conservative legal views, but roll back the status quo on abortion rights, affirmative action, and the scope of federal power. The solid conservative majority would also serve as a bulwark against adventurous leftward policymaking for at least a generation. Victory has never been closer for conservatives.

Trump himself shows little interest in judicial politics, but he knows that many of his supporters care about it deeply. The president’s own lawyers have often struggled to keep him from tweeting and saying potentially incriminating things related to the Russia investigation. His fondness of weighing in on the news cycle is also well established. That makes it all the more remarkable that he’s largely kept quiet about the Kavanaugh allegations since they emerged last week, saying on Monday, “We want to go through a full process ... and hear everybody out.” There could be no greater testament to the fight’s political sensitivity and importance.

But the Republicans are also well aware of what might happen if senators decide against confirming Kavanaugh to the high court at this stage. Democrats could retake the Senate in November, and lame-duck Republicans could fail to push another nominee through before the new Congress takes over in January. It would be extremely unlikely that Trump could then find a nominee who would satisfy both the conservative legal movement and the new Democratic Senate. As a result, the Supreme Court could be left with only eight justices—evenly split between four conservatives and four liberals—until at least the next presidential election.

With that risk at hand, it’s possible that Republicans could force a vote to confirm Kavanaugh as early as next week. That move would place the credibility of two American institutions at stake. The Supreme Court’s only real power is its legitimacy in the eyes of the American public, and forcing through another justice who’s been accused of sexual misconduct is a surefire way to damage it. The Senate, meanwhile, could claim that voters gave them a mandate in 2016 to confirm judges like Kavanaugh, but the message it would send to many Americans is that women’s traumatic stories still don’t matter to them.

On September 18, McDonald’s workers in 10 cities will make history, striking to protest what they say is a persistent failure to enforce company rules against sexual harassment at work. The Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund will provide legal support for women who have filed sexual harassment claims, and the strike is backed by the Fight for 15 movement of fast-food workers organizing for a living minimum wage. As reported by Fortune, hundreds of employees in worker-led women’s committees organized the strike, “demanding improved procedures for receiving and responding to sexual harassment complaints, plus required anti-harassment training for managers and employees.” It will be the first time McDonald’s workers have taken such action on sexual harassment.

For nearly a year, the #MeToo moment calling out sexual misconduct has revolved mostly around the already-famous: in Hollywood, in media, and in politics. On Friday, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh became the latest to be accused publicly of assault. But #MeToo originally had nothing to do with the rich and powerful. Tarana Burke, a Bronx-based activist, coined the term over a decade before it became a hashtag; at the time, Burke intended it as a response to the prevalent sexual abuse of young, working-class women of color. Sexual harassment and assault has also been a focal point for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which organizes farmworkers against the exploitation and sexual harassment of women in the fields. CIW activists recently held a hunger strike in front of the corporate headquarters of Wendy’s over the chain’s refusal to comply with CIW’s Fair Food program, which sets out a program of rules and regulations meant to protect workers from harassment and abuse. “There’s no new news here, aside from the CIW trying to exploit the positive momentum that has been generated by and for women in the #MeToo and Time’s Up movement to advance their interests,” a Wendy’s spokeswoman asserted to the Huffington Post in March.

Tuesday’s strike is a reminder that #MeToo’s roots are deep, and they were planted by working-class women. But the strike is still an unusual tactic. “There’s not a deep history of large coordinated strikes over sexual harassment,” Rebecca Kolins Givan, an associate professor of labor studies and employment relations at Rutgers University, told me. “Usually when sexual harassment has been an issue, it’s one of many issues about disrespect and lack of dignity in the workplace and, like with McDonald’s, it’s in the context of a broader campaign of organizing for recognition and respect.”

“There are some key recent cases, not necessarily of strikes but of demands around sexual harassment, the major recent one being the hotel workers in Chicago, with what they called their ‘Hands Off, Pants On’ campaign to get panic button for housekeepers,” Givan said. In October 2017, the Chicago city council approved an ordinance that requires hotel owners to give panic buttons to workers and to develop anti-sexual harassment policies.

Annelise Orleck, a professor of history at Dartmouth College who has participated in a public relations campaign on behalf of striking McDonald’s workers, told me that the earliest example she could find of a strike provoked by sexual harassment dates to 1912. “Corset-makers in Kalamazoo, Michigan were the first that I could find to publicly say that they were walking out to protest physical and verbal harassment by their foreman, in addition to his demands for quid pro quo sex,” she said. According to Orleck, unions were “nervous” about the prospect of taking action on workplace sexual harassment, and preferred behind-the-scenes action as opposed to a strike.

McDonald’s already has a company-wide sexual harassment policy, but in 2016, 15 workers filed formal complaints about its non-enforcement with the National Labor Relations Board. In May, ten more women filed complaints with the NLRB, also over the company’s failure to stop sexual harassment. Many women said they experienced retaliation for reporting the behavior. “The claimants, including a 15-year-old from St. Louis, said in a conference call with journalists that they were ignored, mocked or terminated for reporting the behavior. The accusations included claims that co-workers or supervisors sexually propositioned, groped or exposed themselves to the women,” Reuters reported at the time. Filing a complaint with a Republican-dominated NLRB is a risk, and so is a strike, but women have few other options. Any complaint about sexual harassment puts workers in a vulnerable position.

“All the men feel like they have all the power, so they’ll cut your hours. Or if they can’t, they’ll just make your day a living hell. They make you feel like you are nothing, just because you tried to stand up against them,” said Adriana Alvarez, who has worked at a Chicago McDonald’s for nine years and helped organize Tuesday’s strike.

Strikes can also provoke retaliation against workers. “They may have their hours docked, they may be fired outright,” Orleck said. “But these kinds of actions get much more attention, as they’re intended to, than an individual complaint or even then a kind of legal complaint like those that have been brought before the NLRB,” she added, due to greater media attention.

“There is no place for harassment or discrimination of any kind at McDonald’s,” McDonald’s spokeswoman Andrea Abate said in a statement provided to The New Republic. “Since our founding, we’ve been committed to a culture that fosters the respectful treatment of everyone. We have policies, procedures and training in place that are specifically designed to prevent sexual harassment at our company and company-owned restaurants, and we firmly believe that our franchisees share this commitment.”

The statement further asserts that the corporation is working with the Rape, Abuse and Incest Network and Seyfarth Shaw at Work, which describes itself as a “legal compliance and consulting services company” on its website, on prevention measures. The choice of consultant is an inadvertent reminder that sexual harassment pervades all industries, and victimizes workers in all income brackets: A Seyfarth Shaw partner, Gerald Maatman, previously represented The Weinstein Company after six actresses filed a class-action lawsuit against it. That wasn’t the first time Maatman had represented an employer in a sexual harassment case, either; according to Variety, he also represented Garban LLC., a brokerage firm, after female employees accused it of rampant gender discrimination. Male employees had reportedly circulated pornography, and hired strippers for company events.

Even if McDonald’s has good intentions—a generous assumption—Givan warns that the “pro forma training” many employers conduct in response to sexual harassment has been shown to have little impact. It does, however, help protect employers from legal liability. “It sounds like they are working with the the typical management-side firm that will help them stay in legal compliance and avoid liability while also trying to deny workers the ability to unionize or have a stronger voice. All with the goal of staying on the right side of the law,” she added.

For some workers, this show of commitment from McDonald’s only underlines how little action the massive corporation has taken until now. “They have the power to stop the sexual harassment. They have more than enough money to educate these managers and let them know what’s right and what’s wrong, which should have been done in the beginning,” said Alvarez. “They have more than enough of everything to fix this.” Taking the chain’s obvious resources into account, McDonald’s workers on Tuesday will take an unprecedented action to demand unprecedented accountability.

If Hurricane Florence were an animal, she’d be a sloth—albeit an unusually dangerous one. The storm became a major hurricane on September 9, prompting potentially apocalyptic but uncertain forecasts. By September 11, more than one million people had been told to evacuate their homes, as Florence was most certainly inching toward the Carolina coastline. The system made landfall in North Carolina as a Category 1 hurricane on Friday, September 14, where it decided to spend the weekend. And though its been downgraded to a tropical depression, Florence continues to rage over the state as of Monday morning.

The four days Florence has spent in North Carolina has helped it break the state record for rainfall during a tropical storm or hurricane, The Washington Post reported on Sunday, citing “a preliminary report of more than 30 inches.” Put another way, meteorologist Ryan Maue told the paper, about six trillion gallons of water has fallen from the sky. That rain and wind has so far left 18 dead and 750,000 without power.

The sloth’s wrath, however, is still far from over—and in some ways it’s just begun. By the time Florence leaves the East Coast later this week, Maue said, the rain total could rise to “18 trillion gallons, enough to cover Texas in four inches of water and fill the Chesapeake Bay.” That means rivers will continue to overflow, delivering sudden, catastrophic flooding to nearby communities. It’s already happening in North Carolina, where there have been more than 900 water rescues so far. Up to six more inches of rain could fall by Tuesday evening, according to CNN.

“This storm has never been more dangerous than it is right now,” the state’s governor, Roy Cooper, said on Sunday. “Many rivers are still rising, and are not expected to crest until later today or tomorrow.”

It’s nearly impossible to get in or out of Wilmington, N.C. right now b/c of rising floodwater. We saw “William”, who’s been stuck in his big rig since this AM. He had food & water but no cell service. He asked us to call his wife. We called her & 911 to give them his location. pic.twitter.com/4psbL9NdU2

Drowning is the main risk from these river overflows, as most people who die in hurricanes die due to flooding from storm surge or rainfall. But the extended rainfall is also threatening to make people sick. At least one pit of coal ash—the waste left over from coal burning—has overflowed near the Cape Fear River, according to NBC News, which added, “There are at least two other coal-fired Duke plants in North Carolina that are likely to be affected by the storm.” Coal ash often contains metals like lead, mercury, arsenic, chromium, and selenium, exposure to which can increase the risk of various health problems.

Governor Cooper said on Sunday that the state’s 4,000 hog manure pits—which had overflowed into drinking water systems during previous storms—have not overflowed this time around. “We are closely monitoring hog lagoons, and we haven’t had any reports of issues,” he said. But not everyone was buying the assessment. “I’d like to see some evidence to show that somehow swine farms and lagoons have been magically spared as everything else fell under water,” University of North Carolina environmental sciences professor Mark Sobsey told Bloomberg. “It’s just a little bit hard to believe.”

The flooding will continue. On Monday morning, the National Weather Service said flash flood warnings were still in effect across large portions of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, and that “heavy and excessive rainfall” could be expected in Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland and southern New England over the next few days. And more slow storms like Florence can be expected to hit the U.S. in the future. “Tropical cyclones, which include hurricanes, have grown more sluggish since the mid-20th century,” the New York Times reported last week, citing research that suggests climate change is playing a role.

“To write history is to make an argument by telling a story,” Jill Lepore once explained. And the argument a historian makes about America’s long, turbulent, and demographically complex past—from the arrival of the first European settlers in the sixteenth century to the triumph of Donald Trump—depends upon the story she chooses to tell. It’s the story of a white man’s empire, many scholars on the left contend, against which dissenters of all races and genders have struggled to create a truly democratic society. No, insist most conservatives, it’s a narrative of individuals striving for liberty, who got stymied, at times, by meddlesome progressives and riotous radicals. One group hopes to see America become great again; the other claims that such golden age thinking is a fantasy of the privileged.

The parallel lives of Harry and George Washington illustrate the contradictions embedded in the nation’s story from birth. George, of course, commanded the Continental Army that defeated Great Britain and then became the first president of the United States; his immense popularity helped legitimize the government of the early republic. On the day the last British ships sailed out of New York harbor, the general-politician grandly toasted “the memory of those heroes who have fallen for our freedom” and vowed, “May America be an Asylum to the persecuted of the earth!” Harry, a black man born in Gambia, was George’s personal property—or had been until he escaped from the Mount Vernon plantation in 1776, signing up with a British regiment that promised him and every other slave their liberty if they fought against the Patriots. It would be only his first stop on a frustrating odyssey of liberation.

After the war ended, Harry moved to Nova Scotia, where he joined “the largest free black community in North America,” led by two evangelical ministers. But poverty and hostility from whites doomed the settlement, and Harry sailed back to West Africa, where the new British colony of Sierra Leone offered land for the asking. When that promise also proved hollow, and the colony’s rulers became tyrants, the settlers took up arms again. The rebellion was crushed, and the victors banished Harry and his fellow insurgents to a malaria-infested area along the Atlantic Coast, where he died around 1800. Still, if Harry had remained at Mount Vernon, he would probably have been buried there. George’s will stipulated that his slaves would be freed only on the death of his wife.

The tale of the two Washingtons can serve as a kind of historical Rorschach test. On the left, most would undoubtedly see it as clear evidence that the United States was founded on a despicable lie: The wigged icon who prattled on about “freedom” owed his wealth and status to the coerced labor of black men and women. Those on the right might counter that the majority of white Americans never owned a single slave, and that the founders’ belief in individual freedom eventually led the country to abolish the “peculiar institution.”

Lepore, who tells this dual story splendidly in her new book, These Truths, declines the temptation either to condemn the national project or to celebrate it. For her, the United States has always been a nation wrestling with a paradox, caught between its sunny ideals and its darker realities. “Between reverence and worship, on the one side, and irreverence and contempt, on the other,” she writes, “lies an uneasy path.” The American Revolution was far more than a mere change of power from one group of well-to-do white men to another. “The United States,” writes Lepore, “rests on a dedication to equality.” Yet throughout her deftly crafted survey, she also makes clear how often citizens and their leaders failed to implement this ideal or actively betrayed it. She borrows her title from the Declaration of Independence, to signal both the standard of reason and equality that Americans profess and how their deeds have fallen short of it.

Few writers in this country produce narratives about the past as insightful, concise, or witty as those that Lepore seems to turn out every few months or so in The New Yorker and in her many books. She divides this book, her tenth, into four parts. It moves chronologically from the making of the new nation (“The Idea” where the tale of the two Washingtons appears), to the antebellum era and Civil War (“The People”), to the growth of federal authority (“The State”), to the 70 years and counting since World War II, which Lepore labels “The Machine,” in a nod to the dominance of computers. While she confines herself mostly to political history, it’s a politics imbued with a rich understanding of culture, biography, and technology.

In her section on the early to mid-nineteenth century, Lepore draws out the contradictions of a nation that was rapidly becoming more democratic and consumer-friendly—and then split in two when the South refused to accept the popular election of a president who swore to halt the expansion of slavery. Some of these tensions are intimate: One of the unsung benefits of the first industrial revolution, which heightened inequality in the republic, was, she notes, that the price of mattresses dropped from $50 to $5—which allowed most families to afford one for the first time. But she also tracks larger shifts, observing that the same Democratic Party that encouraged ordinary white men to run for office and welcomed plebeian immigrants from all over Europe also reviled the abolitionists and grabbed a huge chunk of land from Mexico.

One vocal opponent of that “wicked war,” as Ulysses Grant called it, was “a gangly young House member” from central Illinois who became known as “Spotty Lincoln,” because he “introduced resolutions” in Congress “demanding to know about the exact spot where American blood was first shed on American soil.” At the end of the Civil War almost two decades later, Abraham Lincoln’s assassination inspired a torrent of monuments, oratory, poetry, and images that continue to define his legacy. But nearly all that memorializing left out a distinct group of Americans whose lives the sixteenth president had helped to transform utterly. In mourning Lincoln, Lepore writes,

Americans deferred a different grief, a vaster and more dire reckoning with centuries of suffering and loss, not captured by any camera, not settled by any amendment, the injuries wrought on the bodies of millions of men, women, and children, stolen, shackled, hunted, whipped, branded, raped, starved, and buried in unmarked graves. No president consecrated their cemeteries or delivered their Gettysburg address; no committee of arrangements built monuments to their memory. With Lincoln’s death, it was as if millions of people had been crammed into his tomb, trapped in a vault that could not hold them.

For more than 150 years, black Americans and their allies have been struggling to create a society that both reckons with the evils of the past and lives up to its promise.

Throughout the book, Lepore takes particular delight in tracing how both Americans with power and those without made effective use of new forms of media either to advance the ideal of equality or to betray it. From his early days as a free man in the 1840s until his death in the 1890s, Frederick Douglass sat so often before the camera that he became “the most photographed man in nineteenth-century America.” He understood that filmed portraits of black people challenged pervasive racist caricatures by showing them as they really looked and hoped to be seen. During the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt mastered the art of speaking on the radio, which had become a common household appliance by the time he moved into the White House. Although we know that his Fireside Chats helped build and sustain his popularity, Lepore highlights the preparation that made them so effective. FDR memorized everything he said on the broadcasts and spurned the hyped-up style of most radio announcers in that era.

When Lepore arrives at the internet age, however, her fascination with communications technology morphs into disdain. Such pioneers of the personal computer as Stewart Brand, publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog, imagined that the universal use of the magic machines would bring about the fulfillment of a libertarian dream. “A realm of intimate, personal power is developing,” gushed Brand, “power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.” Yet, like any shrewd historian, Lepore knows that technology does not by itself subvert the designs of the powerful. In the 1990s, none other than Newt Gingrich lobbied hard and successfully for a new Telecommunications Act, scrapping the New Deal regulations that had barred big media firms from squeezing out would-be competitors. And some Silicon Valley billionaires have aligned themselves with the right, like Peter Thiel, who cofounded PayPal hoping it would “free the citizens of the world from government-managed currency,” and went on to support Trump.

Lepore establishes the influences of technology on American ideals, but she has less time for the diverse flavors of political religiosity—egalitarian or otherwise. She dutifully notes the evangelical fervor of the abolitionists and accurately describes Phyllis Schlafly, a devout Catholic, as one of the more effective organizers of the modern Christian Right. But she glosses over the Social Gospel, which inspired many of the activists and politicians who made the early twentieth century a time of path-breaking reform. They included the mostly Protestant crusaders for Prohibition, who succeeded in getting one of the nation’s most ubiquitous consumer industries banned for more than a decade. In a land of many faiths, Americans certain of what God wanted them to do have always been central to the contest for policy and power. Even secular historians who may wish that were not true should realize that attention must be paid.

Lepore begins her book by rejecting the urge to moralize, but she cannot resist making stern judgments near the end of it about the troubling, crude politics of the present. The attacks of September 11, she argues, drove many Americans rather crazy, and a recovery is not yet in sight. Alex Jones’s accusation that the Feds brought down the Twin Towers gained him a mass audience and became a model of sorts for even more popular conspiracy theories, including the notions that Barack Obama had been born in Africa and that his health plan would create “death panels.” A decline in the readership of print newspapers and the ubiquity of smartphones have led, in her view, to a point where “truth” resides in the mind of the app-clicker and whichever online community she or he prefers. That Donald Trump both prominently advocated the “birther” lunacy and welcomed Jones’s fawning endorsement seem to prove that the country has “lost its way in a cloud of smoke.”

While her concern is obviously justified, Lepore’s jeremiad omits some key details, present and past, that might qualify the terms of the lament. Subscriptions to The New York Times and The Washington Post have soared since Trump’s election, and Americans who oppose the president outnumber those who adore him. Which of these groups will show up at the polls this November is, of course, a different question. But this is hardly the first time in U.S. history when an election or administration “had nearly rent the nation in two” and when millions of citizens disagreed fundamentally about the accuracy of nearly every important statement uttered by a sitting president. The politics of the 1860s and 1960s were, by almost any measure, even angrier and more divisive than those we are suffering through.

Lepore is at her best when she illuminates these conflicts in both thought and action. “A nation born in revolution will forever struggle against chaos,” she concludes. “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.” The writers who have understood the country’s history best have always sought to capture how Americans have wrestled with these inescapable, opposing forces. Or, as Zadie Smith wrote in her obituary of Philip Roth, whose sensibility about the past matches Lepore’s, “He always wanted to know America, in its beauty and its utter brutality, and to see it in the round: the noble ideals, the bloody reality.”