Introduction to Myth America PDF

Here is the conversion of the supplied text into a structured markdown format: ### INTRODUCTION Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer WE LIVE IN THE AGE OF DISINFORMATION. To be sure, there have always been lies in our public discourse. But in the last few years the floodgates have opened wide, and...

Here is the conversion of the supplied text into a structured markdown format: ### INTRODUCTION Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer WE LIVE IN THE AGE OF DISINFORMATION. To be sure, there have always been lies in our public discourse. But in the last few years the floodgates have opened wide, and the line between fact and fiction has become increasingly blurred if not completely erased. Unlike past eras in which myths and misunderstandings have clouded our national debate, the current crisis stands apart both for the degree of disinformation and for the deliberateness with which it has been spread. Crises never have a single cause, but in this instance a good deal of blame can be attributed to the political campaigns and presidency of Donald Trump. His administration thrived on deceptions and distortions, reframing its own lies as "alternative facts." The fire hose of falsehoods coming from the Trump White House was so pronounced that the Washington Post launched a database tracking them all, accounting for more than thirty thousand instances in the end.¹ Whereas previous presidencies might have been embarrassed by such fact-checking, Trump and his aides simply waved away these corrections as "fake news."² Even when watchdogs inside the administration pushed back against the president's statements, they too were ignored or, in the case of five inspector generals, simply dismissed. This consistent embrace of disinformation could, at times, turn deadly. As the COVID-19 pandemic swept the nation, the administration effectively went to war with scientists and medical experts, engaging in what the Union for Concerned Scientists called "an egregious pattern of ignoring, sidelining, and censoring the voices of scientists and their research." Refusing to face facts, President Trump insisted in February 2020 that the number of coronavirus cases in the nation would "within a couple of days ... be down to close to zero."⁴ When he left office less than a year later, however, the country had experienced tens of millions of cases and four hundred thousand deaths from the virus. The Trump administration's long-running war on the truth culminated with a massive campaign to discredit the 2020 election and a violent insurrection at the United States Capitol designed to stop the certification of the results. This may have been, as critics charged, "the big lie," but it was only one of many. The Trump presidency pushed the country to this crisis point, but it was able to do so only because of two large-scale changes that have in recent years given right-wing myths a huge platform and an accordingly large impact on American life. The first major development was the creation of the conservative media ecosystem, which ranges today from cable news networks such as Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News to websites such as Breitbart. Unlike the network news programs of the so-called mainstream media, which placed great emphasis on an evenhanded approach that hewed to objective facts and eschewed editorializing, these new outlets have taken a different tack. Abandoning the old broadcast television approach of the post-World War II era, they instead embraced a "narrowcast" model of the cable age, one that seeks to echo the partisan point of view of a carefully cultivated target audience and to amplify their assumptions back to them. Engaging and enraging viewers became the primary aim, it seems, not any conventional journalistic commitment to the truth. (Indeed, when its popular host Tucker Carlson was sued for slander, Fox News own lawyers argued that Carlson's on-air statements "cannot reasonably be interpreted as facts" because the show clearly engages in "exaggeration" and "non-literal commentary.") Importantly, the conservative media ecosystem was augmented by the even more wide-open world of social media, especially Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, where the tendency to find like-minded partisans and the freedom from fact-checkers took disinformation to new depths. Taken together, these venues have given far-right lies unprecedented access to significant numbers of Americans and, just as important, let ordinary Americans spread lies to one another as well. As a result, misinformation and disinformation have infused our debates about almost every pertinent political question. The second significant change, related to the first, is the devolution of the Republican Party's commitment to truth. All political parties, by their very need to pull in voters and push them to the polls, have long engaged in various versions of political spin, privileging selective evidence and occasional outright lies. But, until recently, Republicans fashioned themselves as realists who would keep the irrational idealism of Democrats in check. Despite his own record of drifting away from facts in ways big and small, President Ronald Reagan took pride in presenting his brand of conservatism as one committed to clear-eyed truths. "It isn't so much that liberals are ignorant," he liked to say. "It's just that they know so many things that aren't so." Within a generation of the Reagan era, however, Republicans' self-image as realists respecting hard facts had taken a beating. "Remember Republicans?" the screenwriter and Bush-era blogger John Rogers asked in 2004. "Sober men in suits, pipes, who'd nod thoughtfully over their latest tract on market-driven fiscal conservatism while grinding out the numbers on rocket science ... How did they become the party of fairy dust and make believe? How did they become the anti-science guys? The anti-fact guys? The anti-logic guys?" Surprisingly, Republicans largely did it to themselves. In 2004 a top aide to President George W. Bush famously scoffed at what he called "the reality-based community." In foreign affairs and domestic policies alike, the administration engaged in a running battle with experts and the facts they carried with them.¹⁰ By 2008, the shift had become clear, with prominent politicians like Alaska governor Sarah Palin, the party's vice-presidential candidate, positioning themselves against intellectuals, universities, the media, and other sources of valid information.'' During the Obama era, out-of-power Republicans felt freer to criticize what the administration was doing and craft fantastical complaints about what it was not. They propagated wild conspiracies about the existence of "death panels" in the Affordable Care Act and spread claims that the program would provide coverage to undocumented immigrants.'² When Obama pushed back against the latter falsehood in a formal address to a joint session of Congress, Republican congressman Joe Wilson yelled out "You lie!" Even after fact-checkers proved that the president had not, in fact, lied, Wilson remained undeterred, promoting his outburst in a fund-raising pitch that quickly raked in a million dollars. During the 2012 presidential campaign, Republicans devoted themselves to similar attacks on facts, ranging from "unskew-ing" poll numbers they didn't like to dismissing employment statistics they found "suspicious."¹⁴ Notably, as the party drifted further and further from the facts, Donald Trump gained a foothold in conservative circles by spreading the "birther" conspiracy that Barack Obama had not been born in the United States and was therefore ineligible to be president.¹5 With Trump's own run for president four years later and the ascendancy of the QAnon conspiracy on the far-right fringes, the transformation was complete.¹⁶ The current war on truth has unfolded along multiple fronts. The fields of science, medicine, law, and public policy, among others, have been the subject of sustained assaults. But history too has come under attack, and for obvious reasons. As George Orwell famously observed in his dystopian novel 1984, "Who controls the past controls the future."¹⁷ Claims about what happened before are, in some sense, claims about what can or cannot happen again. But such claims can be misleading and even malignant. In their classic work Thinking in Time, Ernest May and Richard Neustadt explored the ways in which clumsy misapplications of history can create catastrophes in public policy as the "lessons" of the past become limitations on the present, or worse.¹⁸ As Sarah Maza has echoed in her own work, "Trying to fit a scenario from the past onto one in the present can be disastrous: 'We will liberate Iraq, as we did Europe! 'Don't go for a diplomatic solution-remember Munich!"¹⁹ Narratives about the past can distort the present in less obvious ways as well. If people allow themselves to become "complaisant hostages of the pasts they create," in the words of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, they find it impossible to imagine futures that are substantially different. 20 The recent controversies over Confederate monuments are a prominent case in-point. Largely constructed in the early twentieth century, these statues and memorials were part of a campaign to promote the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, an alternate version of the past that whitewashed the role of slavery in the rebellion and recast traitors who warred against the United States as American patriots. Generations raised under this consciously crafted mythology came to believe that act of spin was "history," and they have naturally seen efforts to undo the damage of the Lost Cause mythos-to restore the real historical record as a devious attempt to "rewrite history." Efforts to reshape narratives about the US past thus became a central theme of the conservative movement in general and the Trump adminis-tration in particular. From its very first hours, when White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer lied that the new president had "the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period," the Trump White House repeatedly made outlandish claims about its "unprecedented" place in history-how Trump's approval ratings were the highest ever, how he was the first to do this or the best to do that, how past presidents like Jackson and Lincoln and Reagan were mere forerunners of his greatness, etc. With the Republican Party echoing its claims and right-wing media voices amplifying them, the Trump White House represented a concerted effort to rewrite history in real time.²¹ These efforts culminated in the closing months of the administration with the creation of the President's Advisory 1776 Commission. The commission would provide, the president promised, a version of history that would enable "patriotic education," but that goal is inherently at odds with the study of history. A history that seeks to exalt a nation's strengths without examining its shortcomings, that values feeling good over thinking hard, that embraces simplistic celebration over complex understanding, isn't history; it's propaganda. To that end, the "1776 Report"-whose authors notably included no American historians-was rushed into print in the very final days of the Trump presidency, one final effort to twist the record. Among other distortions, the report compared nineteenth-century supporters of slavery to contemporary proponents of "identity politics" and equated early twentieth-century progressivism with fascism.²² When Trump finally left office, Republicans in Congress and in state legislatures picked up his "history war" as their own. They have worked to block the teaching of popular histories such as the New York Times' 1619 Project and turned the advanced legal field of critical race theory into a threat that is allegedly menacing elementary schoolchildren. 23 William F. Buckley famously defined a conservative as someone who "stands athwart history, yelling Stop," but conservatives in our era have increasingly focused on thwarting history, full stop. To be sure, political debates about history are nothing new. But a brief look at the most recent one-the so-called history wars that unfolded in the mid-1990s-shows the ways in which our current debate is different from what's come before. First, there was a controversy over a proposal for a set of national history standards. The idea, launched as a joint program by George H. W. Bush's Department of Education and the National Endowment for the Humanities, seemed to have a thoroughly conservative lineage. NEH Chair Lynne Cheney, wife of then secretary of defense and future vice president Dick Cheney, said the standards were needed to strengthen Americans' mastery of basic historical facts. Yet she acknowledged that interpretations of those facts might well vary. "History," she noted in 1991, "is contentious." The draft of the standards revealed that admission to be an understatement. Reflecting the ways the historical profession had shifted away from conventional tropes of Western civilization and "Great Man history" over the previous decades and broadened the ana-lytical lens to account for the experiences of working-class people, racial and religious minorities, women, gays and lesbians, and other previously overlooked groups, the standards proposed by the academics and administrators recruited for the project quickly became a new front in the culture wars of the early 1990s. In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Lynne Cheney denounced them for providing an overly "grim and gloomy" interpretation of US history. Other conservatives washed their hands of the project as well, but so did the whole political establishment. In a stunning rebuke, ninety-nine US senators voted to condemn the standards, and the project was abandoned.²⁴ In 1995 a similarly fierce controversy unfolded over the Smithsonian Institution's plan to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the atom bombing of Hiroshima. The centerpiece of the exhibit would be the Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber that carried out the mission; the controversy came over how to contextualize the display. Curators insisted that they sought only to provide an "honest and balanced" narrative of the event, but opponents including military and veterans' organizations criticized the exhibit for providing what they saw as a forced false equivalence between the United States and Japan. Republican congressman Tom Lewis summed up the feeling of many on the right when he said the Smithsonian's job was "to tell history, not rewrite it." The director of the museum redid the display to avoid any controversy and, indeed, virtually even any commentary, displaying the plane on its own as a "fact" devoid of "interpretation." And that, in turn, led to protests from historians. The Organization of American Historians formally condemned "revisionist interpretations of history" that came about not from scholarly motives, but rather from patriotic demands or political considerations. Despite the controversy, historians resolved to maintain their public engagement. "The only alternative to learning from this tragedy," David Thelen wrote in a roundtable for the Journal of American History, "is to retreat into professional harbors where we talk only 'with' ourselves."²⁵ Although those debates remind us how common it has been for history to become politicized, the tumult of the 1990s represented a crisis that was qualitatively different from the one we now face. As Joyce Appleby, Margaret Jacob, and Lynn Hunt wrote in Telling the Truth About History, it is one thing to acknowledge how historians were influenced by a particular context and could therefore disagree about how to interpret certain facts; it is quite another thing to ignore the facts altogether. In the past, Americans have argued about which facts were more important in their explanatory power or causal emphasis; in the present, we are often reduced to arguing about which facts are even facts. Unmooring our debates from some shared understanding of facts inevitably makes constructive dialogue impossible because there is no shared starting point. This shift has been driven by the rise of a new generation of amateur historians who, lacking any training in the field or familiarity with its norms, have felt freer to write a history that begins with its conclusions and works backward to find-or invent, if need be some sort of evidence that will seem to support it. A cottage industry on the right, in particular, has flourished with partisan authors producing a partisan version of the past to please partisan audiences, effectively replicating the "narrowcasting" approach of conservative cable news. Often, these arguments are based on "facts" that simply aren't facts or on narratives that fundamentally misconstrue what we know from the archives. Decades of well-regarded research have been simply disregarded for the sake of convenience; academic consensus built painstakingly over time has been waved away as more "fake news." The public, as a result, is inundated with wild claims about history that don't match what any legitimate historian-on the right, left, or center-would deem to be true. For historians, this assault on history represents a new front in a long-standing campaign to engage and educate the general public about our shared history. For all the clichés about academics being shut off from the real world in ivory towers, American historians have long worked to bring their expertise about the past into their present. In 1931 Carl Becker used his presidential address to the American Historical Association to remind his colleagues that their archival research and scholarly work was only the start. "The history that lies inert in unread books," he chided, "does no work in the world."²⁷ Becker's call for historians to share their insights and illuminate public debate has been answered time and time again. In the early days of the civil rights movement, for instance, John Hope Franklin and C. Vann Woodward confronted then- commonplace myths about the origins and operations of segregation. During the Vietnam War, a new generation of scholars such as William Appleman Williams and Gabriel Kolko challenged long-standing legends about the workings of US foreign policy. Social and cultural historians in the 1970s and 1980s wrote new histories of the nation from the bottom up, expanding our view to include long-overlooked perspectives on gender, race, and ethnic identities and, in the process, showing that narrow narratives focused solely on political leaders at the top obscured more than they revealed. Despite the fact that the term revisionist history is often thrown around by nonhistorians as an insult, in truth all good historical work is at heart "revisionist" in that it uses new findings from the archives or new perspectives from historians to improve, to perfect- and, yes, to revise our understanding of the past. Today, yet another generation of historians is working once again to bring historical scholarship out of academic circles, this time to push back against misinformation in the public sphere. Writing op-eds and essays for general audiences; engaging the public through appearances on television, radio, and podcasts; and being active on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Substack, hundreds if not thousands of historians have been working to provide a counterbalance and corrections to the misinformation distorting our national dialogue. Such work has incredible value, yet historians still do their best work in the longer written forms of books, articles, and edited collections that allow us both to express our thoughts with precision in the text and provide ample evidence in the endnotes. This volume has brought together historians who have been actively engaging the general public through the short forms of modern media and has provided them a platform where they might expand those engagements into fuller essays that reflect the best scholarly traditions of the profession. The lies and legends addressed in the twenty essays in this edited collection are by no means the only ones prevalent in public discourse today, but they represent some of the most pressing distortions of the past in the present moment. Because there has been such a robust debate over the role of slavery in America's political development by contributors and supporters of the 1619 Project as well as by its critics, we decided to focus our limited space here on other issues that have not received as much attention. Many of the lies and legends in this collection, as we have already noted, stem from a deliberate campaign of disinformation from the political Right. Some of these have obvious partisan motives, such as the efforts to portray Democratic programs such as the New Deal or Great Society as misguided failures or the campaign to present the "Reagan Revolution" as an unbridled success. Others have worked to bolster broad ideological stances that reinforce the modern Right, framing the free market as wholly good or democratic socialism as wholly bad, for instance, or characterizing feminism as a deliberate plot against the family. Whereas those distortions embody the kind of predictable spin that has long been a part of US party politics, a more ominous strand of disinformation-focused on racial issues and stoking racial resentment-has surged to the forefront in recent years, driven in large part by the rise of white nationalism and the inroads it has made in Republican politics. Not long ago, during the time of George H. W. Bush, the GOP worked aggressively to confront past incidents of racism, with its leaders even going so far as to offer formal apologies for past practices like the "southern strategy." However, that push for reckoning and reconciliation was abruptly abandoned in the Trump era and replaced by outright denialism. Rather than apologize for the southern strategy, new voices on the right simply asserted that there had never been a southern strategy and that, as a result, there was nothing to apologize for. Seeking to paper over proof of racism in the movement's past and present, they have tried to rewrite the history of a range of issues: immigration and the border, civil rights protests and white backlash, police violence and voter fraud. These efforts have sought to retrofit history as a rationale for present policies and programs. Although partisan motives animate much of the current crisis of misinformation, this volume also addresses a number of lies and legends that were born long before this moment and spread well beyond a single political party or ideology. These "bipartisan" myths, without any overt motive behind them, have proved more stubborn than the partisan ones. Some of these misunderstandings are rooted in a persistent belief in American exceptionalism, expressed both generally and also in the particulars, as in claims that America has never been an empire or that Americans have not previously engaged in insurrections. Other myths have invented false pasts about "vanishing" Native Americans or a virtuous policy of "America First"-to undergird the same claims of American exceptionalism. Americans across the political spectrum have embraced these arguments, but such widespread acceptance of a myth still doesn't make it true. Misinformation is wrong, no matter how narrowly or widely it is held. This collection is by no means exhaustive in its coverage. There are other significant myths and misunderstandings we haven't addressed in this limited space, and there will surely be new lies and legends created in the coming years. But we hope that this intervention by some of the most prominent historians in the United States can serve as a model of sorts, both for the broader work done by historians engaged in the public sphere and for the broader debates that Americans outside the historical profession can and should have with one another. We need to see the past clearly in order to understand where we stand now and where we might go in the future.