Fault Lines Read online

  To our families

  for all their support, encouragement, and love

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1

  A CRISIS OF LEGITIMACY

  CHAPTER 2

  A CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE

  CHAPTER 3

  A CRISIS OF IDENTITY

  CHAPTER 4

  A CRISIS OF EQUALITY

  CHAPTER 5

  TURNING RIGHT

  CHAPTER 6

  FIGHTING RIGHT

  CHAPTER 7

  CHANGING CHANNELS

  CHAPTER 8

  DIVIDING AMERICA

  CHAPTER 9

  NEW WORLD ORDERS

  CHAPTER 10

  THE ROARING 1990s

  CHAPTER 11

  SCANDALIZED

  CHAPTER 12

  COMPASSION AND TERROR

  CHAPTER 13

  THE POLITICS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

  CHAPTER 14

  POLARIZED POLITICS

  CHAPTER 15

  THE TRUMP EFFECT

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Fault Lines

  Introduction

  WHEN PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA DELIVERED HIS FAREWELL address to the nation in January 2017, much of the country still seemed in shock over the election two months before. In one of the most surprising results in American political history, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, an experienced public servant with a lengthy resume, had lost the presidential race to real estate developer and reality television star Donald J. Trump. Defying the polls and the pundits, the political novice had pulled off a stunning upset. In a sign of the unlikely nature of his win, Trump pieced together an improbable patchwork of states to secure his victory in the electoral college, even though he lost the popular vote by a margin of nearly three million ballots nationwide.

  To many observers, Trump’s stunning victory revealed a nation deeply divided. More troubling, the president-elect had come to power largely by widening those divisions. In a bruising bare-knuckle campaign, he had thrown aside the traditional niceties of American politics and repeatedly taunted both his own party rivals in the race for the Republican nomination and then his general election opponent as well. Most ominously, Trump had singled out large segments of American society for attack. He characterized Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers and proposed barring Muslims from entering the country; he mocked a disabled reporter in a campaign appearance and was even caught on tape bragging about sexually assaulting women. Aside from the standard election-night rhetoric about uniting the nation, the incoming president showed little inclination to bring the country together. With control of the White House, both houses of Congress, and thirty-three state governor’s mansions, the Republican Party now had the most dominant presence in American politics since just before the Great Depression. As a result, the president-elect and his allies saw little need to reach out to the opposition party in any effort to find common ground.

  Accordingly, in his farewell address, President Obama felt forced to address the tension himself. In keeping with past practices, the departing chief executive spoke about the many accomplishments of his administration. Refusing to abandon the hopes that he had expressed in his famous keynote speech to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Obama listed the many ways in which the basic foundation of the country remained strong and, in areas like the overall economy, stronger than it had been before.

  Yet, Obama warned, America’s democracy faced a number of serious threats. The first, he noted, was the growing economic inequality that separated the rich from the poor and left the middle class in a state of insecure anxiety. He pointed in particular to “the laid off factory worker, the waitress or health care worker who’s just barely getting by and struggling to pay the bills. Convinced that the game is fixed against them, that their government only serves the interests of the powerful. That’s a recipe for more cynicism and polarization in our politics.”

  The second threat to democracy, racial division, was more difficult for Obama to address. His election as the first African American president had initially raised hopes about the dawn of a “postracial America.” Obama’s ascendancy, one observer insisted, had been “a seismic event” that sent the troubled history of race relations “crashing into apparent obsolescence.” But racial divisions—broadly defined and deeply rooted in the nation’s history—had never really gone away. Racial minorities still lived in a country in which many key institutions didn’t afford the same benefits to them that they did to whites. The criminal justice system, in particular, seemed to have pronounced biases. Even though the previous years had seen a steady stream of videos showing unarmed African Americans being killed by police officers in suspect circumstances, much of the nation still refused to recognize the problem, much less show a willingness to confront it.1

  The third threat to democracy, Obama noted, was political. The deep degree of partisan polarization had been painstakingly clear throughout the 2016 presidential election. The distance between the two major parties—between an imagined Republican “red America” and a Democratic “blue America”—had grown so pronounced that it consumed most talk among the nation’s pundits and scholars. Polarization, the hardening of partisan loyalties and the refusal to compromise, not only damaged the health of the polity, the departing president warned, but also prevented the government from handling pressing issues like climate change.

  Obama’s farewell address touched on trends that had been long in the making, not just through his presidency, but for decades before him. In many ways, these three basic “fault lines” of division—the economic, racial, and political lines Obama outlined, plus a fourth line on gender and sexuality—had always been part of the national experience. For much of the twentieth century, however, strong centripetal forces pushed back against these traditional sources of discord and tension. A robust federal government, a thriving middle-class economy, and a powerful union movement had each, in its own significant way, ameliorated these sources of division. But the turbulent decade of the 1960s caused the common ground of the mid-twentieth century to crumble beneath Americans’ feet. Rather than seek to find new sources of agreement, the nation reconstituted itself in the 1970s and the decades that followed in ways that augmented and institutionalized these lines of division. Believing consensus was beyond reach, Americans sought to guarantee that different voices could be heard and divergent views could be seen. Abandoning the search for common ground in political and economic life, they increasingly valued competition and even conflict. From the 1970s on, the United States would seem less and less united with each passing decade.

  WHILE THESE FAULT LINES in America were important, so too were the lines Americans were fed about who was at fault. The media became increasingly fractured during these decades, changing from a fairly rigid industry dominated by three television networks and a handful of prominent newspapers to a more cluttered, chaotic landscape. The realm of what might be counted as “media” was soon populated by practitioners who ranged from professional reporters to a growing rank of partisan pundits and, with the rise of the internet, ordinary Americans who used platforms like Facebook and Twitter to break (or fake) news of their own. The somewhat forced “consensus” of the postwar era gave way to chaos, in which virtually every slice of the American populace found an outlet that was willing to reflect and refract the news in ways that confirmed and deepened their own existing biases.

  Americans received Obama’s farewell address, for instance, over separate channels. Most did not hear it live and direct, as they would have in the heyday of network television, but digested it through sensational headlines and selected online clips. They receive
d the speech not as it was intended, but according to their own intent, on their own terms and on their own time. Like all other news in their lives, it was translated through their preferred partisan outlets and transmitted directly to their own personal devices. In the new era, messengers mattered as much as the message, if not more.

  For liberals, coverage of the Democrat’s departure was sentimental and celebratory. On Twitter, for instance, those who “followed” the president’s official account first saw him preview the speech, noting his plans to discuss “the remarkable progress that you made possible these past 8 years.” Hours before the address, the left-leaning cable news channel MSNBC featured a countdown clock in the corner, ticking off the seconds until the speech with an image of a grinning Obama in the corner. Liberal outlets online, such as the Huffington Post, covered the speech itself uncritically, noting that the president had offered the nation a “heartfelt farewell.” More than that, several posts on the site humanized the drama, noting how “Obama teared up as he spoke about his ‘best friend,’ first lady Michelle Obama.” The site ran a series of lighthearted tweets insisting that even animals were in mourning over his departure: “No One Is Sadder About Barack Obama Leaving Office Than These Pets.” 2

  Those on the right, however, framed the speech in a rather different way. At the conservative media giant Fox News, for instance, the network’s star host Sean Hannity said that Obama’s address “can’t hide a disastrous legacy,” while contributor Laura Ingraham placed blame for all the divisions Obama described directly at the president’s own feet. “He has laid waste to our productivity, to this idea of a vibrant economy, to a foreign policy that has some semblance of pragmatism. He’s laid waste to all of that. We have more racial division in the country.” (Even the emotion Obama showed, the two asserted, was little more than contrived “crocodile tears.”) Meanwhile, the Alt Right website Breitbart.com, whose publisher Steve Bannon led the Trump campaign to its triumph, offered similar criticisms of “Obama’s Farewell Campaign Speech”: “Obama admitted during his speech that the idea of ‘post racial America’ was never realistic,” one piece noted, “but said that race relations were better than they were 10, 20, 30 years ago—conveniently leaving out the eight years of his presidency.” (They, too, mocked the president’s tears, with the Breitbart Daily News satellite radio program deriding the “hour-long, self-congratulatory, snooze fest” from the “Commander-in-Handkerchief.”) 3

  HOW DID WE COME to this? How did the United States fall into such a state of division and discord? While some observers try to pinpoint “the” single source of division in America today, we find that there were multiple forces transforming the nation in these decades. That is the story of this book.

  The sources of division are not entirely obvious. Indeed, as we will show, during the past four decades, the country actually seemed to be coming together in some significant ways. In the marketplace, in the spread of social norms and in the propagation of popular culture, disparate parts of the nation were becoming less and less dissimilar. For all the talk of a deeply divided nation, pollsters found that many issues that were contentious in the political arena, such as LGBTQ rights and women’s rights, were much less so outside of the confines of Washington, DC.

  That said, the forces of division were persistent and powerful, often rooted in institutional forces that moved the nation in destructive directions. The rebellions and discord of the 1960s led to widespread disillusionment and cynicism about the viability, or even the value, of national consensus and unity. As the country moved on from the tumultuous decade, national leaders rebuilt institutions that privileged division, competing views, and fragmentation.4 Shifts in the national economy resulted in the steady disappearance of the kinds of jobs and security that many working-class and middle-class Americans had come to take for granted. The failure to enact public policy that addressed institutional racism and ethnic pluralism ensured that the social tensions that persisted even after the civil rights movement of the 1960s only became more aggravated. Fundamental changes in the political process combined with an aggressive new conservative movement that pushed the GOP sharply to the right to erode the political center in Washington. The victories of the conservative movement were often incomplete. The ideas and institutions of liberalism proved to be more durable than the Right imagined. Fueled by what they had gained but frustrated by how much further they had to go, conservatives in politics and media drove themselves, and the nation, into an ongoing and ever-expanding partisan clash. The decline and demise of the Cold War removed one of the last sources of consensus in American life, allowing for polarization and partisanship to reach new depths. The fracturing of our politics was amplified by a fragmented partisan media, to be sure, but its power was also bolstered by an increasingly polarized population.

  With a wide-angle lens, this book traces the political, economic, racial, and sexual divisions in modern America, but also the cultural and technological changes that confronted and contorted the country along the way. Following these fault lines, in both senses of the term, we examine the history of our divided America.

  CHAPTER 1

  A Crisis of Legitimacy

  TRUST IN GOVERNMENT WAS THE FIRST THING TO GO.

  Washington had loomed large in the previous decades, guiding the nation through crises like the Great Depression, World War II, and the early decades of the Cold War too. Its vision of a unifying “American way of life” offered a powerful countervailing force to other lines of division—race, religion, region, inequality, and gender—that might otherwise have torn the country apart.

  But over the course of the chaotic 1960s, the basic political consensus that had held Americans together started to come undone as those fault lines continued to fracture. Grassroots social movements, especially the struggles for civil rights and feminism, had exposed racial and gender inequalities at the very foundations of American government at home. The growing movement against the war in Vietnam, meanwhile, shattered the so-called “Cold War consensus,” the notion that the spread of Communism must be challenged all around the globe, which had forged a united front in foreign affairs. During the 1970s, in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, the soundness of “the establishment” suddenly seemed in doubt. President Lyndon Johnson had left the White House with his credibility shattered by the war abroad, and then President Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace over scandal at home. In the aftermath, Americans wondered if the entire nation was following its presidents to ruin.

  Watergate

  Initially, the scandal seemed to involve little more than a bungled burglary at the Watergate Complex in Washington, DC. But the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters proved to be just the beginning. Two local reporters for the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, dug into the story, soon discovering that the five burglars had surprisingly deep connections to both Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). During their trial before the US District Court, James McCord, one of the burglars and chief of security for CREEP, sent a letter to Judge John J. Sirica, indicating that other high-ranking officials in the Nixon campaign had been involved too. As the burglars’ trials concluded in March 1973, Judge Sirica surmised that there must have been serious connections between the burglars and the presidential campaign. Over the next months, investigations into those ties only intensified. In May 1973, Attorney General Elliot Richardson appointed a special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, to investigate the president’s men, while a new Senate select committee began holding its own televised hearings in Congress.

  Over the summer of 1973, the various investigations revealed that President Nixon had abused his executive authority in alarming ways. While it was initially unclear what role the president played personally in the break-in, White House aide Alexander Butterfield revealed in July 1973 that the president had tape-recorded all Oval Office conversations. As the press and the public called f
or the release of the tapes, Nixon refused, insisting that presidents had the right to withhold information under certain circumstances. Undeterred, the special prosecutor pressed on. In October 1973, the president lashed out, demanding that the attorney general fire Cox. Richardson not only refused; he resigned in protest. When the deputy attorney general refused the presidential order as well, he too was pushed out. Solicitor General Robert Bork, third in line at Justice, finally did the president’s bidding. For all the drama, the bloodletting of the so-called “Saturday Night Massacre” did nothing to stop the release of the tapes. In July 1974, in the aptly titled case of The United States v. Richard Nixon, the Supreme Court ruled that “executive privilege”—the doctrine that Nixon claimed protected the tapes from public release—did not apply in the investigation of criminal matters like the Watergate break-in. The president had to release the recordings. While the tapes provided some answers, they ultimately raised many more questions. Some had some suspicious erasures, including an eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap in a recording made on a key day in the crisis. Even with that part erased, there was still more than enough evidence to prove convincingly that the president had attempted to obstruct justice in the Watergate investigation.

  As the details of the scandal came to light, Americans watched in shock. The televised hearings before Congress, conducted with equal measures of prosecutorial professionalism and folksy charm by North Carolina’s Democratic senator Sam Ervin Jr., brought the drama directly into their living rooms. The nightly news and morning papers, building on each other’s reporting and amplifying their findings, combined to form a single voice. Day after day, in a steady drumbeat of dramatic headlines, they revealed the secrets of what the president and his men had done behind closed doors, all in the pursuit of power. The nation was stunned to hear all manner of criminal activity—bribery, burglary, wiretapping, intimidation, etc.—casually discussed as business-as-usual inside the Oval Office. Among other things, Americans learned that White House operatives had broken into the office of a private psychiatrist, hoping to discredit Daniel Ellsberg, a former national security staffer who had released the “Pentagon Papers,” secret documents that chronicled the flawed origins and poor planning of the Vietnam War. As the incriminating evidence mounted, the House Judiciary Committee moved to impeach Nixon. When his last remaining allies made it clear that the rest of the full House would follow suit in impeaching the president and the Senate would then vote to convict, the president finally resigned in disgrace on August 9, 1974.