Last fall, the historian Jill Lepore gave an interview to the Chronicle of Higher Education about her career as an historian that sheds a great deal of light about what has happened to history in the last hafl century or so. She described a key moment in her professional evolution.
"My passion as a historian came out of that impetus to tell the stories of people who were left out of the accounts of history that I grew up with. But what I increasingly saw as a young professor was how little of an impact that work had had. I saw how inward a lot of that work was. In the ‘90s, when I was in graduate school, if you walked into a bookstore, the history books would be David McCullough and Steven Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin — these doorstop biographies of presidents and generals. The Father’s Day book trade, as it’s sometimes called. Whether you like those books or don’t like those books, they do not offer Americans an understanding of their past that is useful for living in a pluralistic, multiracial, multiethnic democracy. That’s not what they’re trying to do."
Lepore is a Gen Xer who didn't reach college until the 1980s, by which time the prejudice against that kind of book in academia was well advanced. The Silent and Boom generations had sold the idea that the mainstream story of American history was a fraud, designed to conceal centuries of oppression of black Americans, women, Indians, and homosexuals. That is what Lepore was referring to when she mentioned a "pluralistic, multiracial, multiethnic democracy." We cannot understand our place in American society, she is arguing, without paying attention to the particular status of groups to whom we belong and their place in various hierarchies. Any "understanding of the past" that lacks that focus, she says, is not "useful" for living in our nation.
I would like to argue the opposite.
It is only after beginning work on the political history of the early 19th-century United States that I have come to appreciate what an extraordinary document the United States Constitution is. Almost anyone on the Left now dismisses it on the grounds that it did not guarantee Americans of different races and sexes equal rights. Yet it now seems more significant to me that there is literally nothing in the original US Constitution that explicitly denies anyone equal rights. It does not define the right to vote at all, leaving the qualifications of voters for the House of Representatives up to each individual state--which is why a number of states had allowed votes for black men or women well before the 15th or 19th Amendment was passed. In some explicit ways it extends rights further than many states did. It bans any religious test for federal office, even though some states did not allow adherents of certain religions to hold office. Some states also had property qualifications for elected officials, but the Constitution had no such qualifications for Congressmen, Senators, or Presidents. It carefully avoided using the word "slave," allowing some politicians to claim by the 1820s that there was no federal right to own slaves. Most significantly of all, in my opinion, the Constitution does not include the words "men," "women," "white," or "black". "Person" is the only word used to refer to inhabitants of the United States.
To my mind, those aspects of the Constitution make it an ideal political charter for "a pluralistic, multiethnic, multiracial democracy." Over the last half century our new left, so dominant in academia, has insisted that we must focus on the characteristics that divide us, and that in my opinion has contributed enormously to the polarization of our society and our inability to united behind a common goal. We will not develop more healthy politics and government until we can focus once again, as we did in the middle decades of the last century, on what unites us and on the things that either benefit or threaten us all. The books that Lepore dismissed--while they varied widely in quality--described attempts to create our Constitution and society and make them work. Our biggest problem, I think, is our continually increasing economic inequality, and that problem cuts across racial and gender lines far more than we tend to recognize. 15 million white Americans, 8 million black Americans, and 14 million Hispanic Americans live in poverty, but the Democratic Party frequently talks as if poverty was primarily a racial problem--and while nearly all poor black people and most poor Hispanics vote Democratic, most poor whites now vote Republican. The structure of our economy--so much changed over the last forty years or so--produces too many superrich people and too many poor ones, and that problem can't be solved by trying to favor some groups over others. Our educational system, to judge from mandatory test scores, is failing children of all races at growing rates. The AI revolution threatens the livelihoods of Americans of all kinds, and disastrous, inflationary wars affect us all as well.
Despite the Constitution, we have never treated each other completely equally--but that fault, dear Brutus, is not in our Constitution, but in ourselves. We need to keep the idea of colorblindness alive because it is the only possible basis for generally fair treatment. Affirmative action and DEI have done a lot to diversify our elite, but without doing anything for the tens of millions of Americans of all races who will never belong to the elite. Meanwhile, we have to prove, for the first time since the early 1960s, that we all really can sacrifice for the common good and achieve things as a society that can inspire us all. We failed to do that in response to 9/11, or the 2008 financial crisis, or the pandemic. We may have to live for a long time without that kind of inspirational glue.
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