"Lepore's pairing of Carmichael and Reagan is telling. Other historians charting the rise of the right have invoked such structural and economic factors as white flight to the suburbs and the rise of corporate-funded think tanks. Her narrative stresses what she views as the ill-advised intransigence of the left. 'With each new form of public protest, Reagan's political capital grew,' she explains. As campus activists 'descended into disenchantment and a profound alienation from the idea of America itself,' Republicans fed off that disenchantment. Conservatism surged, she writes, when liberalism faltered because 'the idea of identity replaced the idea of equality.'"
Daniel Immerwahr at The Nation reviews Jill Lepore's These Truths and This America.
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