The same can be said about the rise of white nationalism in the wake of mass immigration. The last time the foreign-born as a percentage of the population rivaled ours today, a brutally draconian immigration law was imposed, with specific racial categories for exclusion, and the Klan turned not just against blacks but against Catholics and Jews as well. Ditto the consistency of political extremism: from John Brown to Malcolm X to Black Lives Matter. Ditto huge economic inequality — in the 1920s and 2010s. Rhetorical excess? “We see dangerous signs of Hitlerism in the Goldwater campaign,” opined one Martin Luther King Jr. Social breakdown? It would be hard to match the late 1960s, when the achievement of civil rights was followed by an explosion of mass violence, beginning in Watts, Los Angeles, in 1965, and the 1970s, when domestic terrorism was everywhere.
Lepore panders a little to liberal sensibilities. And so in her account, Communism was no real threat at all; Nixon was simply playing the demagogue in going after Alger Hiss (she doesn’t note that Hiss was indeed a Soviet spy and a traitor). Ronald Reagan gets no credit for the implosion of the Soviet Union. Clinton’s crime bill was a terrible failure because of mass incarceration, and yet the extraordinary decline in crime that followed does not earn a mention. But she is withering about the New Left, and liberalism’s turn toward elitism and identity politics. And she highlights truths that are usually dim-lit: that the first attempt at a welfare state came in the South, where women secured a war widow’s pension; that the conservative movement was made possible by women, especially Phyllis Schlafly; that the gay rights movement only succeeded when it took a conservative turn. She sees John F. Kennedy, rightly, as a conservative
