Book: ‘This America’ pits rise in nationalism against championing of liberal democracy

Jill Lepore, author of These Truths, argues that supporters of free and fair liberal government can’t just hold their noses and wait for voters to realize that democracy is better than autocracy.

“Nations, to make sense of themselves, need some kind of agreed-upon past,” Jill Lepore writes in her latest book, This America: The Case for the Nation. “They can get it from scholars or they can get it from demagogues.”

We know Lepore thinks America’s national history is worth studying and writing. Just last year, she published an epic, 900-plus page single-volume history of the United States, which NPR reviewed at the time as “magnificent.” The aim of this much, much more slender book — she calls it “a long essay, really” — is much less clear.

Lepore’s main point is that while champions of liberal democracy were celebrating the dawn of a cosmopolitan, interconnected, multi-cultural global community, an ugly, xenophobic nationalism was quietly taking root and reemerging as a powerful political force. This is an idea well-documented in recent books, and rightly so, as a global populist and autocratic wave shows no signs of weakening. This America’s contribution to this booming genre: an argument that the advocates for liberal democracy ceded the field of studying and interpreting American history to nationalists — and, by doing so, inadvertently gave fuel to a fire they thought was completely extinguished.

There are two terms worth spelling out here. “Liberal” doesn’t refer to left-leaning political views, but rather the broader geopolitical term Lepore defines as “the belief that people are good and should be free, and that people erect governments in order to guarantee that freedom.” As for the difference between nationalism and patriotism, Lepore puts it this way: “Patriotism is animated by love, nationalism by hatred.” More at NPR.com