The American Beast by Jill Lepore: Analysing the hot-button issues of the US

If magazines are a dying breed, nobody told Jill Lepore. At the New Yorker, she’s published essays at a furious clip for the past 10 years, exploring such hot-button issues as inequality, race riots, school shootings, and, yes, Donald Trump. Her title comes from the historian Richard Hofstadter’s line about the nation “slouching into its uncertain future like some huge inarticulate beast”. He must’ve been reading his WB Yeats.

Lepore is a brilliant historian herself, who teaches at Harvard. She sees history as a narrative and digs deep to investigate the root cause of problems. Why does polling exert such a malign influence on elections now? George Gallup’s to blame. He set out in 1932 to predict the odds on his mother-in-law winning an election in Iowa. He got it right – she won – and the pollsters have been peddling algorithms ever since.

Lepore wades into the 845-page government report on the January 6th attack and finds it wanting. It wasn’t an attack, she says, but an insurrection. The tale is history poorly told compared to the Warren report on JFK (“reads like a mystery novel”) or the Starr report on Clinton (“reads like porn”). It lacks drama and fails to convey the full extent of Trump’s guilt.

Politicians in general upset Lepore. They express high-minded ideals, but seldom deliver. She’s appalled by their refusal to act on gun control. One in three Americans knows someone who has been shot, yet few laws exist to restrict the purchase and use of guns due to the lobbying of the National Rifle Association. Lepore visits its president; he shows no remorse.

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She covers election rallies for Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio, but she’s not much of a reporter. Unlike Hunter Thompson, she has no taste for blood sport. He worried about his cup of bourbon spilling into his crotch while driving; she wonders if she’s put the lasagna in the oven for her kids. She isn’t without a sense of humor.

Lepore belongs to the liberal media elite. She does a fair bit of hand-wringing without offering any possible solutions. Yet there’s no denying her legitimate concern for the fate of the republic when she quotes John Adams, who said: “Democracy never lasts long.”