Many of the book’s essays-like those by Elizabeth Hinton, Daniel Immerwahr, and Eric Rauchway-are exemplary models of political and cultural history. And by localizing the threat of misinformation and disinformation almost exclusively within certain far-right segments of the conservative movement and the Republican Party, Myth America absolves not only other stripes of conservatism, but also the milquetoast technocratic liberalism that helped set the stage for this moment. By implying that misinformation is the principal cause of the partisan rancor, violence, and general dysfunction that mark our current political moment, the collection obscures our much bigger problems. The book fundamentally misunderstands the crises facing the U.S. In its attempt to explode particular myths, however, Myth America engages in its own mythmaking. Only by grappling with the past as it actually happened, Kruse and Zelizer assert, can Americans “understand where we stand now and where we might go in the future.” Their new edited collection, Myth America, looks to debunk certain “legends and lies” about the American past-from the idea that “the framers believed in ‘republics’ but disdained ‘democracy’ ” (dismantled in an essay by Akhil Reed Amar) to the notion that activists used “good” (mild and inoffensive) protest tactics during the Black freedom struggle of the mid-20 th century (handled in a piece by Glenda Gilmore). Now Kruse and Zelizer have assembled some of their most esteemed colleagues to set the record straight. The vanishingly thin line between fact and fiction, truth and untruth, Kruse and Zelizer insist, sits at the center of the interlocking political crises in which Americans now find themselves. We now live in a post-truth world, one in which “alternative facts” hold freight while inconvenient truths can be dismissed as “fake news.” In this “age of disinformation,” as Princeton historians Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer characterize it, nefarious actors distort the historical record without compunction.

Myth america kruse