Robert S. Mcelvaine, Salon

The present political chaos is connected with the decay of language.
— George Orwell (1946)

Words have meanings. Words have power. Words influence the way people think and act. Words must be used with precision if the people who read them are not to be misled.

This article first appeared in Salon.

No honest journalist would disagree with any of those four sentences....

It is often said that history is a story told by the winners. It might be more accurate to say that those who tell their story as history and get others to believe it thereby make themselves the winners. That happened on a grand scale in the United States from the late 19th century into the 1960s. That fact is essential for us to understand as right-wing extremists again seek to dictate that a fraudulent version of the American past be taught in schools.

This article first appeared in Salon.

Within a few decades after the Civil War, it came to be the losers' stories of "a land of Cavaliers and cotton fields," moonlight and magnolias, kindly masters and happy slaves, a glorious "Lost Cause" and a horrible period of "Black Reconstruction" that were widely accepted as accurate history. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the nation was reunited on the basis of a tacit armistice in which the South accepted that the Union was indissoluble and white Americans outside the South accepted the Southern doctrine that people of African ancestry were innately inferior. That acceptance was facilitated by the popularity of the pseudoscience of social Darwinism and a fabricated story that Reconstruction had been a monstrous time of rule by ignorant black people, rather than the largely successful period of progressive and democratic reform that it actually was....

This summer we are experiencing the effects of global climate change at an accelerating pace, but the political climate can change more rapidly still.

Three weeks ago, I wrote here about "Seven Days in June," a right-wing coup carried out without violence, but with considerable malice aforethought by the Supreme Court in the final week of its term. At that point, and for some days thereafter, most political observers still foresaw a Republican midterm landslide in the House this November, and many believed the GOP might also win a majority in the Senate. That changed dramatically in the last week of July.

Hints of a political climate change began almost immediately after the court's coup. The brazen reversal of women's right to control their own bodies produced a significant turn toward the Democrats. The average of six generic congressional polls taken before and after the court's Dobbs decision — which struck down the 49-year-old precedent of Roe v. Wade — found a gain of three points for the Democrats. Then, gleeful right-wing zealots in several states declared, in effect, Yes, we do favor forcing 10-year-old rape victims and women whose lives are endangered by a pregnancy to carry fetuses to term—and we're proud of it! The turn away from Republicans began to pick up more steam. A Suffolk University/USA Today poll conducted between July 22 and 25 found that abortion had risen to the second most important issue to registered voters. ...