STEVE INSKEEP, BYLINE: This year marks the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, and we're learning about the world America made then and how we're changing it now. Last week, Walter Isaacson told us U.S.-led global institutions and free trade brought benefits - just not for all.
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WALTER ISAACSON: And I think people like myself sometimes underestimated the people being left behind - the harm and resentments they would feel.
INSKEEP: Today, we hear Jill Lepore. Her books include "These Truths: A History Of The United States." She argues the U.S. is downplaying ideals like freedom and self-government, ideals it once promoted overseas.
JILL LEPORE: The postwar moment is when the United States is really attempting to bring that set of universal ideals to the world.
INSKEEP: This promotional video is from the 1950s, featuring a prominent anti- Communist of the time.
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RONALD REAGAN: My name is Ronald Reagan. Last year, the contribution...
INSKEEP: Reagan promoted a Cold War effort that the United States today is defunding.
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REAGAN: And built this powerful 135,000-watt Radio Free Europe transmitter in Western Germany. This station daily pierces the Iron Curtain with the truth.
LEPORE: What's fascinating to me is it, like - that just has all kinds of knock-on effects within the United States because to have your outward-facing posture be we are the beacon of freedom puts a lot of pressure on domestic arrangements.
INSKEEP: What do you mean?
LEPORE: So it becomes, actually, a fairly big problem for the State Department. The United States is still riven by racial injustice. This is still the age of Jim Crow and segregation across the South. There are a series of really international scandals. The finance minister of Ghana comes to the United States. He stops at a Howard Johnson's in Delaware, orders a glass of orange juice. He's told that Blacks are not allowed in the restaurant. The secretary of agriculture of Haiti goes to Mississippi for a conference. He's unable to stay at the hotel where the conference is being held. And it's really hard for the State Department to do the work it thinks it should be doing in these newly independent nations in Asia and in Africa of kind of convincing them to follow the American way when Communist - well, we would call it propaganda, but they're just reporting stories like these about segregation in the United States. It doesn't make democracy sell well.
INSKEEP: What did American domestic leaders do about that?
LEPORE: Well, one thing they did is really put a little bit of extra pressure on the Supreme Court to make the decision that came down in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 that declared segregation unconstitutional as a violation of the 14th Amendment. The attorney general under Truman wrote, racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills, and it raises doubts even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith.
INSKEEP: Jill Lepore says when the Cold War ended, Americans felt less pressure to unify, which gave them greater freedom to speak out.
LEPORE: It is really terrifying, the intensity of it all. I mean, one place easy to look for it is Newt Gingrich.
INSKEEP: The former House speaker famously circulated words that Republicans should use to describe Democrats.
LEPORE: You should call them sick, pathetic, shallow, traitors. You should - words like hypocrisy, radical, devour. The very lexicon that Americans use to talk politically was borrowed from our foreign policy and adapted to our domestic political debates.
INSKEEP: When you bring that history to the present day, what do you think about when you look at the new administration and the way that they're trying to reshape America's place in the world, as well as America at home?
LEPORE: You know, I think that there's been a long history in the United States of people on the left critiquing the idealism of American foreign policy as hypocritical, that this vision or the image of America as this beacon of liberal democracy was a sham. You know, you can think about the many kinds of nefarious - especially covert CIA operations, Latin America...
INSKEEP: Sure.
LEPORE: ...Really portraying that ideal and the commitment to self-determination. And I guess in this moment - well, I mean, I'd take the hypocrisy. Do you know what I mean? Like, the idealism mattered. It mattered for Americans to have a vision of the nation's place in the world as one of moral leadership. That commitment to self-government, the commitment to self-determination, the commitment to equal rights - these mattered to Americans finding ways to meet those obligations to themselves as much as they attempted to meet them or failed to meet them to the world. And so you see here, I think, in this moment of incredible retreat and betrayal of American ideas and ideals, the domestic version of it as well, right? Trump's foreign policy is Trump's domestic policy. It is all about limiting a sense of moral direction, purpose and idealism.
INSKEEP: Jill Lepore, thanks very much for your insights.
LEPORE: Thanks so much, Steve.
INSKEEP: We are hearing many perspectives on the world America made at the end of World War II and where we're taking it now. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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