Lynne Cheney’s 1995 work, Telling The Truth, is a remarkably balanced and well supported critique of the impact of postmodern thought on American institutions. Wife of current Vice President, Richard Cheney, she was Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 1986-1992, and she holds a PhD in English.

The book, divided into seven chapters, is written very much like an academic text– every statement supported by evidence and cited. (There are, in fact, more than 35 pages of citation in the End Notes section.) Each chapter examines a different facet of postmodern infiltration of American institutions, including colleges, primary and secondary education, media, law, and, of course, politics. I will quote just one passage from Cheney’s book and let it stand for all the book contains:

That there are no true stories, but only useful ones, no overarching principles, but only the interests of the moment, are ideas now deeply embedded in our culture. We are not the first society in which this has happened; and damaging as the consequences are for us, they have been far more destructive in other places, in the Soviet Union and in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, for example. Nonetheless, there are things that we can learn from the experience of others; and first and foremost among them is the relationship between truth and freedom.

… When we find ourselves faced with situations that violate good sense– whether it is how our children are being taught or how our legal system is abandoning the principles that have long undergirded it– we should, each of us, speak out about what we see. We should not let ourselves be intimidated by seemingly sophisticated statements about how there is no reality and thus no truth… Complete objectivity may be beyond our reach, but we can achieve a significant degree of it, certainly enough to understand that social arrangements are mutable and to make reasoned judgments about how the ones our society has chosen measure up. Faced with demands that those arrangements change, citizens of a democracy should demand reasoned argument and make clear that invective and name-calling do not fall into that category.

If there is one criticism I have of Telling The Truth, it is that Cheney tends to credit too heavily Michel Foucault with advancing the idea of reality as a social construct. He did, of course. But by the time Foucault was writing I, Pierre Riviere, Peter Berger had already written The Social Construction Of Reality, which is an important text in the field of sociology and is completely apolitical.

Despite that small criticism, Cheney examines her subject with very little political bias, citing incidents of postmodern damage at both ends of the political spectrum. More, she does so thoroughly and supports every claim and example with citation. The book is widely criticized by socialists and postmodern champions, as is expected, but of the critiques I’ve read, they have all been rife with the “invective and name-calling” Cheney rightly places outside the arena of rational discourse.