How ‘post-truth’ left-wingers created the very presidency they hate.
HOW ‘POST-TRUTH’ LEFT-WINGERS CREATED THE VERY PRESIDENCY THEY HATE
It is a rare thing in the hyper-partisan cacophony of the current Trumpian moment that a comprehensible and honest American accounting presents itself that makes some clear sense of the cultural pathologies that have led directly to the dystopian abyss where the world’s liberal democracies are now perilously teetering.
That’s what’s on offer from Michiko Kakutani, after more than 30 years as The New York Times’ chief book critic, in her just-published book, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump. Its value is in its lucidity, its persuasiveness, and its courage to lay out a patient elucidation of the slovenly habits of mind most closely associated with the American academic “left” that effectively cleared the field for President Donald Trump’s lies in the first place.
It should be uncontroversial by now that Trump — whose bloody-mindedness and cynicism would be catastrophic enough were he merely the vulgar and dangerous demagogue any sensible person will understand him to be — is also a pathological liar of amazing profligacy.
Kakutani lays that case out sufficiently, but keeping track of Trump’s lies and his casual and constant uttering of falsehoods was already a sub-genre of serious journalism. The Washington Post counted 2,140 untruths in Trump’s claims during his first year in office. Going back over Trump’s 18-month record to his inauguration speech of Jan. 20, 2017, The Toronto Star’s Washington correspondent Daniel Dale counts 1,929 falsehoods up to July 1.
But what Kakutani more usefully and carefully explains is exactly how this moment in history — the bizarre phenomenon of at least one-third of the American public not believing that Trump is a liar, or not caring — owes its origins to a nihilistic intellectual milieu arising from the 1960s and a section of the New Left. In the darkest of ironies, Trumpism emerged from “the gospel of postmodernism,” as Kakutani describes it: Cultural relativism and the radical-chic proposition that there are no universal truths, that “facts are fungible and socially constructed.”
By the time Trump came along, enlightenment ideals had been cast aside as “vestiges of old patriarchal and imperialist thinking,” and a toxic nihilism that had spread throughout the culture, in literature, film, popular culture and politics eventually came to upend American conservatism, too. A new species of Republican activist took on the faddish habits of the bourgeois “left,” joining in to reject the evidence for anthropogenic climate change and the efficacy of vaccines, and to insist that creationism and “intelligent design” be taught alongside the science of evolution. Paranoia “increasingly migrated from the Left — which blamed the military-industrial complex for Vietnam — to the Right, with alt-right trolls and Republican members of Congress now blaming the so-called deep state for plotting against the president,” Kakutani writes.
It was this phenomenon — the rubbishing of Enlightenment ideas about truth itself — that combined in a perfect “ecosystem” conducive to the rise of Trumpism: the fusion of news and entertainment, the emergence of rabid, right-wing media, the breakdown of social cohesion, a rejection of expertise by both the right and the left, the collapse of a common understanding of American history, and the retreat of citizens into group-identity silos. Besides all that, “Hillary Clinton’s campaign basically wrote off the white working-class vote,” Kakutani points out. And with the good fortune of an Electoral College twist, Trump barged his way into the Oval Office.
Unmoored from a conventional, common understanding of what constitutes truth, Americans had become dangerously susceptible to demagoguery, hysteria, and even subversion by a foreign power.
The ease with which Americans on both the right and the left can be manipulated into forming groupidentity camps to scream at one another is perfectly illustrated by a successful Russian “dezinformatsiya” (disinformation) operation in May 2016. A fake Facebook account called Heart of Texas set up by the Internet Research Agency, a notorious troll factory in St. Petersburg, Russia, organized a “Stop the Islamization of Texas” rally in Houston. Disclosures to Congress by Facebook executives revealed that a same-day counterprotest across the street from the Houston rally turned out to have been organized by another fake Russian account, United Muslims of America.
Facebook’s review of 130 fake accounts set up by the Internet Research Agency found that 13 accounts managed to reach 126 million Americans and organized 130 protest rallies around issues related to race, migrants, guns and other divisive issues.
Last February, the U.S. Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller filed indictments against several Russians who are alleged to have broken a variety of U.S. laws — including theft of the identities of American citizens — to pose as political activists in an effort to subvert the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign in Trump’s favour. Last week, a dozen Russian intelligence officers were charged with hacking the Democratic party’s computers during the 2016 election campaign.
The indictments have fallen short of finding any deliberate collusion between the Russians and Trump’s campaign, but Mueller’s investigations are ongoing. So far, his efforts have secured guilty pleas from Trump’s former foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, and from former national security adviser Michael Flynn, for lying to the FBI about their contacts with Russian officials.
While it has become exceedingly difficult to distinguish insinuation and innuendo from genuine fact-based conjecture in the hyper-partisan American political discourse these days, there is no longer room for any doubt about the point of Russian dezinformatsiya in American politics.
The objective is the same as the purpose of the Kremlin’s propaganda monkey-wrenching in recent elections in Germany, France and the Netherlands. It was the point of the dirty lie the Russian embassy in Ottawa circulated last year — that Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland had lied about her family’s Nazi past and was hiding an irrational animus towards Russia. The whole point of Moscow’s pro-Trump mischief is to enfeeble and destabilize liberal democracies.
Vladimir Putin came close to admitting as much on Monday in Helsinki, while Trump was scandalously dismissing the finding of several U.S. intelligence agencies that the Kremlin wanted Trump to beat Hillary Clinton in the race to the White House, and that Russian interference in the presidential election campaign was calibrated to that purpose. Standing beside Trump after their two-hour, translators-only meeting, Putin was asked if he wanted Trump to win. “Yes, I did,” he said, “because he talked about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal.”
Just what constitutes “normal” anymore is an open question, but as Kakutani’s The Death of Truth makes clear, the abnormality that has disfigured the United States didn’t begin with Trump. It produced Trump. It is a deep dysfunction at the core of American culture, and will likely persist long after Trump is gone.