Truth under siege
Donald Trump’s lies are only the brightest blinking red light of his assault on democratic institutions, argues Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michiko Kakutani in a provocative new best-seller.
Donald Trump’s lies are only the brightest blinking red light of many warnings on his assault on democratic institutions and norms, argues Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michiko Kakutani in a new bestseller.
If a novelist had concocted a villain like Trump – a largerthan-life, over-the-top avatar of narcissism, mendacity, ignorance, prejudice, boorishness, demagoguery and tyrannical impulses (not to mention someone who consumes as many as a dozen Diet Cokes a day) – she or he would likely be accused of extreme contrivance and implausibility. In fact, the President of the United States often seems less like a persuasive character than some manic cartoon artist’s mash up of Ubu Roi, Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog, and a character discarded by Molière.
But the more clownish aspects of Trump the personality should not blind us to the monumentally serious consequences of his assault on truth and the rule of law, and the vulnerabilities he has exposed in our institutions and digital communications. It is unlikely that a candidate who had already been exposed during the campaign for his history of lying and deceptive business practices would have gained such popular support were portions of the public not somehow blasé about truth telling and were there not more systemic problems with how people get their information and how they’ve come to think in increasingly partisan terms.
With Trump, the personal is political, and in many respects he is less a comic-book anomaly than an extreme, bizarro-world apotheosis of many of the broader, intertwined attitudes undermining truth today, from the merging of news and politics with entertainment, to the toxic polarisation that’s overtaken American politics, to the growing populist contempt for expertise.
These attitudes, in turn, are emblematic of dynamics that have been churning beneath the surface of daily life for years, creating the perfect ecosystem in which Veritas, the goddess of truth (as she was depicted by Goya in a famous print titled “Truth Has Died”), could fall mortally ill.
For decades now, objectivity – or even the idea that people can aspire toward ascertaining the best-available truth – has been falling out of favour. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s well-known observation, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts”, is more timely than ever: polarisation has grown so extreme that voters in Red
State America and Blue State America have a hard time even agreeing on the same facts. This has been going on since a solar system of right-wing news sites orbiting around Fox News and Breitbart News consolidated its gravitational hold over the Republican base, and it’s been exponentially accelerated by social media, which connects users with likeminded members and supplies them with customised news feeds that reinforce their preconceptions, allowing them to live in ever narrower, windowless silos.
RISE OF RELATIVISM
For that matter, relativism has been ascendant since the culture wars began in the 1960s. Back then, it was embraced by the new left, eager to expose the biases of Western, bourgeois, male-dominated thinking; and by academics promoting the gospel of postmodernism, which argued that there are no universal truths, only smaller personal truths – perceptions shaped by the cultural and social forces of one’s day. Since then, relativistic arguments have been hijacked by the populist right, including creationists and climate-change deniers who insist that their views be taught alongside “sciencebased” theories.
Relativism, of course, synced perfectly
with the narcissism and subjectivity that had been on the rise, from Tom Wolfe’s “Me Decade” on through the selfie age of self-esteem. No surprise then that the Rashomon effect – the point of view that everything depends on your point of view – has permeated our culture, from popular novels like Fates and Furies, to the television series The Affair, which hinge upon the idea of competing realities or unreliable narrators.
I’ve been reading and writing about many of these issues for nearly four decades, going back to the rise of deconstruction and battles over the literary canon on college campuses; debates over the fictionalised retelling of history in movies like Oliver Stone’s JFK and Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty; efforts made by both the Clinton and Bush administrations to avoid transparency and define reality on their own terms; Donald Trump’s war on language and efforts to normalise the abnormal; and the consequences that technology has had on how we process and share information.
In a prescient 2005 article, David Foster Wallace wrote that the proliferation of news outlets – in print, on TV and online – had created “a kaleidoscope of information options”. Wallace observed that one of the ironies of this strange media landscape that had given birth to a proliferation of ideological news outlets (including so many on the right, like Fox News and The Rush Limbaugh Show) was that it created “precisely the kind of relativism that cultural conservatives decry, a kind of epistemic free-forall in which ‘the truth’ is wholly a matter of perspective and agenda”.
Those words were written more than a decade before the election of 2016, and they uncannily predict the post-Trump cultural landscape, where truth increasingly seems to be in the eye of the beholder, facts are fungible and socially constructed, and we often feel as if we’ve been transported to an upside-down world where assumptions and alignments in place for decades have suddenly been turned inside out. The Republican Party, once a bastion of Cold War warriors, and Trump, who ran on a lawand-order platform, shrug off the dangers of Russia’s meddling in American elections, and Republican members of Congress talk about secret cabals within the FBI and the Department of Justice. Like some members of the 1960s counterculture, many of these new Republicans reject rationality and science. During the first round of the culture wars, many on the new left rejected Enlightenment ideals as vestiges of old patriarchal and imperialist thinking. Today, such ideals of reason and progress are assailed on the right as part of a liberal plot to undercut traditional values or suspicious signs of egghead, eastern-corridor elitism. For that matter, paranoia about the government has 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. The Trump campaign depicted itself as an insurgent, revolutionary force, battling on behalf of its marginalised constituency and disingenuously using language that strangely echoed that used by radicals in the 1960s. “We’re trying to disrupt the collusion between the wealthy donors, the large corporations, and the media executives,” Trump declared at one rally. And in another he called for replacing this “failed and corrupt political establishment”.
More ironic still is the populist right’s appropriation of postmodernist arguments and its embrace of the philosophical repudiation of objectivity – schools of thought affiliated for decades with the left and with the very elite academic circles that Trump and company scorn. Since the 1960s, there has been a snowballing loss of faith in institutions and official narratives. Some of this scepticism has been a necessary corrective – a rational response to the calamities of Vietnam and Iraq, to Watergate and the financial crisis of 2008, and to the cultural biases that had long infected everything from the teaching of history in elementary schools to the injustices of the justice system. But the liberating democratisation of information made possible by the internet not only spurred breathtaking innovation and entrepreneurship; it also led to a cascade of misinformation and relativism, as evidenced by today’s fake news epidemic.
Truth increasingly seems to be in the eye of the beholder; assumptions and alignments in place for decades have suddenly been turned inside out.
POSTMODERNISM HIJACKED
Central to the breakdown of official narratives in academia was the constellation of ideas falling under the broad umbrella of postmodernism, which arrived at American universities in the second half of the 20th century via such French theorists as Foucault and Derrida (whose ideas, in turn, were indebted to
the German philosophers Heidegger and Nietzsche). In literature, film, architecture, music and painting, postmodernist concepts (exploding storytelling traditions and breaking down boundaries between genres, and between popular culture and high art) would prove emancipating and in some cases transformative, resulting in a wide range of innovative works from artists like Thomas Pynchon, David Bowie, the Coen brothers, Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, Paul Thomas Anderson and Frank Gehry. When postmodernist theories were applied to the social sciences and history, however, all sorts of philosophical implications, both intended and unintended, would result and eventually pinball through our culture.
There are many different strands of postmodernism and many different interpretations, but very broadly speaking, postmodernist arguments deny an objective reality existing independently from human perception, contending that knowledge is filtered through the prisms of class, race, gender and other variables. In rejecting the possibility of an objective reality and substituting the notions of perspective and positioning for the idea of truth, postmodernism enshrined the principle of subjectivity. Language is seen as unreliable and unstable (part of the unbridgeable gap between what is said and what is meant), and even the notion of people acting as fully rational, autonomous individuals is discounted, as each of us is shaped, consciously or unconsciously, by a particular time and culture.
Science, too, came under attack by radical postmodernists, who argued that scientific theories are socially constructed: they are informed by the identity of the person positing the theory and the values of the culture in which they are formed; therefore, science cannot possibly make claims to neutrality or universal truths.
With this embrace of subjectivity came the diminution of objective truth: the celebration of opinion over knowledge, feelings over facts – a development that both reflected and helped foster the rise of Trump.
Language is to humans, the writer James Carroll once observed, what water is to fish: “We swim in language. We think in language. We live in language.” This is why George Orwell wrote that “political chaos is connected with the decay of language,” divorcing words from meaning and opening up a chasm between a leader’s real and declared aims. This is why America and the world feel so disoriented by the stream of lies issued by the Trump White House and the President’s use of language as a tool to disseminate distrust and discord. And this is why authoritarian regimes throughout history have co-opted everyday language in an effort to control not just how people communicate but also how they think, exactly the way the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s 1984 aims to deny the existence of external reality and safeguard Big Brother’s infallibility.
Trump’s assault on language is not confined to his torrent of lies, but extends to his taking of words and principles intrinsic to the rule of law and contaminating them with personal agendas and political partisanship. In doing so, he’s exchanged the language of democracy and its ideals for the language of autocracy. He demands allegiance not to the US Constitution but to himself, and he expects members of Congress and the judiciary to applaud his policies and wishes, regardless of what they think best serves the interests of the American people.
With other phrases, Trump has performed the disturbing Orwellian trick (“WAR IS PEACE,” “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY,” “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH”) of using words to mean the exact opposite of what they really mean. It’s not just his taking the term “fake news”, turning it inside out, and using it to try to discredit journalism that he finds threatening or unflattering. He’s also called the investigation into Russian election interference “the single greatest witch hunt in American political history”, when he is the one who has repeatedly attacked the press, the Justice Department, the FBI, the intelligence services, any institution he regards as hostile.
In fact, Trump has the perverse habit of accusing opponents of the very sins he is guilty of himself: “Lyin’ Ted”, “Crooked Hillary”, “Crazy Bernie”. He accused Hillary Clinton of being “a bigot who sees people of colour only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future,” and he has asserted that “there was tremendous collusion on behalf of the Russians and the Democrats”.
… These sorts of lies, the journalist Masha Gessen has pointed
Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s wellknown observation – “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts” – is more timely than ever.
out, are told for the same reason that Vladimir Putin lies: “to assert power over truth itself”.
Trump’s incoherence (his twisted syntax, his reversals, his insincerity, his bad faith and his inflammatory bombast) is both emblematic of the chaos he creates and thrives on as well as an essential instrument in his liar’s tool kit. His interviews, off-teleprompter speeches and tweets are a startling jumble of insults, exclamations, boasts, digressions, non sequiturs, qualifications, exhortations and innuendos – a bully’s efforts to intimidate, gaslight, polarise, and scapegoat.
Precise words, like facts, mean little to Trump, as interpreters, who struggle to translate his grammatical anarchy, can attest.
ALTERNATE REALITY NEWS
Even before we were being sealed in impermeable filter bubbles by Facebook newsfeeds and Google search data, we were living in communities that had become increasingly segregated in terms of politics, culture, geography and lifestyle. Add to that partisan news sources like Fox News, Breitbart and Drudge, and it’s no surprise that the Rashomon effect has taken hold: common ground between citizens from opposing political parties is rapidly shrinking, and the whole idea of consensus is becoming a thing of the past.
Such partisanship is being inflated further by Russian trolls seeking to undermine democracy in America by amplifying social divisions through fake news and fake social media accounts and by President Trump’s use of inflammatory remarks to pander to his base and bait his adversaries.
In the three decades since the Federal Communications Commission revoked the Fairness Doctrine (which required TV and radio stations to devote some of their programming to important issues of the day and air opposing views on those issues) and the two decades since Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News, right-wing media has grown into a sprawling, solipsistic network that relentlessly repeats its own tropes (the dangers of immigration, the untrustworthiness of mainstream media, the evils of big government and so on), and it’s succeeded in framing many debates in the national conversation through its sheer shamelessness and decibel level. Breitbart News, which Steve Bannon described as a “platform for the alt-right”, and the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which reaches an estimated 38% of American households through local news broadcasts, have expanded the right-wing media universe, along with countless online sites, YouTube channels and radio broadcasts. In an Orwellian move, Sinclair has even forced local news anchors to read a scripted message about “false news” that echoes President Trump’s own rhetoric, undermining real reporting.
Many of these outlets don’t even go through the motions of trying to provide verifiable facts and information, but instead attempt to spin what one talkshow host calls “truth-based content” into self-serving, precooked narratives that ratify audiences’ existing beliefs or gin up their worst fears.
In recent years, the conservative radio host Charlie Sykes observed, conservative media created an “alternate reality bubble” that “destroyed our own immunity to fake news, while empowering the worst and most reckless on the right”.
A 2017 Harvard study of more than 1.25 million stories published online between April 1, 2015, and election day in November 2016 concluded that pro-Trump audiences relied heavily on this “insulated knowledge community”, which uses “social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world” and reinforces users’ shared worldview while poisoning them against mainstream journalism that might challenge their preconceptions. The result: an environment in which the President can allude to a terrorist event in Sweden that never happened, or a presidential adviser can reference a non-existent “Bowling Green massacre”.
Because social media sites give us information that tends to confirm our view of the world – what internet activist Eli Pariser calls “an endless you-loop” – people live in increasingly narrow content silos and correspondingly smaller walled gardens of thought. It’s a big reason why liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, find it harder and harder to agree on facts and why a shared sense of reality is becoming elusive. It also helps explain why elites in New York and Washington – including the Clinton campaign and much of the press – were so shocked by Trump’s win in the 2016 election.
“If algorithms are going to curate the world for us,” Pariser warned in a 2011 Ted talk, “if they’re going to decide what we get to see and what we don’t get to see, then we need to make sure that they’re not just keyed to relevance but that they also show us things that are uncomfortable or challenging or important, other points of view.”
While public trust in the media declined in the new millennium (part of a growing mistrust of institutions and gatekeepers, as well as a concerted effort by the right wing to discredit the mainstream press), more and more people started getting their news through Facebook, Twitter and other online sources: by 2017, two-thirds of Americans said they got at least some of their news through social media. This reliance on family and friends and Facebook and Twitter for news, however, would feed the ravenous monster of fake news.
Fake news is nothing new, of course: sensationalised press coverage helped drum up public support for the Spanish-American War, and Julius Caesar spun his conquest of Gaul as a preventive action. But the internet and social media allow rumours, speculation and lies to flash around the world in a matter of seconds: like the preposterous Pizzagate stories and the baseless stories claiming that the man behind the massacre of 58 people in Las
Trump’s hate-fuelled message was almost tailor-made for social media algorithms.