Michiko Kakutani - The Death of Truth: Notes on falsehood in the age of Trump

Two of the most monstrous regimes in human history came to power in the twentieth century, and both were predicated upon the violation and despoiling of truth, upon the knowledge that cynicism and weariness and fear can make people susceptible to the lies and false promises of leaders bent on unconditional power. As Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

Whats alarming to the contemporary reader is that Arendts words increasingly sound less like a dispatch from another century than a chilling mirror of the political and cultural landscape we inhabit todaya world in which fake news and lies are pumped out in industrial volume by Russian troll factories, emitted in an endless stream from the mouth and Twitter feed of the president of the United States, and sent flying across the world through social media accounts at lightning speed. Nationalism, tribalism, dislocation, fears of social change, and the hatred of outsiders are on the rise again as people, locked in their partisan silos and filter bubbles, are losing a sense of shared reality and the ability to communicate across social and sectarian lines.

This is not to draw a direct analogy between todays circumstances and the overwhelming horrors of the World War II era but to look at some of the conditions and attitudeswhat Margaret Atwood has called the danger flags in Orwells 1984 and Animal Farmthat make a people susceptible to demagoguery and political manipulation, and nations easy prey for would-be autocrats. To examine how a disregard for facts, the displacement of reason by emotion, and the corrosion of language are diminishing the very value of truth, and what that means for America and the world.

The historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life, Arendt wrote in a 1971 essay, Lying in Politics; it is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams of falsehoods or simply allowed to fall into oblivion. Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs.

The term truth decay (used by the Rand Corporation to describe the diminishing role of facts and analysis in American public life) has joined the post-truth lexicon that includes such now familiar phrases as fake news and alternative facts. And its not just fake news either: its also fake science (manufactured by climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers), fake history (promoted by Holocaust revisionists and white supremacists), fake Americans on Facebook (created by Russian trolls), and fake followers and likes on social media (generated by bots).

Trump, the forty-fifth president of the United States, lies so prolifically and with such velocity that The Washington Post calculated that hed made 2,140 false or misleading claims during his first year in officean average of nearly 5.9 a day. His liesabout everything from the investigations into Russian interference in the election, to his popularity and achievements, to how much TV he watchesare only the brightest blinking red light of many warnings of his assault on democratic institutions and norms. He routinely assails the press, the justice system, the intelligence agencies, the electoral system, and the civil servants who make our government tick.

Nor is the assault on truth confined to the United States. Around the world, waves of populism and fundamentalism are elevating appeals to fear and anger over reasoned debate, eroding democratic institutions, and replacing expertise with the wisdom of the crowd. False claims about the U.K.s financial relationship with the EU (emblazoned on a Vote Leave campaign bus) helped swing the vote in favor of Brexit, and Russia ramped up its sowing of dezinformatsiya in the run-up to elections in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and other countries in concerted propaganda efforts to discredit and destabilize democracies.

Pope Francis reminded us, There is no such thing as harmless disinformation; trusting in falsehood can have dire consequences. Former president Barack Obama observed that one of the biggest challenges we have to our democracy is the degree to which we do not share a common baseline of facts; people today are operating in completely different information universes. And the Republican senator Jeff Flake gave a speech in which he warned that 2017 was a year which saw the truthobjective, empirical, evidence-based truthmore battered and abused than any other in the history of our country, at the hands of the most powerful figure in our government.

How did this happen? What are the roots of falsehood in the Trump era? How did truth and reason become such endangered species, and what does their impending demise portend for our public discourse and the future of our politics and governance? That is the subject of this book.

Its easy enough to see Trumpa candidate who launched his political career on the original sin of birtherismas a black swan who ascended to office because of a perfect storm of factors: a frustrated electorate still hurting from the backwash of the 2008 financial crash; Russian interference in the election and a deluge of pro-Trump fake news stories on social media; a highly polarizing opponent who came to symbolize the Washington elite that populists decried; and an estimated five billion dollars in free campaign coverage from media outlets obsessed with the views and clicks that the former reality-TV star generated.

If a novelist had concocted a villain like Trumpa larger-than-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 artists mashup of Ubu Roi, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, and a character discarded by Molire.