Also by Evan Davis
Made in Britain
Public Spending
LITTLE, BROWN
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Little, Brown
Copyright Evan Davis 2017
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Extracts from Beyond Lying: Donald Trumps Authoritarian Reality ( New York Times , 4 November 2016) on reproduced by kind permission of Jason Stanley.
Extracts from A new theory for why Trump voters are so angry ( Washington Post , 8 November 2016) on reproduced by kind permission of Jeff Guo.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-7481-2718-4
Little, Brown
An imprint of
Little, Brown Book Group
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
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www.hachette.co.uk
www.littlebrown.co.uk
For all those people to whom I have ever
lied, nearly lied, economised with facts
or been phoney, insecure or pretentious.
This is for you.
I fear there are too many of you to mention by name.
And for Guillaume
To whom I am incapable of being anything other than completely honest.
CONTENTS
Bullshit old and new
Back in May 2013, a former speech writer for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama gave a commencement address to the graduating students of Pitzer College in Claremont, Southern California. Jon Lovett was only thirty years old at the time, but had not only spent three years working in the White House; he had been the head writer on an NBC sitcom ( 1600 Penn ) and had also worked as a stand-up comedian. Few people better understand the rules of modern communication, in politics or beyond, than him.
The subject of his speech to the students that day was bullshit . He was not a fan. He described it as one of the greatest threats we face.
We are drowning in it. We are drowning in partisan rhetoric that is just true enough not to be a lie; in industry-sponsored research; in social medias imitation of human connection; in legalese and corporate double-speak. It infects every facet of public life, corrupting our discourse, wrecking our trust in major institutions, lowering our standards for the truth, making it harder to achieve anything.
I think we all know how he felt. We are assailed by the stuff all day, from the moment we get up and turn on the radio next to our bed, to the emails we get at work, to the ads we try to avoid as we surf the web, to the pretentious restaurant menus that we encounter when we want a special night out, or the distortions of history laced into the plotlines of movies that purport to be inspired by real events.
But the bullshit to which Mr Lovett was referring is particularly a product of that special class of modern professional communicator: the people who are paid to craft messages and explain things to us. They turn out to be the worst offenders when it comes to mangling the message in a way that obscures the plain truth. Political spin and obfuscation; clumsily drafted corporate press releases; the weasel words and excuses of mediocre bureaucrats; the faux-friendly signage that tries to boss us around in our daily lives; exaggerated distortions we read in newspapers desperate to arouse our interest.
Jon Lovett referred to the numerous books on the subject. One is called Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit . There is so much bullshit that one hardly knows where to begin, the author, Laura Penny, wrote, her title making the point that we are assaulted by it in all corners of our lives. I doubt anyone will disagree with the simple proposition that professional bullshit is a pervasive and important phenomenon. And I should know, because I work in the bullshit industry: I interview politicians on TV and chat with chief executives on the radio. And we who work in the media world have to sell our programmes to our audiences, and that sometimes means trying to make them sound big even if the material is small or medium. My job is to listen to bullshit, to try to expose it and to manufacture my share of it too.
In his speech, Jon Lovett implored the students to strive for truth in their lives, to speak up when they see something wrong and not to be afraid to get into peoples faces. And he went on:
I believe we may have reached peak bullshit. And that increasingly, those who push back against the noise and nonsense; those who refuse to accept the untruths of politics and commerce and entertainment and government will be rewarded. That we are at the beginning of something important.
Well, as I say, Jon Lovett gave his speech in 2013 and he was right to say that we were at the beginning of something important, but he was wrong as to what that was. Within a few years all the everyday bullshit to which we had become so accustomed was overtaken by a new kind of politics, and a new kind of bullshit to accompany it. I was as surprised as anyone else. In 2013, I had already started thinking about this book and I agreed with Lovett that we had reached peak bullshit, that the public had grown cynical of nonsense; become habituated to the tiresome techniques of the professional spinners; could see through exaggeration and deception; and would reward those who demonstrated authenticity and honesty. And then there it was: the reaction came and it was not the emergence of a new breed of plain-speaking, common-sense honest politician; rather, it was an international wave of populist politicians who smashed through the old conventions of political obfuscation, and who introduced us to a new style of communication replete with attention-grabbing propositions that have no basis in fact or expert judgement at all. To take one random example, Donald Trump made the claim that old-style CFC-infused aerosol hairsprays were never damaging to the ozone layer when the gases were released inside an apartment building.
And then along came the term post-truth, an expression of frustration and anguish from a liberal class discombobulated by the political disruptions of 2016. It was in that year, one could say the great political schism to divide Western societies switched from being a leftright one to being about liberalism and populism, each with different priorities, values and tribal allegiances. Post-truth came to refer to a number of different things; the liberals use of the phrase was obviously fuelled by Donald Trumps election campaign, but that was just a small part of it. In the UKs EU referendum campaign, both sides were said to have used extreme exaggeration or direct falsehood in order to draw attention to the issues that favoured their side of the argument. These were not off-the-cuff stream-of-consciousness meanderings, but claims that were carefully calculated to get attention, and some stretched the norms that have tended to discipline political campaigns in Britain. Surprisingly, some deceptions were peddled by intelligent and generally honest people, who felt it opportune to mislead because the penalties of so doing were outweighed by the benefits.
The cluster of post-truth worries extended to other phenomena too: fake news stories spread online (a consequence of a technology that ironically makes it easier for non-reputable sources of news to get attention); conspiracy theories, such as the bizarre claim that a Washington DC pizzeria was the base of a child sex ring run by Hillary Clinton and her aide John Podesta; wilful and sometimes offensive provocation online or in print; and finally, a certain scepticism of expert opinion.
