Plan B Forum

• Welcome to the post-truth presidency
  By Ruth Marcus | Columnist | December 2
  
  Welcome to — brace yourself for — the post-truth presidency.
  
  “Facts are stubborn things,” said John Adams in 1770, defending British soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre, “and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
  
  Or so we thought, until we elected to the presidency a man consistently heedless of truth and impervious to fact-checking.
  
  Oxford Dictionaries last month selected post-truth — “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” — as the international word of the year, and for good reason.
  
  The practice of post-truth — untrue assertion piled on untrue assertion — helped get Donald Trump to the White House. The more untruths he told, the more supporters rewarded him for, as they saw it, telling it like it is.
  
  As Politico’s Susan Glasser wrote in a sobering assessment of election coverage for the Brookings Institution, “Even fact-checking perhaps the most untruthful candidate of our lifetime didn’t work; the more news outlets did it, the less the facts resonated.”
  
  Indeed, Hannah Arendt, writing in 1967, presciently explained the basis for this phenomenon: “Since the liar is free to fashion his ‘facts’ to fit the profit and pleasure, or even the mere expectations, of his audience, the chances are that he will be more persuasive than the truth teller.”
  
  So there is no reason to think Trump is about to suddenly truth-up. Indeed, all signs are to the contrary — most glaringly Trump’s chockfull-of-lies tweet that “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”
  
  Trump and his aides are not embarrassed by their post-truthism — they embrace it. Three data points from last week:
  
  First, quasi-fired Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski at Harvard University, making the astonishing assertion that the media’s failing during the campaign was not that it scorned Trump — it was that it believed him.
  
  “You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally,” he said. “The American people didn’t. They understood it. They understood that sometimes — when you have a conversation with people . . . you’re going to say things, and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up.”
  
  Second, this eye-popping assertion from Trump supporter/CNN commentator Scottie Nell Hughes on the Diane Rehm Show: “People that say that facts are facts — they’re not really facts . . . there’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore of facts. And so Mr. Trump’s tweet amongst a certain crowd . . . are truth.”
  
  Finally, the president-elect himself, who at a rally to celebrate his successful bribing of Carrier to keep some jobs in the United States, explained that he was impelled to act by a Carrier-employed supporter who had been naive enough to take Trump’s promises seriously.
  
  Watching the evening news, Trump said, he saw the Carrier worker say “‘No, we’re not leaving, because Donald Trump promised us that we’re not leaving,’ and I never thought I made that promise. Not with Carrier.”
  
  Then, Trump said, “they played my statement, and I said, ‘Carrier will never leave.’ But that was a euphemism. I was talking about Carrier like all other companies from here on in.”
  
  This was a telling moment, and not just because Trump doesn’t quite understand what euphemism means. The episode simultaneously shows Trump, confronted with Trump on tape, willing to recognize reality and Trump telling us straightforwardly that his promises are not to be taken seriously. They are truthphemisms.
  
  And Arendt reminded us a half- century ago about the inherent tensions between truth-telling and political power: “No one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other, and no one, as far as I know, has ever counted truthfulness among the political virtues.”
  
  But today we have the conjunction of a president unconstrained by facts with a media environment both siloed into partisan echo chambers and polluted by fake news. This development poses an urgent challenge — for journalism and for democracy.
  
  The journalist’s challenge is not to tire in refuting the torrent of lies. The citizen’s challenge is to remain vigilant against the enticing lure of post-truth politics, to recall the admonition of our second president even as our 45th seeks to prove his wisdom an outmoded relic of a pre-post-truth era.

Scooter wrote:Some more definitions:

Sue U wrote:This is certainly not the first hyper-partisan period in American history, and these conflicts have produced both good and bad results in the past. It's hard to imagine getting past the current set of tensions, but my bet is that American democracy will again survive the idiocy of its citizenry.

Sue U wrote:

That is not going to get you anywhere; we just spent the last 16 months watching more than 40% of the American electorate Republican voters shrugging these things off with a "So what?" Fer chirssakes, look at wesw: impervious to facts, an avid consumer of propaganda, a cheerleader for authoritarianism and virulent nativism. No amount of empirical evidence or logic will dissuade him from what he wants to believe. And he's far from alone; people love to have their biases confirmed and hate to have their opinions challenged. Contrary facts and rigorous evaluation of policy positions are hard to manage and make people uncomfortable, often requiring learning something new. It's much easier to rely on aphorisms, slogans and magical thinking to addressing social ills.

This is certainly not the first hyper-partisan period in American history, and these conflicts have produced both good and bad results in the past. It's hard to imagine getting past the current set of tensions, but my bet is that American democracy will again survive the idiocy of its citizenry.

rubato wrote: fixed



yrs,
rubato

Sue U wrote:Frankly, I face that dilemma with every election, because the Republicans and Democrats are both unabashedly capitalist parties. I think it is fundamentally wrong to leave the management of society to "market forces" and grossly immoral to promote the "profit motive" -- a/k/a greed -- as the motivating principle of social order. In that sense, every time I vote for a Democrat or Republican, I am literally voting for a continuation of "evil," as I see it.

Yet in any mature way of thinking, politics is not about always getting what you want. Unless you are a single-issue voter, there will never be a political candidate with whom you agree on every issue. (Heck, I even disagree with myself on a number of issues.) So there will always be an inherently "less bad" candidate, depending on the particular number of individual issues on which you agree and the order in which you prioritize them. But reducing that to a simplistic slogan of "two evils" is not in any way helpful in choosing who will actually make governmental policy. There is nothing wrong with voting your conscience to make a third-party choice, and in a more representative system than the one we have, such votes would actually make a difference. But unless you are willing to convert our current system to a parliamentary model with multi-party proportional representation, you have to know that our two-party system gives a third-party vote as much effect as a fart in a hurricane (to borrow one of Jim's favorite phrases) .

"... The time has come to sum up our discussion. Politics is concerned with herds rather than with individuals, and the passions which are important in politics are, therefore, those in which the various members of a given herd can feel alike. The broad instinctive mechanism upon which political edifices have to be built is one of cooperation within the herd and hostility towards other herds. The co-operation within the herd is never perfect. There are members who do not conform, who are, in the etymological sense, «egregious», that is to say, outside the flock. These members are those who have fallen below, or risen above, the ordinary level. They are: idiots, criminals, prophets, and discoverers. A wise herd will learn to tolerate the eccentricity of those who rise above the average, and to treat with a minimum of ferocity those who fall below it.

As regards relations to other herds, modern technique has produced a conflict between self-interest and instinct. In old days, when two tribes went to war, one of them exterminated the other, and annexed its territory. From the point of view of the victor, the whole operation was thoroughly satisfactory. The killing was not at all expensive, and the excitement was agreeable. It is not to be wondered at that, in such circumstances, war persisted. Unfortunately, we still have the emotions appropriate to such primitive warfare, while the actual operations of war have changed completely. Killing an enemy in a modern war is a very expensive operation. If you consider how many Germans were killed in the late war, and how much the victors are paying in income tax, you can, by a sum in long division, discover the cost of a dead German, and you will find it considerable. In the East, it is true, the enemies of the Germans have secured the ancient advantages of turning out the defeated population and occupying their lands. The Western victors, however, have secured no such advantages. It is obvious that modern war is not good business from a financial point of view. Although we won both the world wars, we should now be much richer if they had not occured. If men were actuated by self-interest, which they are not - except in the case of a few saints - the whole human race would cooperate. There would be no more wars, no more armies, no more navies, no more atom bombs. There would not be armies of propagandists employed in poisoning the minds of Nation A against Nation B, and reciprocally of Nation B against Nation A. There would not be armies of officials at frontiers to prevent the entry of foreign books and foreign ideas, however excellent in themselves. There would not be customs barriers to ensure the existence of many small enterprises where one big enterprise would be more economic. All this would happen very quickly if men desired their own happiness as ardently as they desired the misery of their neighbours. But, you will tell me, what is the use of these utopian dreams ? Moralists will see to it that we do not become wholly selfish, and until we do the millenium will be impossible.

I do not wish to seem to end upon a note of cynicism. I do not deny that there are better things than selfishness, and that some people achieve these things. I maintain, however, on the one hand, that there are few occasions upon which large bodies of men, such as politics is concerned with, can rise above selfishness, while, on the other hand, there are a very great many circumstances in which populations will fall below selfishness, if selfishness is interpreted as enlightened self-interest.

And among those occasions on which people fall below self-interest are most of the occasions on which they are convinced that they are acting from idealistic motives. Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power. When you see large masses of men swayed by what appear to be noble motives, it is as well to look below the surface and ask yourself what it is that makes these motives effective. It is partly because it is so easy to be taken in by a facade of nobility that a psychological inquiry, such as I have been attempting, is worth making. I would say, in conclusion, that if what I have said is right, the main thing needed to make the world happy is intelligence. And this, after all, is an optimistic conclusion, because intelligence is a thing that can be fostered by known methods of education.
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969 ... "