We are all Romanians now: how lies have become indistinguishable from facts in America
FactCheck has annotated the letter, with the false and misleading statements highlighted and linked to the actual facts.
Since it hasn't been approved by the Ministry of Propaganda, Trumpworld, of course, will dismiss this corrective as heresy. The people who ought to be perusing this annotated document by definition will not. Such are the times we live in.
I recently came across a comment by a certain Romanian who lived through the Ceaușescu era. He wrote that everybody knew that the government's propaganda was false. But on the other hand, they were also deluged with claims that whatever contradicted that propaganda was false. This had an interesting effect on the Romanian people. They simply decided that the truth was unknowable. As a practical matter, truth- or what passed for it- became, not a matter of fact, but a matter of taste.
And that's exactly what has happened in America. For years we've been deluged by news filtered through the fairly uniform biases of liberal journalists who went to the same colleges, went to the same parties, traveled in the same incestuous circles, and generally lived in an echo chamber which more or less channeled their perception of the world around them into a remarkably homogenous pattern. It's no secret that upward of 90% of working journalists consistently vote Democratic in presidential elections.
It's not so much (sorry, Molly Hemingway) that they are consciously distorting the facts or being unprofessional. It's just that they're all poured from the same mold. They think the same way. They have the same values and prejudices, and those values and prejudices color their perceptions. And they are reinforced by pretty much everyone they come into meaningful contact with, particularly on a professional basis. It's hardly surprising that they confuse their narrow, parochial echo chamber with the real world.
A healthy solution would be a massive infusion of conservative journalists into the mainstream media. Instead, the zany right has generated its own rival channels of equally distorted propaganda. I don't necessarily think that even the Alex Jones crowd or the various other "news" outlets of the alt-right are being consciously deceptive. Fox News is no more consciously trying to deceive us than is CNN (MSNBC would be a better analogy, but the more thoroughly the liberal media can be discredited the more effective right-wing disinformation can be and CNN has a bigger audience share). But the effect is the same.
I remember many years ago coming across a chilling report by some clandestine government operative which characterized the late William F. Buckley as "slightly to the left of center." One can only imagine how far to the right its author was, and hope that he wasn't taken to seriously by whoever he reported to. I recently had an exchange with someone on Facebook who dismissed Christianity Today's call for President Trump's removal by saying that CT is a "liberal magazine." It's hard to take anybody seriously who can make a claim like that, especially since CT has traditionally been studiously non-partisan and since the editorial in question took a couple of very bogus pro-Trump talking points at face value.
But here we are. We have a president who makes reality up as he goes along and lies even when he has no reason to lie. When he is shown to be dead wrong, he simply hunkers down- and is unquestioningly believed. A very large minority of us accept every word he speaks as gospel anyway because they want to. No previous president or public figure in the United States could have gotten away with a tenth of the B.S. Mr. Trump dumps on us every day without being completely discredited and laughed into obscurity.
But the hangover from the Sixties is still with us. Even conservatives have come to accept the notion that truth is relative. During my days as an ELCA pastor, my bishop summoned us to a meeting at which a philosophy professor explained the difference between modernism (which sees objective truth as unknowable) and post-modernism (which asserts that there is no such thing as truth). All but two of those present (the bishop and myself) identified with one or the other.
Only the two of us were willing to insist that there is such a thing as objective truth and that it was knowable.
No people can govern itself well in a world in which either of these philosophies is believed. I would argue that truth in the political arena not only exists but can be discovered. But it takes a stronger desire to discover it than most of us have, and a great deal more work than most of us are willing to invest. But there is still another necessary step we have to take after that if we're going to make this America thing work again. We aren't prepared to take that step, either. Or perhaps it's merely that we aren't able to. And that may be the most frightening thing about the dilemma in which we find ourselves.
Precisely because we all, and not only those in the journalistic profession, see reality through the filter of our own biases, we need to have those biases challenged by others with different filters. And that takes a greater desire to know the truth than to have our prejudices confirmed. It takes a greater capacity than most of us have for doing something which Mr. Trump notoriously cannot do at all: to admit to being wrong, and to admit it, both to ourselves and to others. It has been said that the difference between an argument and a debate is that an argument is about who is right, whereas a debate is about what is right. We need to do less arguing and more debating.
Just as the only practical corrective for a journalistic profession with a profound leftward tilt is the infusion of a huge number of conservative journalists in the mainstream media to balance things out and present the other side, we cannot arrive at even an approximation of what is true unless we can hear both sides, not as rivals in a shouting match, but as rational voices engaged in rational, reasoned, and at least moderately civil debate in which rather than being motivated by a desire to win, we are motivated by a desire to reach the truest and wisest and most nuanced and most useful conclusion. We are going to have to be motivated by a greater desire that all of us win than that our side does.
Before you scoff too hard, reflect with all the outrageous character assassination and outright lies which have permeated our politics down through the years, the American experiment has proven that this is not utterly impossible. We may not have done a very good job of it, but we've done it sufficiently well to survive as a more or less free people who every four years can meaningfully choose between two more or less meaningful options.
But the more the other side becomes a caricature which doesn't even approximately represent who they are or what they believe, the less we will be able to engage them with any hope of the encounter yielding light as well as heat. And the more cynical we become- the more we cop-out on our responsibilities as citizens by simply saying "It's all propaganda," or "They're all liars," the more we'll come to resemble Ceaușescu's Romania, and the more incapable we will be of governing ourselves.
It's already late in the day. We've already gotten to a point where a president can make up the facts as he goes along out of his head, and people who notice and object are simply dismissed by a large minority of us as if we were the ones who were "talking through our hats." "They're all liars" is the conclusion authoritarian propaganda by definition tries to get us to reach. It doesn't expect to be believed. It only attempts to create a mindset in which it will be impossible to consider the possibility that something else, that conflicts with it, might be true.
Authoritarianism can only succeed when we have decided that truth is unknowable and that winning the argument is more important than pursuing it.
That's what Ceaușescu did. That's what Xi and Putin and Kim and Ergodan and Duterte and Mr. Trump's other authoritarian buddies around the world have done. And that's what Mr. Trump is doing. And to a frightening degree, he's succeeded. And as a result, not quite half the country will believe the work of fantasy and fiction he sent to Speaker Pelosi- not necessarily because they think it's true, but because they want it to be, and that's good enough.
There is no one as gullible as a cynic. G.K. Chesterton once observed that when one ceases to believe in God, one does not believe in nothing. One believes anything. Cut loose from the notion of ultimate order and meaning in the universe, we go searching for what ersatz meaning we can invent or tell ourselves that we have found that can supply it. To take the notion one step further, when we cease to believe in anything, we don't believe nothing. We really do believe anything- anything at all, including the whoppers which both Donald Trump and the leftists in the Democratic Party both tell us daily.
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