In a 2008 book, I argued that the internet would usher in a “post-fact” age. Eight years later, in the death throes of an election that features a candidate who once led the campaign to lie about President Obama’s birth, there is more reason to despair about truth in the online age.
.. Psychologists and other social scientists have repeatedly shown that when confronted with diverse information choices, people rarely act like rational, civic-minded automatons. Instead, we are roiled by preconceptions and biases, and we usually do what feels easiest — we gorge on information that confirms our ideas, and we shun what does not.
.. There is also the looming specter of Photoshop: Now, because any digital image can be doctored, people can freely dismiss any bit of inconvenient documentary evidence as having been somehow altered.
.. But that hasn’t quite happened. Today dozens of news outlets routinely fact-check the candidates and much else online, but the endeavor has proved largely ineffective against a tide of fakery.
.. That’s because the lies have also become institutionalized. There are now entire sites whose only mission is to publish outrageous, completely fake news online (like real news, fake news has become a business). Partisan Facebook pages have gotten into the act; a recent BuzzFeed analysis of top political pages on Facebook showed that right-wing sites published false or misleading information 38 percent of the time, and lefty sites did so 20 percent of the time.
.. “In many ways the debunking just reinforced the sense of alienation or outrage that people feel about the topic, and ultimately you’ve done more harm than good,” she said.
Introducing a New Series: Trump and the Truth
Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for President, does not so much struggle with the truth as strangle it altogether. He lies to avoid. He lies to inflame. He lies to promote and to preen. Sometimes he seems to lie just for the hell of it. He traffics in conspiracy theories that he cannot possibly believe and in grotesque promises that he cannot possibly fulfill. When found out, he changes the subject—or lies larger.
Why Are Some Conservative Thinkers Falling for Trump?
American intellectuals haven’t felt the allure of authoritarian, illiberal politics this strongly in a long time.
.. In 1953, Czesław Miłosz published The Captive Mind, which described how a series of Polish intellectuals came to embrace Stalinism. Miłosz detailed the role that “coercion” and “personal ambition” played in their ideological transformation.
.. “To belong to the masses is the great longing of the ‘alienated’ intellectual,”
.. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. observed that “against the loneliness and rootlessness of man in free society,” totalitarianism “promises the security and comradeship of a crusading unity.”
.. First, they admire his campaign’s raw, unbridled energy. The Trump movement, according to the Wall Street Journalcolumnist Peggy Noonan, radiates “dynamism.”
.. The “Journal of American Greatness” makes explicit what Noonan, Hanson, and Gingrich imply: that America’s current system of government is illegitimate.
.. A second asserts that the United States is “post-Constitutional.”
.. A tyrant, Strauss argues, takes absolute power by overthrowing a constitutional republic. A Caesar also takes absolute power, but only when a constitutional republic has already collapsed on its own.
.. “Caesarism is not tyranny. It is rather a sub-species of absolute monarchy, in which the monarch is not an unjust usurper but the savior of a country with a decayed republican order that can no longer function.” By overthrowing a depraved and unaccountable elite, Trump would reassert “the people’s sovereignty” and “their natural right to rule themselves.”
.. In May, she wrote that Trump’s fans want him to be “a human bomb that will explode by timer under a bench in Lafayette Park and take out all the people but leave the monuments standing.” These are ghastly metaphors. Obviously, Noonan is not endorsing revolutionary violence. But she’s writing sympathetically about the people’s supposed desire for it. And she’s doing so on behalf of a candidate who incites actual violence.
.. Because Trump represents the people and the people distrust the media, which are part of the corrupt ruling class, Trump has the right to slander and impede the media’s work. In Hannity’s words, “They deserve what they get.”
.. For Trump, popularity equals truth.
That’s why, when he’s ahead, he spends so much time citing polls. He understands that in American public discourse, it’s hard to say the people are wrong.
.. America is a democracy because the people’s voices count. But it is a liberal democracy because freedom of the press, independence of the judiciary, and the rule of law are not subject to popular vote.
Is Everything Wrestling?
the rest of the world has caught up to wrestling’s ethos. With each passing year, more and more facets of popular culture become something like wrestling: a stage-managed “reality” in which scripted stories bleed freely into real events, with the blurry line between truth and untruth seeming to heighten, not lessen, the audience’s addiction to the melodrama. The modern media landscape is littered with “reality” shows that audiences happily accept aren’t actually real; that, in essence, is wrestling.
.. The way Beyoncé teased at marital problems in “Lemonade” — writing lyrics people were happy to interpret as literal accusations of her famous husband’s unfaithfulness — is wrestling. The question of whether Steve Harvey meant to announce the wrong Miss Universe winner is wrestling. Did Miley Cyrus and Nicki Minaj authentically snap at each other at last year’s MTV Video Music Awards? The surrounding confusion was straight out of a wrestling playbook.
..In politics, as in wrestling, the ultimate goal is simply to get the crowd on your side. And like all the best wrestling villains — or “heels” — Donald Trump is a vivacious, magnetic speaker unafraid to be rude to his opponents; there was even a heelish consistency to his style at early debates, when he actively courted conflict with the moderator, Megyn Kelly, and occasionally paused to let the crowds boo him before shouting back over them. (The connection isn’t just implied, either: Trump wasinducted to the WWE’s Hall of Fame in 2013, owing to his participation in several story lines over the years.)
.. Ted Cruz’s rhetorical style, with its dramatic pauses, violent indignation and tendency to see every issue as an epic moral battleground, was sometimes reminiscent of great wrestling heels. The way Rick Perry called Trump’s candidacy a “cancer” that “will lead the Republican Party to perdition” before endorsing Trump and offering to serve as his vice president: this was a tacit admission that all his apocalyptic rhetoric was mainly for show. Pure wrestling, in other words.
.. (In wrestling, it’s considered a cardinal sin to genuinely hurt your opponent, thereby limiting their ability to work.
.. to analyze each narrative not just through its in-world logic (“this guy will win the championship because he seems more driven”) but by considering external forces (“this guy will win the championship because he is well-spoken enough to represent the company when he inevitably shows up on ‘Today’”
.. So when I think of how politics and pop culture are often compared to wrestling, this is the element that seems most transferable: not the outlandish characters or the jumbo-size threats, but the insistence on telling a great story with no regard for the facts. Donald Trump can claim there were thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheering when the World Trade Center came down.
.. When everything becomes a story, the value of concrete truth seems diminished. There’s too much going on in the world to dive this deep into something as frivolous as entertainment, you might say.
.. And ultimately, we can’t expect that post-truth culture will somehow collapse because of its perfidiousness. The WWE, for instance, now tells its story without challenge: It’s outlasted all its major competitors and holds the rights to the very images wrestling’s history is made of.