Navigating a Post-Truth World Means Letting Go of Objective Truth
At the Southern New Hampshire University Arena, the night before that fateful 2016 election, Donald Trump bounded onstage to raucous applause and the booming, anthemic riffs of “Proud to be an American.” He stepped to the lectern and did his whole Mussolini routine: a nodding wave, a half-sneer, a little US Open-style applause back to the crowd, and flashing a thumbs up that looked like a protruding breakfast sausage. I was standing about hundred feet away from this repulsive bog orangutan, lost in a sea of several thousand whooping New Englanders appropriately decked out in red MAGA hats and beer guts. As reactionary patriotic theater goes, this scene was bizarre, but just about everything you’d expect from a Republican rally. There was the pyrotechnically performative god-and-country stuff, the obligatory Obama and Hillary bashing, the boilerplate free-market worshiping, the WWE ambiance. It was pure camp, a variety show. But the freewheeling riffs felt especially pander-y when Trump announced he received a congratulatory letter from New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick and would like to recite it as a public address:
“Congratulations on a tremendous campaign. You have dealt with an unbelievable, slanted, and negative media and have come out beautifully. You’ve proved to be the ultimate competitor and fighter. Your leadership is amazing. I have always had tremendous respect for you, but the toughness and perseverance you’ve displayed over the past year is remarkable…”
Surrounded by a bellowing horde of innumerable interchangeable loathsome smirking morons, my initial thought was a sarcastic, “Yeah, you really nailed Belichik’s voice there, Donald.”
Discerning the true nature of the Trump phenomenon is a truly baffling enterprise, one that has bestowed humanity’s more reasonable thinkers with a host of brain diseases. As I pondered the magnitude of this alternate universe portal that existed a roughly 50-minute drive from me (I lived in Boston at the time), I deliberated over why I didn’t want to believe Bill Belichick wrote that letter. Is it because Trump is an honesty-averse narcissist? Or is it because of my stubborn refusal to acknowledge the possibility that the coach of my favorite football team would quasi-endorse someone like Trump? Frederich Nietzsche’s argument that “Every belief, every considering something true, is necessarily false because there is simply no true world” felt chillingly relevant during this perverse perspective-altering moment.
If enough people believe in something with concentrated vigor, they can reshape the world in the image of whatever they want, no matter how disconnected to physical reality it is. There has to be enough of these people, and they have to believe in this image sufficiently. Then, they live and act from that belief. America’s COVID response was a tug-of-war between Democrats who Believe In Science and Trump governing from within the fantastical epistemological bubble of Fox “News.” Both sides were operating from a wildly different actuarial calculus: Democrats refused to risk permanent lung damage to run Applebee’s at full capacity while Republicans were urging Americans to consider opting into a mini-Holocaust to keep the stonk numbers going up and up.
Søren Kierkegaard observed, “Truth is subjectivity,” noting that absolute objective certainty is an illusion. This sentiment does not deny the existence of concrete, propositional realities. He emphasizes that different personalities and perceptions of the world are based on how the brain processes information. Everyone is led to a feeling that adheres to a system of symbols and frameworks because there is no truth that does not adhere to emotion. When the Ben Shapiros of the world say, “Facts don’t care about your feelings,” they fail to understand epistemology. Facts literally are feelings. Shapiro should have an intuitive understanding of this, as his brand value is built on cherry-picking random data points and draping a veneer of pseudo-intellectualism over willful ignorance.
None of this is to say all truths are created equal — of course, some will inevitably be more or less well-reasoned, well-researched, well-articulated than others. But we are not living in what some would call a post-truth era because Objective Truth never really existed outside of arbitrary consensus and mainstream values. Trump’s presidency unfolded as a vicious satire of American life in the way that it stripped every cheesy grift and smug savagery of its familiar euphemism and institutional legitimacy. This may have been both the apotheosis and grim reckoning of social media fragmenting us into camps of frothing and self-reifying news consumers, subverting the idea of universal principles in the process.
To repair the fraying bonds that tether us to a shared reality, many have turned to ideals like Objective Reporting or fact-checking. There is a certain strand of Democratic normie that is convinced they have all the evidence and science on their side and therefore everyone else should get out of the way and let them make all the decisions. This sentiment, though, misses a broader and more fundamental point: A truth can be real — even if it’s not valid — if a person sincerely believes in it.
After watching the horrifying banality of Joe Biden’s inauguration, I finally understood how someone who lacks a developed political critique but has an ambient comprehension of our rotten affairs could think a cabal of Satanic pedophile elites is in cahoots to manipulate the public. Cable networks reached almost North Korea levels of supplicancy in echoing Democratic Party omerta: That Biden is a kind-hearted harbinger of unity who will usher in an era of unbridled progressive altruism. Squint hard enough, and you’ll find some slivers of truth to it — Biden is certainly preferable to Trump, even if it’s in the same way a benign brain tumor is preferable to terminal rectal cancer. The inauguration was manufacturing consent in real-time. When stripped of its ornamental pomp, the backdrop was a hair-raising nightmare. The National Mall was surrounded by 25,000 National Guardsmen and a 12-foot steel barrier to fend off a potential sequel to the half-baked Capitol Hall Putsch two weeks prior. A drooling, senile, near-octogenarian mummy was carted out to swear an oath and hopefully not wander off and grope Michelle Obama by accident. There was no crowd because of a rampaging pandemic that was killing a 9/11’s worth of people a day. But we were told this was an undeniable roaring triumph of American democracy.
There was an identifiable rhythm to the Trump presidency, albeit one that was jittery, chaotic, and atonal as he bumbled back and forth from bombastic improvisational tantrums to peevy spats. White House Press Conferences often created a queasy binary between non-questions and bloviating anti-answers, one that Invited Controversy and Sparked Conversation without actually saying anything interesting or insightful or remotely new. Reporters would try to get Trump to disavow or repudiate some blithely proffered conspiracy he plucked from the murky depths of right-wing fever swamps. And a president would stand defiant in his damp and demented ignorance, insisting he is both a master of the news and someone who is constantly being talked about. The series of drawn-out petty combats would puff up an already overinflated liberal sense of righteousness while any counter to MAGA truisms was interpreted as an existential threat to conservative identity.
The irony here is, despite their lamentations of a wildly metastatic leftist postmodern scourge, the right is incredibly savvy in its understanding of branding and how people make decisions: Truth is whatever affirms a person’s affectations. Anything could be made debatable if a realistic enough narrative is stitched together with some relevant facts. It’s like the ice cream scene in Thank You For Smoking where Nick Taylor tells his son, “If you argue right, you are never wrong.” Conservative media has featured craven liars and loathsome hate-merchants spending decades serving fervid-but-vague conspiracies and goofy-vile beliefs as scoops of news-slop mostly to keep viewers pliable and on the hook through the commercial breaks. Now it has curdled into a weirdly superior, gleefully expansive, relentlessly aggrieved incoherence. As a lifestyle, though, MAGA is pretty straightforward: a rejection not just of conventional Beltway wisdom but consensus reality, done with relentlessly signifying intensity.
Despite this, liberals are stuck in this fantasy cloud about fact-checking the problems of democracy away, that people cling to “bad” political beliefs because they’ve been force-fed targeted misinformation. Therefore, it is the duty of more responsible mediators of true and false to erect a Phil Spector Wall of Sound for facts. This obsession with fact-checking stems from the idea of Objective Reporting, and in turn, Objective Truth. Objectivity has only existed as a journalistic standard since the 1920s, and that began as a gambit to broaden various newspapers’ readership so they could successfully advertise to housewives. Fittingly, Shep Smith, on a promo for his CNBC show, promised to deliver the news “without bias, without opinion,” which is rich coming from an anchor who worked for the most aggressively hyperpartisan cable news network only to migrate to a similarly flagrant pro-Wall Street outlet.
The idea of journalistic objectivity rests on the presumption that a news piece cannot be biased if isn’t blatantly editorialized. Any story runs through a series of subjective editorial decisions: How a headline is written, the angle of a piece, the sources interviewed, what facts and figures are presented, the reasons why those facts and figures are presented, and the conclusions drawn from them. I’m not dropping any particular truth bombs by stating the obvious fact that people make decisions based on conscious and unconscious biases; it is confounding to me why a profession as research- and analytically-intensive as journalism is expected to be somehow exempt from this reality. One reason there’s such a widespread distrust of the press comes from mainstream outlets like the New York Times or Washington Post or CNN posturing as objective when they are clearly partisan. Though, this bias isn’t “liberal” as much as they reflect the elitist corporate centrism that has come to dominate the Democratic Party.
In 2016, Jim Rutenberg wrote in the New York Times that “Trump is testing the norms of objectivity in journalism.” The context in which Trump was allowed to lie was facilitated by a media ecosystem that gave his ratings-bonanza spectacle nearly $2 billion in free coverage without any concern for our democracy or the targets of his sneering and racist rhetoric.
For decades, America created a rage-filled, hyper-stimulating media firehose that blasted piping-hot reactionary bullshit 20 hours a day. Clickbait headlines, cartoonish alarmism, false equivalencies, scary criminals at home, menacing terrorists abroad — it all decimated attention spans and rewarded hot-takes. It created a generation of loony and vapid anger addicts who can barely read past a paragraph. The average news consumer is credulous, manic, and glued to stories that appeal to their sense of outrage and victimhood. News execs like Rupert Murdoch and Les Moonves and Jeff Zucker have done more to annihilate our shared reality than the Kremlin could ever dream of.
Paradoxically, if mass media was earnestly interested in regaining the trust of the public — and thus beginning the slow-bore work of building a consensual reality with various shades of truth orbiting nearby — it would require admitting bias and subjectivity. This doesn’t mean embracing deceit or denial or bad-faith smarm, but for journalists and columnists and pundits to freely broadcast their politics so their audiences can better understand what insights to glean from their reporting.
For the past century, Americans have been spun and manipulated and propagandized in every way imaginable — in military-glorifying Hollywood films, in commercials, in the selling of presidencies as brands. The development of neoliberalism coincided with ceaseless campaigns to distort discourse and information, caused by industries built on targeted messaging and massaging public opinion.
When Walter Lippman published his most famous work, Public Opinion, in 1922, he examined the inherent limitations of democracy and the ways in which subjective perception can be manipulated to nefarious ends. When Edward Bernays wrote Crystallizing Public Opinion, he subtly inverted some of Lipmann’s critiques, arguing that public relations must combat the masses’ susceptibility toward tyranny by entrusting a great deal of civic-didactic power to the thought leaders of a white-collar class, who would, of course, shoulder the psychic burden of gently coaxing or kindly suggesting prescriptions aimed at advancing what they understand to be the public’s best interest. PR and propaganda (if there is a meaningful difference between the two) are ubiquitous in late-stage capitalism; it’s important to understand that both are narrative-shapers driven far more by deceptive aspirational branding than overt falsehood.
Social media now exists within a human centipede alongside news and public relations. It has been a destabilizing cultural force of its own, paced by influencers and blue-check pundits that purport to dish out Epic Owns and Hard Truths, driven by fluctuating levels of irony and literality, something that distorts the idea of an Objective Truth by being confusingly tautological. To the extent Objective Reporting ever existed, it cannot function or do its job effectively within this swelling digital realm of ever-proliferating brand campaigns and explanatory narratives and ideological conflict.
This should be self-evident in the year 2021, but Trumpism is an appeal to passion, not reason. He presents a surface with no handle, a wall without a door. Polemic doesn’t work and neither does the snarky I-know-what-you-don’t-know-so-lemme-educate-you-about-the-facts-tone that has come to dominate #resistance prose. You can explain to your eagle-strewn boomer relatives that illegal border crossing apprehensions have steadily fallen for two decades, or undocumented immigrants commit less crime, or immigration is a net-positive to the economy, but they don’t care, no matter how many Last Week Tonight segments you retweet. The most die-hard MAGA chuds are enveloped with horror stories of unassailable and rape-happy Mexicans because they contextualize their underlying feelings — that their way of life is under siege. Voters don’t need Politifact to know what Trump is about: The big man will take care of them by brandishing a power that is wholly negative, not really helping them as much as he punishes people they don’t consider to be Real Americans.
Liberals scrambled to counter George W. Bush’s warmongering and violations of the Constitution with a Daily Show methodology: play a soundbite of a politician making a statement, then reference a scientific body or government agency that undermines the claim, or run a different clip of said politician saying something contradictory or foolish. But Dubya was ultimately undone by bungling Katrina and presiding over a global economic meltdown, not by a succession of “pants on fire” verdicts.
Similarly, Teflon Don was vanquished because he spent all of 2020 forfeiting the requisite work of confronting a global pandemic and instead decided to bluster through slapdash performances of executive seriousness. Biden coasted on an overwhelming wave of negative partisanship to win far more votes than any candidate in American history — not because a substantial chunk of Trump’s core base was brought to salvation.
The idea of Objective Truth, at least colloquially, tends to be conflated with facts. Author William Saletan wrote in Slate that our polarized world is best explained as “people who care about basic facts vs. people who don’t.”
“Trump and his acolytes don’t just spin facts; they completely disregard them. They repeat fantastic lies about election fraud, and when they’re confronted with contrary evidence, they’re not even embarrassed.
If we don’t get control of this — if we don’t reestablish an ethic of respect for facts — nothing else will be solved. We can’t extinguish the virus if tens of millions of Americans insist it’s a hoax and refuse to be vaccinated or wear masks. We can’t restore public faith in election results and put down insurrectionism if half the population refuses to believe anything the media report. Repairing the consensus that facts must be respected won’t settle our debates on spending, education, or criminal justice. But without that consensus, the crisis we’re in will get much worse.”
There is a degree of correctness to Saletan’s assessment: A considerable faction of Republican voters have sunk into schizophrenic solipsism because they are as capable of self-determination as an infant holding a fork and waddling toward an electrical outlet. They hold forth in their slackjawed antipathy with a po-faced casualness. To them, the difference between a well-substantiated argument and Trump raving patently falsifiable claims is blurred into a miasma of equivalent partisan hackery.
Ultimately, though, Saletan misdiagnoses the fundamental problem: There is a deep cynicism in America that has convinced people that the media, the government, and corporations are all lying to them at any available opportunity. Also, reality has escalated into rapidly refreshing cycles of interminable absurdity, and the delineation between conspiracy theory and genuine conspiracy has all but completely evaporated. Depending on what quarters of the internet you inhabit, the belief that Brittney Spears is mind-controlled by MK Ultra is granted the same level of legitimacy as the argument that a media and political symbiosis pushed a bogus Weapons of Mass Destruction narrative to justify an illegal invasion.
This provided a backdrop for disaffected voters to absolve Trump for his babbling incoherent fabrications. It took the biggest asshole in the 2016 Republican Primary to tap into a truth. Trump understood, with the fabulist’s blithe intuition, that Jeb Bush is a feckless dweeb and the remaining priggish frogs were frauds with blood-soaked records.
The debate over facts and fake news and conspiracy theories rightly critiques the pernicious anti-democratic dangers of Silicon Valley, but in an utterly dumbed-down and convoluted way that mostly offers to cede authority to Facebook to dictate what is or isn’t true. The aim of fact-checking has a laudable purpose — calling out politicians when they’re playing fast-and-loose with information. But fact-checkers, with all their independent biases and motivations, cannot be neutral arbiters of truth. “Ideology never announces itself as ideology,” Anne Helen Peterson writes, “It naturalizes itself.” Placing an overbearing and unwavering faith in the powers of fact-checking can prompt the more cynical among us to smuggle subjective commentaries through various syntactic guises that manipulate certain objective realities.
In 2019, the Washington Post’s fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, awarded Bernie Sanders a “mostly false” rating for claiming there are half a million medical-related bankruptcies a year — the Vermont Senator was relying on published research from the American Public Health Association. Earlier that year, when Sanders asserted that “millions of Americans” work multiple jobs, the Post labeled the statement “misleading,” even though the first sentence of Kessler’s rebuke literally reads: “Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that nearly 8 million people hold more than one job.” Ryan Grim has compiled a list of the Post’s supposedly “unbiased” criticisms on the left. Whatever this is, it isn’t fact-checking, even if it awards epic Pinocchios to Donald Trump because one time he said he slept with Miss America in 1980-something.
This obsession with facts is the apotheosis of the liberal trajectory. It started with West Wing where half the dialogue was just neurotic nerds reciting statistics to each other as if they all shared Aaron Sorkin’s coke-brain. Facts are, and have always been, second-order to context, narrative, and broader arguments. Stand-alone data points mean very little without an overarching story and framework to understand power, policy, and cultural trends.
In late 2018, the Mercatus Institute, a Koch-funded libertarian think tank, published a study that found Medicare-for-All would cost the federal government $32 trillion over the next decade. The obvious purpose of the report was to present a whopping price tag that would illustrate a massive expenditure in a misleading way. Single-payer supporters proffered some counter spin, noting if you trudge deeper into the report, it also found overall spending would decrease by $2 trillion in that same timeframe. By their analysis, Americans would save money through the elimination of premiums, deductibles, and co-pays once private insurance is transferred into a more cost-effective national healthcare system. As Dylan Scott of Vox noted at the time, this sparked a furious wonk spat over facts and figures, which obfuscated a larger debate about how Medicare-for-All would be achieved and what its trade-offs would entail: Questions like, whether the necessary tax hike to fund a single-payer system is politically tenable (depends on the framing), or will the overall per capita savings and degree of care offset increased federal spending (it does).
This healthcare proxy-war wasn’t a disagreement over facts, but of values and priorities. The mainstream press is already inclined to accept Republican talking points as de facto reality — honing in on the costs of universal social programs while hesitating to elaborate on their benefits — but is now tasked with adjudicating a debate over an unprecedented overhaul of not just American healthcare, but this nation’s social contract.
Fact-checking without any deeper contextualization amounts to pedantic sticklers doing slavish stenography and pointless quibbling. Hume’s Law discusses the gap between facts and values: A person cannot derive a moral or political conclusion from strictly factual premises. Americans are entitled to healthcare is a subjective claim, even if facts are deployed to substantiate why and how someone would reach this conclusion. There is an ongoing and massive dispute about whether humans are inherently cooperative or self-interested, and everyone can find evidence to support both narratives; this argument is both politically and historically contingent.
Everyone interprets facts and information through their own lens of analysis, and everyone will gloss over certain considerations because of our own built-in blind spots. The key is to recognize when you’re being lied to, when information is being manipulated, when someone is demonstrating a bias, what they’re trying to sell you, and what other perspectives are worth considering. And if you want to be a logic nerd, it helps to understand half-truths, straw-manning, false equivalencies, false dichotomies, false dilemmas, shifting the goalpost, snuck premises, assuming the conclusion, appeals to authority, appeals to emotion, motte-and-bailey, nirvana fallacy, slippery slopes, thought-terminating clichés, post hoc fallacy, sufficient and necessary conditions, descriptive and prescriptive claims, and the difference between correlation and causation. These traits begin to develop when you worry less about who to trust and instead focus on refining the methods by which you determine the legitimacy of the content you’re engaging with.
Simply put, one cannot derive an ought from an is. Factual statements can yield moral truths or instruct us on how to achieve certain goals, but they can’t tell us which truths or goals to care about. Language has failed liberals because it is varied, has connotations, and doesn’t have any fixed meanings. Language is also how moral visions and narratives are communicated, which liberalism has completely botched, leaving them to grab onto bare facts. Liberal discourse is like Invasion of the Body Snatchers except people stroll down the street with a “Nasty Woman” shirt and a “Covfefe” mug shouting “DESPITE RISING PREMIUMS, OBAMACARE HAS EXPANDED COVERAGE TO 30 MILLION AMERICANS, SO PLEASE FACT CHECK THE REPUBLICAN DEATH PANEL SMEARS BECAUSE THE DEMOCRATS GIVE AMERICANS ACCESS AND AFFORDABILITY!!”
Blue America enjoys flattering themselves over their commitment to Facts and Truth, despite spending the last several years grasping for any explanation of why the 2016 election was a nightmare aberration, an inevitable Hillary coronation thrown off the rails by a perma-tweeting, out-of-work game show host on a political suicide mission. The default replacement explanation was this “Great Man” theory swirling around Trump, that he is a wizard-like swindler who entranced a savage, atavistic horde of baying jackals that can only be appeased with Golden Corral. Upscale, urban, blue-leaning news consumers worked righteously backward from there. There were also supplementary rationalizations like racism, sexism, “economic anxiety,” social media misinformation, and a cloak-and-dagger election-fixing espionage conspiracy between Trump and the Kremlin. These were surely part of the story, but not the whole picture. Rather than come to terms with the totality of this grim spectacle and take on the courageous and difficult work to envisage an alternative, many Democrats retreated into the arms of the only thing capable of providing them a semblance of structure, security, and authority: Liberal MAGA.
So much of the Trump phenomenon is about denial. Donald Trump’s appeal represents the fact that we’ve never had a real reckoning with either our bloody past or our similarly bloody present — an absolute whitewashing of America’s sins from slavery on.
Liberal MAGA is also a denial mechanism. It assumes America’s institutions are unquestionably good, and that Trump — the singular root of all evil — tainted what was already great about this country. It is powered by an intense desire to not have to look at the depravity scuttling and swaggering hideously in the open. It nostalgizes and romanticizes the Obama years as a quaint idyl of comity and yearns for a return to this normal. It refuses to countenance the fact that Hillary Clinton was the Bill Buckner of presidential candidates. While Trump and his Koch-fueled cronies were dismantling whatever remained of the American regulatory system and social fabric, the popular rallying cries of Not My President and This Isn’t Who We Are became outright disavowals and arm-flailing dismissals. These grim rhetorical formulations represent an eerie, twisted inversion of American exceptionalism: There is nothing fundamentally busted with a system that produced Trump, it just needs the “right” people in charge making pragmatic and incremental tweaks.
American voters have at least some lingering sense of their alienation from their time and their labor — neoliberalism appears to be ideologically and materially ill-equipped to deal with this problem, let alone explain it. By this dint, QAnon is more than a goose-chase to investigate the inner machinations of a satanic cabal of pedophiles running the Deep State; it is a crowdsourced attempt to investigate reality itself, even if the dots are connected with kitschy iconography. While not quite as psychically twisted as QAnon — Robert Mueller’s probe delivered 34 indictments and convictions — at its peak, Russiagate was dragged and stretched to some insane hyperbolic lengths. It was pure cope, providing Blue America a form of escapism that would explain why Trump won while exonerating them from any introspection or reevaluation. Because of their own media consumptive bubble, Liberal MAGA reeled from the shock of an election result they were wholly unprepared for, and thus plunged into this Russiagate rabbit hole. Emotionally investing in this titillating conspiracy was the easier and more comforting choice than accepting its own shortcomings.
The Steele dossier piss romp was the Magna Carta of #Russiagate, and since then, there was little pretense that the Mueller probe was supposed to be a neutral fact-finding mission, as opposed to religious allegory. The steely and silver-haired former FBI Director was cast as the hero sent to slay the monster with “presidency-wrecking” conspiracy charges. For years, every pundit and Democratic pol in DC hyped every new Russia headline like the Watergate break-in, OJ, and any celebrity meltdown combined. Anonymous officials, they were often anonymous, promised Trump would “die in jail” and that he committed acts “nothing short of treasonous.” Some even proclaimed he might have been recruited by the KGB in 1987. Russiagate followed a fairly consistent pattern: shock viewers with a salacious headline; days or weeks later, news emerges that proves the story is shakier than initially believed; the story is either walked back or retraced by the publication, or the less principled and/or less discerning journos doubled-down.
None of this mattered, really, because the point and principle of Liberal MAGA — and Trumpism to a greater degree — is to believe all of it with a wholly cosmetic certitude, even and especially where those blunderbuss blasts of bluster are circular and contradictory, and you hold those rationalizations tightest when they are most tenuous. This isn’t to downplay Russia’s foreign policy interest in influencing American elections. But it is unknowable, unquantifiable, and unfalsifiable to conclude whether KGB-backed troll farms swung enough would-be Hillary voters or non-voters to clinch the presidency for Trump or if they just radicalized already existing right-wingers.
Lost in the clickbait, as Russiagate was unfolding, criminal lawyers and constitutional experts expressed doubts as to whether the Mueller probe had sufficient evidence to clear a very high legal bar of convicting Trump of conspiracy (this is the closest legal term to the utterly colloquial “collusion”). Regardless, “COLLUSION!” was repeated and posted into de facto reality until it all flubbed. The amount of literal truth contained within this mania was supposed to be beside the point, but it never managed to stay on the sidelines. In the bleak cosmology of Russian perfidy, the possibility of fact and counterargument would inevitably contaminate and was reflexively disregarded. The #resistance fancied themselves as this witches coven that could tweet their way into vanishing Trump.
As Trump exited the presidency, millions of Americans are living in the damage that a failed government approach to a pandemic can create, in terms of the sickness and suffering and death that surrounds us, but there isn’t a sense that any meaningful lessons have been learned, let alone any urgency in facing the task of remedying it. The only remaining delineation between a full-scale Trump cult delusion and Liberal MAGA remains in the latter being compulsively wedded to institutions like the Democratic Party, mainstream media, and Hollywood. Of course, this reverence only manifests in a way that layers partisanship onto American exceptionalism onto a logical system that is fully realized but drizzled with therapeutic self-affirmation and suffused with existential despair.
The collapse of a shared reality across the online sector unfolds in this fudgy, vagued-out language describing cycles of offhand umbrage and gilded bluster that cossets people in their own epistemological realm. Social media is a sort of fun mirrored hothouse full of internet-damaged hobgoblins exploring some truly avant-garde dimensions of public mutancy. It is a realm inherently counterproductive to pursuing truth, the ideal breeding ground for the kind of petty irrationality that incorporates the narcissistic character building of the personal brand. Without Twitter, Trump himself is a spent force, just another inexcusably rich golf blob. But he is airborne. He is alive in all the Americans who are blinkered and vain enough to earnestly believe that wearing a mask is somehow the same thing as dying in the Holocaust, but who also believe they must live-stream their spastic, baby-brained conniption fits in defiance of Trader Joe’s cashiers or municipal cops. But, really, lib accounts like Jeff Tiedrich, Palmer Report, Neera Tanden, Angela Belcamino, and Sarah Cooper are grifting just as hard, even if these maladjusted goobers have the charisma of someone who’s been involved in multiple child abduction trials.
The belief system that has emerged from these incentives and pressures is defined by simple stubbornness and thirst and strident idiocy. The game is to leverage your limitless vanity and every cheesy chiseling gripe to push whatever you yourself find most intriguing and that which centers you most. From there, the long-con of being a political influencer is to keep devising more elaborate and extravagant ways to profess that belief, all the time. For all the clammy and overdetermined machinations these aspirants undertake to snare a piece of Trump’s soggy mantle, it is plain to see the compulsive shitposting and defiant ugliness as pure clout chasing built on whatever already assumes your, or your audience’s, conclusions.
The terrified and fuming derangement that cable media sought to embed in its consumers has blossomed into a rising army of detached and unhappy people with ambitions both vague and vast, heads filled with Cobb salad and warped by dizzying righteousness. Whether it’s out of some sincere belief or lazy suspicion or secondhand gripe or idle vendetta, post by post and provocation by provocation, the most important point is that their ideology is nothing more than an obsessive taxonomy and weird fixation on enemies and threats. It’s all performed through relentless arias of anger and anxiety.
Although Trump himself is nothing more profound than a television-addicted, attention-seeking moron, his administration posed a legitimate threat to American democracy. But the big-picture horrors were often lost in the day-to-day hyperbole. It occurs through the snowballing accumulation of utterly terrible and disturbing things that some people claim to be Very Important and Super Interesting, all of which occlude and then obscure very real and demonstrable bad news. The cumulative effect of the generations-spanning right-wing disinfotainment complex has produced some grisly outcomes: white-supremacist terrorism, Charlottesville, and a bunch of swirly-eyed gun puds sacking Capitol Hill. It’s more uncertain what will come from the fairly insincere and facile hysteria of Liberal MAGA. This is a constant and cascading barrage of tweets and breaking news convincing people this is the biggest crisis ever and this is the most important election ever and people need to be held accountable and this is unprecedented and whatever Trump just did is of earth-shattering importance.
Despite their disintegrating sanity and ongoing psychosis, even the most die-hard #resistance libs never managed to summon the passion or urgency of QAnon; their curdled paranoia and pure unbridled resentment mostly amounted to stern, but enervating, How dare you, sir posts. For a year and a half, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer dutifully served as a beleaguered human punchline who lied and rationalized on behalf of an administration that was oft-compared to the Third Reich. Immediately upon resigning from his disgraced post, Spicer was wholeheartedly hugged by the same Hollywood celebs and media elites who drew these Literal Hitler parallels. In context with liberal media circles laundering the reputations of cretins like John Bolton or applauding obvious clammy grifts like the Lincoln Project, there isn’t really much to glean from the #resistance other than it signaled four years of impotent scolding and howling tantrums. These people are complete cowards or they are cynical histrionics — they either don’t believe what they’re saying or they’re not committed enough to care.
Among the most infuriating and exasperating aspects of being a progressive in America is that you’re often called a pie-in-the-sky purist for advocating for baseline social democracy as practiced in literally every other developed nation. The double standard is wild to behold. All the facts and figures and studies and analyses can be evoked, illustrating that since the U.S. embraced supply-side economics, the average American works longer hours for stagnating wages; the nation is experiencing increasing rates of loneliness, suicidality, addiction, and precarity; concentrating wealth and monopolistic power are corroding democracy and the economy — but the snide response is this is not endemic to capitalism, because this is, of course, not real capitalism, but crony capitalism. Proponents of neoliberalism, meanwhile, tend to fall into this patronizing discursive tendency where they vaguely gesture at “consumer choice” and “competition,” then herald the iPhone as the pinnacle of human progress with lavish rhetorical flourishes. Scandanavia is a working model of what a progressive America would resemble; free-market libertarians have… the Gilded Age?
The unique grossness of Trump, while mostly aesthetic, revealed the inherent con in Republican appeals: It is the divine right for the rich to snatch what they feel entitled to with impunity and any effort of the government to remedy any past injustice is tantamount to Literal Stalinist Totalitarianism — mixed with white power and white grievance. The Democratic con is a little more opaque but it centers around them purportedly supporting universal social programs, but with the signature caveat that these things are of course impossible and anyway must be negotiated with a demonic opposition party that is only legitimized through racism and sexism. So if all questions of macroeconomics and imperialism and institutional legitimacy are off the table, the only other option is to adopt the Bush-era tactics of constantly whipping voters into a grift-amenable frenzy.
America is trapped in this boring culture war with no end in sight, leveraged by both mainstream Republicans and Democrats to offer a social critique of why everything sucks without indicting capitalism. MAGA chuds fuming over the gender neutrality of a rebranded Potato Head is latently idiotic because never in the history of basic English grammar has an inanimate plastic toy been referred to as “he” or “she.” But when Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema did her whole quirky YAAAS QUEEN SLAY KWEEN thumbs down to raising the federal minimum wage to $15/hour, I immediately envisioned algorithms farting out insufferable and cringe think pieces like, It’s sexist to criticize a woman’s mannerisms when Democratic men also voted “no” on this bill, that are just so besides the fucking point.
If voters from mainstream Democrats to mainstream Republicans have accepted that government only exists to inflict and retroactively justify harm, then politics is nothing more than an escapist television program. Any “truth” recedes from whatever subjective rationalization justifies an emotional attachment to either party, or even capitalism in general. Being a die-hard Democrat or Republican is like rooting for the New York Jets: You know your team sucks and is run by a bunch of incompetent and greedy oligarchs, but you already went through the trouble of buying a jersey, so you’re going to cheer for them regardless. For Democrats, beating Trump wasn’t just a salient issue, but the most important issue. This means policy differences and who has the better vision for America are subordinate to who you want to watch on television manage whatever version of decline we get.
Likely from stupid luck and falling ass-backward into lightning in a bottle, Trump’s nonsensical blabber-mouthing dovetailed with a broader truth: Most Americans are struggling because both parties are pimping themselves out to the same job-exporting, wage-suppressing donors. Millions of individuals are justified, even if misguided, in feeling anxious and uncertain and frightened about the future. Those in power have nothing to offer in explaining how America can pull itself out of this shrugging, fatalist rut. The upshot here is there’s a sense that this current order is reaching the end-stage of its natural life, which is terrifying but full of dreamlike possibility. In his book, The Utopia of Rules, anthropologist David Graeber writes, “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
The answer to Trumpism is not to tweet “believe in science.” There has to be action, guided by a simple, but powerful story that communicates some truth about the present and about the future. It must capture imaginations and center an enemy, solutions, and a goal. The idea now that we have no choice but continued decline and widespread cruelty writ large, that the only viable options are between a version that is happy about it one that is sad about it, is a remarkable abdication of responsibility.
If we are to build a shared vision of empathy, equality, egalitarianism, it must be informed by empiricism and sound reasoning but also reject old ideals of Objective Truth. Examined from this perspective, Objective Truth was never that objective, to begin with. It was one of many subjective interpretations of reality following a lineage of overrated white guys in power selling their self-regard to everyone else because their perspectives happened to win out in the marketplace of ideas and make them rich in the process. Objective Truth has, and still is, a justification of a flailing and failing status quo. Questioning or rejecting this doesn’t make you an ideologue or a purist or whatever dismissive and lazy smear is hurled your way. It means you’re setting forth in creating your own objective.
