The Death of Truth

by Michiko Kakutani

  More specifically, Eco wrote that “Mussolini did not have any philosophy; he had only rhetoric”: it was “a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions.” Ur-fascism employs “an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax,” Eco added, “in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.” And it regards “the People” not as citizens or individuals but as “a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will,” which the leader pretends to interpret; the leader puts himself forth—instead of, say, a parliament or legislature—as “the Voice of the People.” If that sounds oddly familiar, it’s because Trump, in his Republican National Convention address, said to the audience, “I’m with you—the American people. I am your voice.”

  6

  FILTERS, SILOS, AND TRIBES

  We’re all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.

  —RUDYARD KIPLING, 1890

  Shortly before the 2004 election, Arthur Miller—the playwright and a dedicated liberal—wondered, “How can the polls be neck and neck when I don’t know one Bush supporter?”

  Since then, of course, the walls of our political silos have only grown taller; the insulation of our echo chambers, that much thicker. Even before we were being sealed in impermeable filter bubbles by Facebook news feeds and Google search data, we were living in communities that had become increasingly segregated in terms of politics, culture, geography, and lifestyle. Add to that partisan news sources like Fox News, Breitbart, and Drudge, and it’s no surprise that the Rashomon effect has taken hold: common ground between citizens from opposing political parties is rapidly shrinking, and the whole idea of consensus is becoming a thing of the past.

  A 2016 Pew survey showed that 45 percent of Republicans view Democratic policies as a threat to the nation’s well-being, and 41 percent of Democrats say the same about GOP policies. And the animosity goes well beyond policy disagreements; it’s personal. Seventy percent of Democrats in that Pew survey said that Republicans are more close-minded than other Americans; meanwhile, 47 percent of Republicans said Democrats are more immoral than other Americans, and 46 percent said they are lazier.

  Such partisanship is being inflated further by Russian trolls seeking to undermine democracy in America by amplifying social divisions through fake news and fake social media accounts and by President Trump’s use of inflammatory remarks to pander to his base and bait his adversaries. It’s telling that the old national motto E pluribus unum (Out of many, one) has been removed from Trump’s commemorative presidential coins and replaced with his own slogan “Make America Great Again.”

  These growing divides in America are only a couple of decades old, according to Bill Bishop’s book, The Big Sort. In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Bishop wrote, communities seemed to be growing more politically integrated, and “there was an economic convergence, too,” as Sunbelt prosperity spread in the South. But around 1980 or so something happened, says Bishop: people had begun reordering their lives around “their values, their tastes, and their beliefs”—in part, as a response to the social and cultural dislocations that followed in the wake of the 1960s. People with college degrees were gravitating toward cities, while rural areas slipped behind economically.

  “As we’ve lost trust in traditional institutions,” Bishop wrote, “the tenuous bonds of the workplace have proven insufficient to satisfy people’s need for belonging.” In response, people found a sense of community by seeking out like-minded neighborhoods, churches, social clubs, and other organizations. It’s a dynamic that would be amplified at light speed by the internet—by news sites catering to particular ideological points of view, by special interest bulletin boards, and by social media that’s helped people further sort themselves into silos of shared interests. By the turn of the millennium, Bishop wrote, the divisions were less about ideology than about tastes and values, but “as the parties have come to represent lifestyle—and as lifestyle has defined communities—everything seems divisible, Republican or Democratic.” Everything meaning not just your views on health care or voting rights or global warming but where you shop, what you eat, what sorts of movies you watch. A 2017 Pew survey showed that Americans don’t even agree about the value of a college education: while 72 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said colleges and universities have a positive effect on the country, a majority of Republicans and Republican leaners (58 percent) have a negative view of those institutions of higher learning.

  Meanwhile, the number of people in the middle—independents or swing voters—dwindled in clout, or at least in the attention they received from many politicians. In his book The Second Civil War, the veteran political reporter Ronald Brownstein described how George W. Bush’s political advisers reviewed the data from the 2000 campaign and decided to focus in 2004 on energizing the base and encouraging turnout among Republicans—a harbinger of the play-to-the-base strategy Trump would later pursue so relentlessly. As one Bush adviser told Brownstein, “This is not designed to be a 55 percent presidency. This is designed to be a presidency that moves as much as possible of what we believe into law while holding fifty plus one of the country and the Congress.” In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign basically wrote off the white working-class vote (the vote her husband, Bill, had owned) and focused, instead, on turning out her base.

  Ideological consistency grew over the years: a 2014 Pew survey found that in the two decades after 1994 more Democrats gave “uniformly liberal responses” to policy questions (about matters like immigration, the environment, the role of government), while more Republicans gave “uniformly conservative responses.” Those members of both parties with the most consistent views, the Pew study noted, had a “disproportionate influence on the political process”; they were more likely to vote, more likely to donate money, more likely to contact elected officials. And then there is gerrymandering, which has favored Republicans since they launched a concerted effort after Obama’s election in 2008 to gain control of state governments, which are in charge of drawing (or redrawing) congressional districts. The new, often highly misshapen districts, drawn with the help of computer software, gave Republicans a substantial advantage in capturing and holding on to the House of Representatives, and they also tended to tilt districts further to the right, which made many elected officials reluctant to compromise with Democrats when they got to Washington, out of fear of being primaried on their right.

  For many of these committed partisans, supporting their party was like being a rabid, die-hard fan of a favorite NBA, MLB, or NFL team; it was part of their own identity, and their team could do no wrong. They might hate a particular policy or a particular candidate—much the way they might blame their team’s coach for a bad play, or loathe an overpaid, underperforming player received in a trade—but short of the apocalypse they were going to remain loyal fans while wishing pain and humiliation upon their opponents.

  Polarized voting in Congress mirrored these developments: by 2014, a Pew report noted, Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill were “further apart from one another than at any point in modern history”; it also highlighted that rising polarization among elected officials was “asymmetrical, with much of the widening gap between the two parties attributable to a rightward shift among Republicans.”

  The chief reason for this asymmetry was the explosion of right-wing media. Back in the 1990s, Rush Limbaugh proved that incendiary invective and showmanship—two things Donald Trump would learn from him—could win him a lucrative national audience, and for decades his faithful dittoheads loyally repeated whatever he said, even when what he said was ridiculous. In one diatribe, Limbaugh asserted that “the Four Corners of Deceit are government, academia, science, and the media.” He also declared that “scientists wear white lab coats and they look really official” but “they’re frauds. They’re bought and paid for by the left.”

/>   In the three decades since the FCC revoked the Fairness Doctrine (which required TV and radio stations to devote some of their programming to important issues of the day and air opposing views on those issues) and the two decades since Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News, right-wing media has grown into a sprawling, solipsistic network that relentlessly repeats its own tropes (the dangers of immigration, the untrustworthiness of mainstream media, the evils of big government, and so on), and it’s succeeded in framing many debates in the national conversation through its sheer shamelessness and decibel level. Breitbart News, which Steve Bannon described as a “platform for the alt-right,” and the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which reaches an estimated 38 percent of American households through local news broadcasts, have expanded the right-wing media universe, along with countless online sites, YouTube channels, and radio broadcasts. In an Orwellian move, Sinclair has even forced local news anchors to read a scripted message about “false news” that echoes President Trump’s own rhetoric undermining real reporting.

  Many of these outlets don’t even go through the motions of trying to provide verifiable facts and information, but instead attempt to spin what one talk show host calls “truth-based content” into self-serving, precooked narratives that ratify audiences’ existing beliefs or gin up their worst fears.

  In recent years, the conservative radio host Charlie Sykes observed, conservative media created an “alternate reality bubble” that “destroyed our own immunity to fake news, while empowering the worst and most reckless on the right.”

  A 2017 Harvard study of more than 1.25 million stories (published online between April 1, 2015, and Election Day in November 2016) concluded that pro-Trump audiences relied heavily on this “insulated knowledge community,” which uses “social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world” and reinforces users’ shared worldview while poisoning them against mainstream journalism that might challenge their preconceptions. The result: an environment in which the president can allude to a terrorist event in Sweden that never happened, or a presidential adviser can reference a nonexistent “Bowling Green massacre.”

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  —

  With tribal politics increasingly dominating Republican and Democratic politics, candidates scramble to lock down their party’s base during the primary process. Much of the Republican base now reacts instantly with knee-jerk denial when it comes to issues like gun violence, Obamacare, or global warming. Never mind statistics, expert analyses, carefully researched university or government studies, in some cases even their own self-interest—a lot of hard-core Trump supporters dismiss such evidence as never-to-be-trusted liberal or deep state politics. For these partisans, party loyalty and tribal politics matter more than facts, more than morality and decency: witness the Republicans who supported Senate candidate Roy Moore, who was accused of sexual misconduct against teenage girls, and the Trump supporters who booed John McCain, a genuine war hero, and viciously said God had punished him with cancer for standing up to Trump.

  As the journalist Andrew Sullivan wrote, “The enduring, complicated divides of ideology, geography, party, class, religion, and race have mutated into something deeper, simpler to map, and therefore much more ominous”: not simple political polarization, but the fracture of the country into “two coherent tribes, eerily balanced in political power, fighting not just to advance their own side but to provoke, condemn, and defeat the other.”

  Assorted theories have been advanced to explain confirmation bias—why people rush to embrace information that supports their beliefs while rejecting information that disputes them: that first impressions are difficult to dislodge, that there’s a primitive instinct to defend one’s turf, that people tend to have emotional rather than intellectual responses to being challenged and are loath to carefully examine evidence.

  Group dynamics only exaggerate these tendencies, the author and legal scholar Cass Sunstein observed in his book Going to Extremes: insularity often means limited information input (and usually information that reinforces preexisting views) and a desire for peer approval; and if the group’s leader “does not encourage dissent and is inclined to an identifiable conclusion, it is highly likely that the group as a whole will move toward that conclusion.”

  Once the group has been psychologically walled off, Sunstein wrote, “the information and views of those outside the group can be discredited, and hence nothing will disturb the process of polarization as group members continue to talk.” In fact, groups of like-minded people can become breeding grounds for extreme movements. “Terrorists are made, not born,” Sunstein observed, “and terrorist networks often operate in just this way. As a result, they can move otherwise ordinary people to violent acts.”

  Charlie Sykes decided to step down from his popular radio show at the end of 2016. Politics had become a “binary tribal world,” he pointed out, in which voters “tolerate bizarre behavior, dishonesty, crudity and cruelty, because the other side is always worse.” What his listeners wouldn’t tolerate was his criticism of Trump or his objections that crazy conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were demonstrably false. His listeners had become accustomed to rejecting mainstream sources of news and, for that matter, simple facts.

  “In the new Right media culture,” he wrote in his 2017 book, How the Right Lost Its Mind, “negative information simply no longer penetrates; gaffes and scandals can be snuffed out, ignored, or spun; counternarratives can be launched. Trump has proven that a candidate can be immune to the narratives, criticism, and fact-checking of the mainstream media.”

  * * *

  —

  Long gone are the pre-cable days when many people got their news from one of three TV networks and watched many of the same television shows like All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. New Star Wars movies and the Super Bowl remain some of the few communal events that capture an audience cutting across demographic lines.

  As for news, an increasingly fragmented media environment offers sites and publications targeted at niche audiences from the reddest red to the bluest blue. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and many other sites use algorithms to personalize the information you see—information customized on the basis of earlier data they’ve collected about you.

  “With Google personalized for everyone,” the internet activist Eli Pariser wrote in his book, The Filter Bubble, “the query ‘stem cells’ might produce diametrically opposed results for scientists who support stem cell research and activists who oppose it. ‘Proof of climate change’ might turn up different results for an environmental activist and an oil company executive. In polls, a huge majority of us assume search engines are unbiased. But that may be just because they’re increasingly biased to share our own views. More and more, your computer monitor is a kind of one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click.”

  Because social media sites give us information that tends to confirm our view of the world—what Pariser calls “an endless you-loop”—people live in increasingly narrow content silos and correspondingly smaller walled gardens of thought. It’s a big reason why liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, find it harder and harder to agree on facts and why a shared sense of reality is becoming elusive. It also helps explain why elites in New York and Washington—including the Clinton campaign and much of the press—were so shocked by Trump’s win in the 2016 election.

  “If algorithms are going to curate the world for us,” Pariser warned in a 2011 TED talk, “if they’re going to decide what we get to see and what we don’t get to see, then we need to make sure that they’re not just keyed to relevance but that they also show us things that are uncomfortable or challenging or important, other points of view.”

  7

  ATTENTION DEFICIT

  When you want to know how things really work,
study them when they’re coming apart.

  —WILLIAM GIBSON, ZERO HISTORY

  When it comes to spreading fake news and undermining belief in objectivity, technology has proven a highly flammable accelerant. Increasingly we have become aware of the dark side of what was imagined as a transformative catalyst for innovation.

  Tim Berners-Lee, who drew up a proposal in 1989 for what would become the World Wide Web, envisioned a universal information system, connecting people across boundaries of language and location and sharing information that would lead to unprecedented creativity and problem solving. A sort of benevolent version of Borges’s infinite library, where everything existed but, in this case, could also be retrieved and put to practical and imaginative use.

  “The rise of the web was a rare instance when we learned new, positive information about human potential,” Jaron Lanier wrote in his book You Are Not a Gadget. “Who would have guessed (at least at first) that millions of people would put so much effort into a project without the presence of advertising, commercial motive, threat of punishment, charismatic figures, identity politics, exploitation of the fear of death, or any of the other classic motivators of mankind. In vast numbers, people did something cooperatively, solely because it was a good idea, and it was beautiful.”

  At the heart of the collective enterprise in those early days, Lanier recalled, was “a sweet faith in human nature. If we empowered individuals, we believed, more good than harm would result. The way the internet has gone sour since then is truly perverse.”