The Death of Truth

by Michiko Kakutani

  “The world is a horrible place,” Trump declared in his book Think Big. “Lions kill for food, but people kill for sport.” And: “The same burning greed that makes people loot, kill, and steal in emergencies like fires and floods, operates daily in normal everyday people. It lurks right beneath the surface, and when you least expect it, it rears its nasty head and bites you. Accept it. The world is a brutal place. People will annihilate you just for the fun of it or to show off to their friends.”

  Trump defines himself largely through the people and institutions he attacks (Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, James Comey, the press, the intelligence agencies, the FBI, the judiciary, anyone he perceives as a rival or a threat), and he always seems on the lookout for an enemy or a scapegoat, insulting immigrants, Muslims, women, and African Americans. Much of his agenda, for that matter, is driven by negativity—by an urge to undo President Obama’s legacy, including health care and environmental protection, and also to dismantle the broader safety net and civil liberties protections implemented since Lyndon B. Johnson launched the Great Society back in the mid-1960s. “Make America Great Again” translates into turning the clock back to the 1950s, before the civil rights movement, before the women’s movement, before LGBT rights, before Black Lives Matter.

  But Trump is hardly alone in his negativity and nihilism. Many Republicans in Congress have also abandoned reason, common sense, and the deliberative process of policy making. Some freely acknowledged that they voted for the tax bill because of their big-money donors. Representative Chris Collins said, “My donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again.’ ” Congress has failed to act on immigration reform again and again, and it’s refused to act on gun control year after year, tragedy after tragedy.

  When it comes to dealing with President Trump, many of these same Republicans simply ignore his multiplying lies; his appointment of woefully unqualified nominees to important government posts; his haphazard and cavalier scuttling of decades of domestic and foreign policy; his reckless decision making (which often seems to emerge, to use Pynchon’s words in Gravity’s Rainbow, from “a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all-round assholery”). They might confide their worries about Trump’s competence or stability to reporters—off the record, of course—but they won’t say so in public for fear of jeopardizing their standing with Trump’s base. This sort of cynical partisanship only serves to turn voters’ disgust with the government into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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  The nihilism in Washington is both an echo and a cause of more widespread feelings: a reflection of a growing loss of faith in institutions and a loss of respect for both the rule of law and everyday norms and traditions; a symptom of our loss of civility, our growing inability to have respectful debates with people who have opinions different from our own; and our growing unwillingness to give others the benefit of the doubt, room for an honest mistake, the courtesy of a hearing.

  It’s a sense that life is random and devoid of meaning, combined with a carelessness about consequences. Think of the Buchanans in The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” And it’s reflected in the cult popularity of Fight Club and Michel Houellebecq’s willfully repellent novels and the mainstream appreciation of bleakly brilliant works like Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men and Nic Pizzolatto’s HBO series True Detective.

  The new nihilism is WikiLeaks failing to scrub the names of Afghan civilians who might have had contact with American troops from classified U.S. documents it released—a move that human rights groups like Amnesty International warned could have “deadly ramifications” for the people named.

  The new nihilism is people making money by creating fake news stories—by one estimate upward of ten thousand dollars a month, earned through online ads. NPR reported that one entirely fictional story with this headline—“FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide”—was shared on Facebook more than half a million times and was created by a California-based company named Disinfomedia that oversees several fake news sites. The founder of Disinfomedia, identified by NPR as one Jestin Coler, claimed that he started the company to show how easily fake news spreads and that he enjoys “the game.” He said that he and his writers “tried to do similar things to liberals” but those efforts didn’t go viral the way stories aimed at Trump supporters do.

  The new nihilism is Michael Anton—who became a senior national security official in the Trump administration—writing an article (under the pseudonym Publius Decius Mus) titled “The Flight 93 Election,” in which he compared the plight of voters in 2016 to that of the passengers on the doomed airplane that went down on 9/11 and compared voting for Trump to charging the cockpit. “Charge the cockpit or you die,” he wrote. “You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain.”

  The new nihilism manifests itself in grotesque acts of cruelty like trolling the grieving parents of children murdered in Sandy Hook and accusing them of perpetrating a hoax, and similar attacks on the students who survived the Parkland school massacre. Given such events, it’s not surprising that one of the most popular words in the Trump era is “weaponize”—as in weaponizing irony, weaponizing fear, weaponizing memes, weaponizing lies, weaponizing the tax code.

  The most appalling racist, sexist, and perversely cruel remarks are served up on social media, often with a wink or a sneer, and when called out, practitioners frequently respond that they were simply joking—much the way that White House aides say Trump is simply joking or misunderstood when he makes offensive remarks. At a November 2016 alt-right conference, the white supremacist Richard Spencer ended his speech, shouting, “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” When asked about the Nazi salutes that greeted his exclamation, Spencer replied that they were “clearly done in a spirit of irony and exuberance.”

  As the researchers Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis suggest in their Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online study, ironic fascism can become a kind of gateway drug, leading to the unironic version: “A 4chan troll may be more receptive to serious white supremacist claims after using ethnic slurs ‘ironically’ for two or three months.”

  In fact, The Huffington Post reported that the neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer (which aims “to spread the message of nationalism and anti-Semitism to the masses”) has a style guide for writers. It provides suggestions like “Always blame the Jews for everything,” approved lists of racial slurs, and this chilling tip on using humor: “The tone of the site should be light.”

  “The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not,” the author of the style guide advised. “There should also be a conscious awareness of mocking stereotypes of hateful racists. I usually think of this as self-deprecating humor—I am a racist making fun of stereotypes of racists, because I don’t take myself super-seriously.

  “This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas kikes. But that’s neither here nor there.”

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  Trump, of course, is a troll—both by temperament and by habit. His tweets and offhand taunts are the very essence of trolling—the lies, the scorn, the invective, the trash talk, and the rabid non sequiturs of an angry, aggrieved, isolated, and deeply self-absorbed adolescent who lives in a self-constructed bubble and gets the attention he craves from bashing his enemies and trailing clouds of outrage and dismay in his path. Even as president, he continues to troll individuals and institutions, tweeting and retweeting insults, fake news, and treacherous innuendo. On Christmas Eve of
2017, he retweeted an image showing a splotch of blood, labeled CNN, on the sole of his shoe, once again denigrating the press. When another Twitter user called him “the most superior troll on the whole of twitter” in 2013, Trump replied, “A great compliment!”

  In his revealing 2017 book, Devil’s Bargain, the journalist Joshua Green reported that in the wake of Gamergate, Steve Bannon recruited a lot of gamers—young, alienated, mostly white men—to Breitbart. Although many were not particularly ideologically inclined to begin with, they were eager to throw bombs at the establishment and saw Trump as a kind of kindred soul. “Trump himself,” Green writes, “would help cement this alt-right alliance by retweeting images of Pepe the Frog and occasional missives—always inadvertently, his staff insisted—from white nationalist Twitter accounts.”

  Some trolls have employed relativistic arguments to insist that their promotion of alternative facts is simply adding a voice to the conversation, that there are no more objective truths anymore—only different perceptions and different story lines. They are clearly using postmodernist arguments in bad faith, but their assertions are no more disingenuous, really, than the efforts of Paul de Man’s defenders to explain away his anti-Semitism by using deconstruction to argue that the articles he wrote for a pro-Nazi publication in the 1940s didn’t really mean what they appear to mean.

  Deconstruction, in fact, is deeply nihilistic, implying that the efforts of journalists and historians—to ascertain the best available truths through the careful gathering and weighing of evidence—are futile. It suggests that reason is an outdated value, that language is not a tool for communication but an unstable and deceptive interface that is constantly subverting itself. Proponents of deconstruction don’t believe that the intent of an author confers meaning on a text (they think that’s up to the reader/viewer/recipient), and many postmodernists go so far as to suggest that the idea of individual responsibility is overrated, as the scholar Christopher Butler puts it, for promoting “a far too novelistic and bourgeois belief in the importance of individual human agency in preference to an attribution to underlying economic structures.”

  In the 1960s, when postmodernism took off in Europe and the United States, it was an anti-authoritarian doctrine, proposing an overthrow of old humanistic traditions, and as its tenets of irony, self-consciousness, and sarcasm leaked into popular culture, it could be seen, as David Foster Wallace observed in the early 1990s, as an antidote to the hypocrisy and smugness of the 1950s world of Leave It to Beaver; it was a “bad-boy” means of exploding old pieties and conventions at a time when the world seemed increasingly absurd. It also led to some genuinely innovative and daring art like Wallace’s own Infinite Jest.

  In a long essay about contemporary culture, Wallace argued that while postmodern irony could be a potent instrument for blowing things up, it was essentially a “critical and destructive” theory—good at ground clearing, yet singularly “unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.” Its promulgation of cynicism made writers wary of sincerity and “retrovalues like originality, depth, and integrity,” he wrote; it shielded “the heaper of scorn from scorn” while congratulating “the patron of scorn for rising above the mass of people who still fall for outmoded pretensions.” The attitude of “I don’t really mean what I say” would be adopted by those alt-right trolls who wanted to pretend that they weren’t really bigots—they were just joking.

  Two of the celebrities Wallace held up in 1993 as symbols of the poisonousness of postmodernist irony can now be seen, in retrospect, as harbingers of Trump. The first was Joe Isuzu, the star of jokey 1980s Isuzu car commercials—“an oily, Satanic-looking salesman,” in Wallace’s words, who “told whoppers about Isuzus’ genuine llama-skin upholstery and ability to run on tap water”—a parody of a dishonest salesman who invited viewers “to congratulate themselves for getting the joke.” Joe Isuzu liked to say “You have my word on it!” while a silent disclaimer ran over the footage of his boasts: “He’s lying.” A second celebrity Wallace held up as a tower of 1990s postmodern irony was Rush Limbaugh, whom he described as embodying “a hatred that winks and nudges you and pretends it’s just kidding.”

  The trickle-down legacy of postmodernism, Wallace argued, was “sarcasm, cynicism, a manic ennui, suspicion of all authority, suspicion of all constraints on conduct, and a terrible penchant for ironic diagnosis of unpleasantness instead of an ambition not just to diagnose and ridicule but to redeem. You’ve got to understand that this stuff has permeated the culture. It’s become our language”—“Postmodern irony’s become our environment.” The water in which we swim.

  EPILOGUE

  In his clear-eyed 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argued that “the technological distractions made possible by the electric plug” were indelibly altering our cultural discourse, making it more trivial, more inconsequential, and rendering the information it conveyed “simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical, and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment.”

  “Our priests and presidents, our surgeons and lawyers, our educators and newscasters,” Postman wrote, “need worry less about satisfying the demands of their discipline than the demands of good showmanship.”

  By “electric plug,” Postman meant television, but his observations apply even more fittingly to the age of the internet, in which data overload ensures that it’s the shiniest object—the loudest voice, the most outrageous opinion—that captures our attention and receives the most clicks and buzz.

  In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman compared the dystopian vision that Aldous Huxley mapped out in Brave New World (in which people lead soporific lives, deadened by drugs and frivolous entertainments) with the one Orwell created in 1984 (in which people live under the crushing autocratic rule of Big Brother).

  “Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information,” Postman wrote. “Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”

  As Postman saw it, Huxley’s dystopia was already coming to fruition in the late twentieth century. While Orwell’s fears of a totalitarian state applied to the Soviet Union, Postman argued, the threat to the liberal democracies of the West—this was in 1985, remember—was better represented by Huxley’s nightmare of a population too narcotized by “undisguised trivialities” to engage as responsible citizens.

  These observations of Postman’s were ahead of their time, and they would be echoed by George Saunders, who in an essay titled “The Braindead Megaphone” (2007) argued that our national discourse had been dangerously degraded by years of coverage of O. J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky. Our national language, he wrote, had become so dumbed down—at once “aggressive, anxiety-provoking, maudlin, polarizing”—that “we were sitting ducks” when it came time to try to have a serious debate about whether to invade Iraq, and all we had in our hands was “the set of crude, hyperbolic tools we’d been using to discuss O.J., et al.”: the shouted babblings of a loud know-it-all, know-nothing figure he called Megaphone Guy, bellowing into a bullhorn, its intelligence level set to “Stupid,” its volume stuck on “Drown Out All Others.”

  But prescient as Postman’s observations about Huxley are (and as prescient as Huxley was about our new age of distraction), it’s clear that he also underestimated the relevance of Orwell’s dystopia. Or perhaps it’s the case that Trump and the assaults he and his administration have committed against the very idea of truth have made 1984 timely again—something readers recognized, propelling it and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism up the bestseller lists in the month that Trump took the oath of office.

  Trump’s lies, his efforts to redefine reality, his violation of norms and rules and traditions, his mainstreaming of hate speech, his a
ttacks on the press, the judiciary, the electoral system—all are reasons that the democracy watchdog group Freedom House warned that year one of the Trump administration had brought “further, faster erosion of America’s own democratic standards than at any other time in memory,” and all are reasons that Orwell’s portrait of an authoritarian state, in which Big Brother tries to control all narratives and define the present and the past, is newly relevant.

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  Trump often seems like a one-man set of Aesop-like fables—with easy-to-decipher morals like “those who lie down with dogs will get up with fleas” or “when someone tells you who he is, believe him”—but because he is president of the United States, his actions do not simply end in a tagline moral; rather, they ripple outward like a toxic tsunami, creating havoc in the lives of millions. Once he has left office, the damage he has done to American institutions and the country’s foreign policy will take years to repair. And to the degree that his election was a reflection of larger dynamics in society—from the growing partisanship in politics, to the profusion of fake stories on social media, to our isolation in filter bubbles—his departure from the scene will not restore truth to health and well-being, at least not right away.

  Philip Roth said he could never have imagined that “the 21st-century catastrophe to befall the U.S.A., the most debasing of disasters,” would appear in “the ominously ridiculous commedia dell’arte figure of the boastful buffoon.” Trump’s ridiculousness, his narcissistic ability to make everything about himself, the outrageousness of his lies, and the profundity of his ignorance can easily distract attention from the more lasting implications of his story: how easily Republicans in Congress enabled him, undermining the whole concept of checks and balances set in place by the founders; how a third of the country passively accepted his assaults on the Constitution; how easily Russian disinformation took root in a culture where the teaching of history and civics had seriously atrophied.