* * *
—
George Washington’s Farewell Address of 1796 was eerily clairvoyant about the dangers America now faces. In order to protect its future, he said, the young country must guard its Constitution and remain vigilant about efforts to sabotage the separation and balance of powers within the government that he and the other founders had so carefully crafted.
Washington warned about the rise of “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” who might try “to subvert the power of the people” and “usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
He warned about “the insidious wiles of foreign influence” and the dangers of “ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens” who might devote themselves to a favorite foreign nation in order “to betray or sacrifice the interests” of America.
And, finally, Washington warned of the “continual mischiefs of the spirit of party,” which are given to creating strife through “ill-founded jealousies and false alarms,” and the perils that factionalism (East versus West, North versus South, state versus federal) posed to the unity of the country. Citizens, he said, must indignantly frown “upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.”
America’s founding generation spoke frequently of the “common good.” Washington reminded citizens of their “common concerns” and “common interests” and the “common cause” they had all fought for in the Revolution. And Thomas Jefferson spoke in his inaugural address of the young country uniting “in common efforts for the common good.” A common purpose and a shared sense of reality mattered because they bound the disparate states and regions together, and they remain essential for conducting a national conversation. Especially today in a country where President Trump and Russian and alt-right trolls are working to incite the very factionalism Washington warned us about, trying to inflame divisions between people over racial, ethnic, and religious lines, between red states and blue states, between small towns and big cities.
There are no easy remedies, but it’s essential that citizens defy the cynicism and resignation that autocrats and power-hungry politicians depend upon to subvert resistance. The inspiring students who survived the Parkland, Florida, massacre have done just that, rejecting the fatalism of many of their elders; by turning their grief into action, they are changing the national dialogue and leading the charge to get real gun control measures enacted that could help prevent others from suffering the terror and loss they experienced.
At the same time, citizens must look to—and protect—the institutions the founders created as pillars to uphold the roof of democracy: the three branches of government—executive, legislative, and judicial—meant to serve as “reciprocal checks,” in Washington’s words, on one another; and the other two foundation stones of democracy that the founders agreed were crucial for creating an informed public that could wisely choose its leaders: education and a free and independent press.
Jefferson wrote that because the young republic was predicated on the proposition “that man may be governed by reason and truth,” our “first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press. It is therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.”
“I hold it, therefore, certain,” Jefferson went on, “that to open the doors of truth, and to fortify the habit of testing everything by reason, are the most effectual manacles we can rivet on the hands of our successors to prevent their manacling the people with their own consent.”
Madison, somewhat more succinctly, put it like this: “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both.” Without commonly agreed-upon facts—not Republican facts and Democratic facts; not the alternative facts of today’s silo-world—there can be no rational debate over policies, no substantive means of evaluating candidates for political office, and no way to hold elected officials accountable to the people. Without truth, democracy is hobbled. The founders recognized this, and those seeking democracy’s survival must recognize it today.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
“The ideal subject”: Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1973), 474.
the “danger flags”: Margaret Atwood, “My Hero: George Orwell,” Guardian, Jan. 18, 2013.
“The historian knows how”: Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics,” in Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt, 1972), 6.
“diminishing role of facts”: Jennifer Kavanagh and Michael D. Rich, Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life (Rand Corporation, 2018).
2,140 false or misleading claims: Glenn Kessler and Meg Kelly, “President Trump Made 2,140 False or Misleading Claims in His First Year,” Washington Post, Jan. 10, 2018.
False claims about the U.K.’s: Anoosh Chakelian, “Boris Johnson Resurrects the Leave Campaign’s £350M for NHS Fantasy,” New Statesman, Sept. 16, 2017.
“There is no such thing”: Pope Francis, “Message of His Holiness Pope Francis for World Communications Day,” Jan. 24, 2018, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/communications/documents/papa-francesco_20180124_messaggio-comunicazioni-sociali.html.
“one of the biggest challenges”: Jessica Estepa and Gregory Korte, “Obama Tells David Letterman: People No Longer Agree on What Facts Are,” USA Today, Jan. 12, 2018.
“2017 was a year”: “Read Sen. Jeff Flake’s Speech Criticizing Trump,” CNN Politics, Jan. 17, 2018.
five billion dollars in free campaign coverage: Philip Bump, “Assessing a Clinton Argument That the Media Helped to Elect Trump,” Washington Post, Sept. 12, 2017.
a dozen Diet Cokes a day: Maggie Haberman, Glenn Thrush, and Peter Baker, “Inside Trump’s Hour-by-Hour Battle for Self-Preservation,” New York Times, Dec. 9, 2017.
It is unlikely that a candidate: David Barstow, “Donald Trump’s Deals Rely on Being Creative with the Truth,” New York Times, July 16, 2016.
“Everyone is entitled”: “An American Original,” Vanity Fair, Nov. 2010.
“We can debate policies”: Sally Yates, “Who Are We as a Country? Time to Decide,” USA Today, Dec. 19, 2017.
1. THE DECLINE AND FALL OF REASON
“This is an apple”: youtube.com/watch?v=IxuuIPcQ9_I.
“spring up amongst us”: Abraham Lincoln, “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Ill., Jan. 27, 1838, abrahamlincolnonline.org.
“a man unprincipled”: Alexander Hamilton, “Objections and Answers Respecting the Administration of the Government,” Aug. 18, 1792, founders.archives.gov.
“progress is neither automatic”: Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom, in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., ed. James M. Washington (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991), 472.
“can constantly remake ourselves”: Barack Obama, “What I See in Lincoln’s Eyes,” CNN, June 28, 2005.
“experiment entrusted to the hands”: George Washington, Inaugural Address, Apr. 30, 1789.
“the indigenous American berserk”: Philip Roth, American Pastoral (New York: Vintage, 1988), 86.
“heated exaggeration”: Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays (1965; New York: Vintage, 2008), 3.
“a nation, a culture”: Ibid., 4.
“Have you no sense”: “McCarthy-Welch Exchange,” June 9, 1954, americanrhetoric.com.
“the State Department harbors”: McCarthy to Truman, F
eb. 11, 1950, telegram, archives.gov.
“episodic waves”: Hofstadter, Paranoid Style in American Politics, 39.
The anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant: Encyclopaedia Britannica, s.v. “Know-Nothing Party.”
“America has been largely taken”: Hofstadter, Paranoid Style in American Politics, 39.
nationalist, anti-immigrant leaders: Ishaan Tharoor, “Geert Wilders and the Mainstreaming of White Nationalism,” Washington Post, Mar. 14, 2017; Elisabeth Zerofsky, “Europe’s Populists Prepare for a Nationalist Spring,” New Yorker, Jan. 25, 2017; Jason Horowitz, “Italy’s Populists Turn Up the Heat as Anti-Migrant Anger Boils,” New York Times, Feb. 5, 2018.
quoted, in news articles: Ed Ballard, “Terror, Brexit, and U.S. Election Have Made 2016 the Year of Yeats,” Wall Street Journal, Aug. 23, 2016.
“Things fall apart”: William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming,” poetryfoundation.org.
Tea Party paranoids who claimed: “Tea Party Movement Is Full of Conspiracy Theories,” Newsweek, Feb. 8, 2010.
According to a 2017 survey: Ariel Malka and Yphtach Lelkes, “In a New Poll, Half of Republicans Say They Would Support Postponing 2020 Election If Trump Proposed It,” Washington Post, Aug. 10, 2017.
Another study conducted: Melissa Healy, “It’s More Than the ‘Rigged’ Election: Voters Across the Political Spectrum Believe in Conspiracy Theories,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 3, 2016; Shankar Vedantam, “More Americans Than You Might Think Believe in Conspiracy Theories,” NPR, June 4, 2014.
Trump, who launched his political: Eric Bradner, “Trump Praises 9/11 Truther’s ‘Amazing’ Reputation,” CNN Politics, Dec. 2, 2015.
His former chief strategist: Maggie Haberman, Michael D. Shear, and Glenn Thrush, “Stephen Bannon Out at the White House After Turbulent Run,” New York Times, Aug. 18, 2017.
“reads to reinforce”: Haberman, Thrush, and Baker, “Inside Trump’s Hour-by-Hour Battle for Self-Preservation.”
Because such mentions tend: Greg Miller, Greg Jaffe, and Philip Rucker, “Doubting the Intelligence, Trump Pursues Putin and Leaves a Russian Threat Unchecked,” Washington Post, Dec. 14, 2017; Carol D. Leonnig, Shane Harris, and Greg Jaffe, “Breaking with Tradition, Trump Skips President’s Written Intelligence Report and Relies on Oral Briefings,” Washington Post, Feb. 9, 2018.
sources like Breitbart News: Charlie Warzel and Lam Thuy Vo, “Here’s Where Donald Trump Gets His News,” BuzzFeed, Dec. 3, 2016; Dean Obeidallah, “Trump Talks Judgment, Then Cites National Enquirer,” CNN, May 4, 2016.
eight hours a day watching: Haberman, Thrush, and Baker, “Inside Trump’s Hour-by-Hour Battle for Self-Preservation.”
“admiring tweets, transcripts”: Alex Thompson, “Trump Gets a Folder Full of Positive News About Himself Twice a Day,” Vice News, Aug. 9, 2017.
“I’m the only one”: Benjamin Hart, “Trump on Unfilled State Department Jobs: ‘I Am the Only One That Matters,’ ” New York, Nov. 3, 2017; Bill Chappell, “ ‘I’m the Only One That Matters,’ Trump Says of State Dept. Job Vacancies,” The Two-Way, NPR, Nov. 3, 2017.
Commonsense policies like: Lydia Saad, “Americans Widely Support Tighter Regulations on Gun Sales,” Gallup, Oct. 17, 2017.
Eighty-seven percent of Americans: Max Greenwood, “Poll: Nearly 9 in 10 Want DACA Recipients to Stay in US,” Hill, Jan. 18, 2018.
And 83 percent of Americans: Harper Neidig, “Poll: 83 Percent of Voters Support Keeping FCC’s Net Neutrality Rules,” Hill, Dec. 12, 2017; Cecilia Kang, “F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules,” New York Times, Dec. 14, 2017.
“addiction to infotainment”: Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason (New York: Pantheon, 2008), 307; Farhad Manjoo, True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2008); Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture (New York: Doubleday, 2007).
“the popular equation of intellectualism”: Jacoby, Age of American Unreason, xviii.
“does a poor job of teaching”: Ibid., 307.
“the persistent and sustained reliance”: Al Gore, The Assault on Reason (New York: Penguin Press, 2007), 1.
“America’s political reality”: Ibid., 38–39.
Indeed, the Iraq war remains: Michiko Kakutani, “How Feuds and Failures Affected American Intelligence,” New York Times, June 18, 2004; Michiko Kakutani, “All the President’s Books (Minding History’s Whys and Wherefores),” New York Times, May 11, 2006; Julian Borger, “The Spies Who Pushed for War,” Guardian, July 17, 2003; Jason Vest and Robert Dreyfuss, “The Lie Factory,” Mother Jones, Jan./Feb. 2004; Seymour M. Hersh, “Selective Intelligence,” New Yorker, May 12, 2003; Michiko Kakutani, “Controversial Reports Become Accepted Wisdom,” New York Times, Sept. 28, 2004; Dana Milbank and Claudia Deane, “Hussein Link to 9/11 Lingers in Many Minds,” Washington Post, Sept. 6, 2003.
“something on the order of several”: Kakutani, “All the President’s Books.”
“A cakewalk”: Ken Adelman, “Cakewalk in Iraq,” Washington Post, Feb. 13, 2002.
“pasting feathers together”: Michiko Kakutani, “From Planning to Warfare to Occupation, How Iraq Went Wrong,” New York Times, July 25, 2006.
Although Trump frequently criticized: Eugene Kiely, “Donald Trump and the Iraq War,” FactCheck.org, Feb. 19, 2016.
“deconstruction of the administrative state”: Philip Rucker and Robert Costa, “Bannon Vows a Daily Fight for ‘Deconstruction of the Administrative State,’ ” Washington Post, Feb. 23, 2017.
crucial role of ambassador: Victor Cha, “Giving North Korea a ‘Bloody Nose’ Carries a Huge Risk to Americans,” Washington Post, Jan. 30, 2018.
world confidence in U.S. leadership: Bill Chappell, “World’s Regard for U.S. Leadership Hits Record Low in Gallup Poll,” NPR, Jan. 19, 2018; Laura Smith-Spark, “US Slumps in Global Leadership Poll After Trump’s 1st Year,” CNN, Jan. 18, 2018.
“the wisdom of the crowd”: Michiko Kakutani, “The Cult of the Amateur,” New York Times, June 29, 2007.
“every opinion on any matter”: Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 20.
“If citizens do not bother”: Ibid., 11.
Unqualified judges and agency heads: Carlos Ballesteros, “Trump Is Nominating Unqualified Judges at an Unprecedented Rate,” Newsweek, Nov. 17, 2017; Paul Waldman, “Donald Trump Has Assembled the Worst Cabinet in American History,” The Plum Line (blog), Washington Post, Jan. 19, 2017; Travis Waldron and Daniel Marans, “Donald Trump’s Cabinet Is on Track to Be the Least Experienced in Modern History,” Huffington Post, Nov. 24, 2016.
Rick Perry, who was famous: Tom DiChristopher, “Trump Once Again Seeks to Slash Funding for Clean Energy in 2019 Budget,” CNBC, Jan. 31, 2018.
the new EPA head, Scott Pruitt: Brady Dennis, “Scott Pruitt, Longtime Adversary of EPA, Confirmed to Lead the Agency,” Washington Post, Feb. 17, 2017; Umair Irfan, “Scott Pruitt Is Slowly Strangling the EPA,” Vox, Jan. 30, 2018.
Congressional Budget Office: Alan Rappeport, “C.B.O. Head, Who Prizes Nonpartisanship, Finds Work Under G.O.P. Attack,” New York Times, June 19, 2017; Steven Rattner, “The Boring Little Budget Office That Trump Hates,” New York Times, Aug. 22, 2017.
“science-based” and “evidence-based”: Lena H. Sun and Juliet Eilperin, “CDC Gets List of Forbidden Words: Fetus, Transgender, Diversity,” Washington Post, Dec. 15, 2017.
“the empirical method of thought”: George Orwell, 1984 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949), 193.
In addition to announcing: Lisa Friedman, “Syria Joins Paris Climate Accord, Leaving Only U.S. Opposed,” New York Times, Nov. 7, 2017.
the Trump administration vowed: Lisa Friedman, “Expect Environmental Battles to Be ‘Eve
n More Significant’ in 2018,” New York Times, Jan. 5, 2018.
Scientists were dismissed: “President Trump’s War on Science,” New York Times, Sept. 9, 2017; “Attacks on Science,” Union of Concerned Scientists, ucsusa.org; Tanya Lewis, “A Year of Trump: Science Is a Major Casualty in the New Politics of Disruption,” Scientific American, Dec. 14, 2017; Joel Achenbach and Lena H. Sun, “Trump Budget Seeks Huge Cuts to Science and Medical Research, Disease Prevention,” Washington Post, May 23, 2017; Julia Belluz, “The GOP Tax Plan Would Blow a Hole in American Science,” Vox, Dec. 11, 2017.
The EPA alone was facing: Brady Dennis, “Trump Budget Seeks 23 Percent Cut at EPA, Eliminating Dozens of Programs,” Washington Post, Feb. 12, 2018.
In April 2017, the March for Science: “Marchers Around the World Tell Us Why They’re Taking to the Streets for Science,” Science, Apr. 13, 2017.
British scientists worry about: “How Will Leaving the EU Affect Universities and Research?,” Brexit Means…(podcast), Guardian, Sept. 13, 2017.
“I liken the attacks on science”: “Marchers Around the World Tell Us Why They’re Taking to the Streets for Science.”
“its very opposite, terror”: Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (New York: Viking Press, 1943), loc. 5297, 346, Kindle.
“the transmission of the human word”: Ibid., 419, 425, 924.
“We had a passion”: Ibid., 403, 5352.
“The few among writers”: Ibid., 5378, 5586.
“preached their gospel”: Ibid., 1269, 5400.
“They practiced their method”: Ibid., 2939.
“put through by force”: Ibid., 5378.
The Death of Truth Page 11