During an interview last spring, this exchange took place:
Journalist: "Don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?”
Trump: “I don’t know.”
See you in the streets.
The quote from Ron Suskind's article in the previous post, about those in power now determining what is real and what is not, is perhaps the most significant paragraph written in the twenty-first century about politics and policy. The truth, evidence, facts, verification - we no longer base our political behavior and our understanding of policy on those things. They are just tools to be manipulated.
Donald Trump was elected, both times, because the ground had been prepared. Republican strategists - including the aide in the article - had been able to distract a large enough portion of the electorate from consideration of facts and evidence, and had helped them replace those verities with anger and outrage by replacing truth with fear. There was no longer, as Arendt notes, a distinction between fact and fiction. They were no longer needed.
And so we live in a post-truth world. A fact: The Oxford Dictionaries named "post-truth" the "Word of the Year" in - wait for it - 2016. The Oxford Dictionaries are based in England, of course, and although America's struggle with the post-truth world could hardly have escaped their notice, you will remember that the Brexit vote was in 2016, as well.
So, fourteen years after Suskind's conversation, the world, and its future, are fundamentally rocked twice by the truthful fact that truth and fact were over.
This will just be true things. A compilation, if you will, of true things. You get to decide what they mean. Let's go.
First: On October 17, 2004, journalist Ron Suskind wrote, in the NY Time Magazine, about a meeting he had with a senior aide to President George W. Bush two years earlier:
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Second: Last Thursday, in a speech to executives of international news agencies belonging to MINDS International, a consortium of leading news agencies, Pope Leo XIV quoted Hannah Arendt's "The Origins of Totalitarianism":
"...the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist."
Third: Pope Leo XIV is the first American Pope.
Make of it what you will.
