Putting an end to political nonsense

Before facts, those with unfettered power determined what was true. If we don’t fight for our democracy, they will again in a post-fact reality.

“Why does the word ‘fact’ – and its definition as something that is true – matter?”

This is the question University of Michigan professor David Wootten asks in a gem of an article titled “A Brief History of Facts.”  Wooten, who wrote the piece shortly after Donald Trump assumed the presidency of the United States in 2017, goes on to answer his own question:

The key point about facts is that they trump authority: President Trump saying that the crowd at his inauguration was the largest ever, cannot make it true.

Indeed, before the invention of the fact, what we would regard as entirely illegitimate arguments … were held to have some validity. Thus, under Roman law, rumor and fama might help to prove guilt: gossip, hearsay and reputation could be introduced in court and could determine the outcome. The value of your evidence depended on who you were as well as what you knew: the evidence of a man was preferred to that of a woman, of a gentleman to that of a labourer.

All that changed in the 17th century with the invention of the printing press. As vast amounts of information became available, rules emerged to judge the accuracy of information; eyewitness accounts replaced hearsay in the courts; experiments were repeated and results replicated to check their veracity; sources were cited and compared to ensure accuracy; newer information replaced older information as new facts came to light along with the conviction that we could and should rely on facts—not authorities—to advance our knowledge of the world around us.

That historic breakthrough is now under siege. As Wootten explains:

We now live in a digital age, in which information becomes fluid and variable. All that was solid has melted into air. In the print world, getting your facts right was about competence and care; now what the facts are depends on what date you access a website, or which website you visit. The nature of information has changed irreversibly.

Today’s information, by its digital nature, is far more disparate, fragmented, and malleable:

For the first time there are facts and (in Kellyanne Conway’s notorious phrase) ‘alternative facts’. As facts become fluid they become contestable; the truth becomes (once again) something you assert, not something you prove. It used to be a peculiar characteristic of totalitarian regimes that they made the facts fit their purposes; now it seems this can happen in a functioning democracy.

When alternative facts trump real facts, nonsense follows

All elections have their share of lies, damned lies, and statistics. But nothing compares to 2024, when Springfield, Ohio became the hapless epicenter of alternative facts—both faux facts and twisted facts—used to advance Trump’s agenda at the expense of a midwestern city.

Faux facts, like faux fur, do not exist in the real world. They are manufactured out of toxic materials that never biodegrade. Long after facts in the real world have falsified faux facts, leaders like Trump use and re-use them to support and spread conspiracy theories and disinformation campaigns. In Springfield, despite a Republican mayor, a Republican Governor, and law enforcement discrediting Trump and Vance’s fiction about Haitian immigrants eating pets, the story lives on as “fact” in an alternate universe occupied by almost half of American voters. Those faux facts now live cheek-to-jowl alongside other faux facts, most recently about government’s role in controlling the weather and exploiting hurricane victims.

Twisted facts are not manufactured out of whole cloth like faux facts, but they are equally harmful and resilient. Just ask grieving father, Nathan Clark, whose son, Aiden, died when a car driven by a Haitian immigrant crossed the center line and hit a school bus. The driver was later convicted of vehicular homicide, a fact Vance twisted to say that a “child was murdered by a Haitian immigrant who had no right to be here.” Aiden’s father begged to differ, literally. “My son Aiden Clark was not murdered,” he told the press. “He was accidentally killed by an immigrant from Haiti.” On September 10^th, at a Springfield City Commission, he added:

The last thing we need is to have the worst day of our lives violently and constantly shoved in our faces. They make it seem as if our wonderful Aiden appreciates your hate, that we should follow their hate. And look what you’ve done to us. We have to get up here and beg them to stop . . . This needs to stop now. 

How to stop the spread of alternate facts in the age of Trump is a conundrum as perplexing as any found in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking Glass.

Both tales are part of a literary genre called literary nonsense, known for subverting linguistic convention and logical reasoning by balancing things that make sense with those that don’t and posing one dilemma after another, none of which get resolved.

Viewed in this Carrollian light, politics in the age of Trump might be classified as part of a political genre called “political nonsense”—a form of politics that subverts political conventions and logical reasoning, rendering solvable problems unsolvable. The result? Almost half of all voters have followed Trump down a virtual rabbit hole into a nonsensical world where up is down and down is up and facts be damned.

As a case in point, consider a Washington Post article about a Republican watch party during the vice presidential debate aired on CBS. Those attending were outraged when moderator Margaret Brennan clarified that “Springfield, Ohio does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status.” One party watcher observed:

“It was [Vance] against three. He didn’t become aggressive but he just stuck to the facts. He didn’t let the lies go unchecked … The moderators were awful. They were terrible. They cut him off when they shouldn’t, when he really got on point of telling the truth.”

Another added:

“Their questions were very biased with the woke agenda,” she said, pointing to Brennan also fact-checking Vance on the issue of climate change, which is real. “They were presenting it as if it were indeed a fact, and it is not a fact.”

When opinions become facts and facts opinions, when faux facts and twisted facts trump real facts, things get curiouser and curiouser.

After Hurricane Helene devastated western North Carolina, response efforts were overrun by what Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC) called “an uptick in untrustworthy sources trying to spark chaos by sharing hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and hearsay.” Among them: Hurricanes are geoengineered by the government to seize and access lithium deposits in Chimney Rock, and FEMA is stopping vehicles with donations, confiscating supplies, and diverting disaster response funding to the border. Not even the Mad Hatter could conjure up such madness masqueraded as facts.

The art of the spiel

Trump’s whole political schtick is to sell faux and twisted facts to voters whose previously ignored anxieties, grievances, and hatreds make them the best marks, and whose preconceived notions and partisan perceptions fit his alternate facts like a hand in a glove. In this alternate reality, Trump’s followers can’t help but grow ever more isolated and insulated from facts and ever more mistrustful of anyone outside their circle refuting their “facts.”

Trump is not the first American president or presidential candidate to deploy political technology to manipulate reality, and he won’t be the last. Long before the digital age, American politicians used the printing press to stretch facts to fit a narrative that featured the other party as a dire threat and themselves as heroes saving the nation.

Trump is simply the first with no moral compass or tether to reality who has access to technology that can be used to systematically subvert facts—and through that subversion, undercut the rule of law, our Constitution, and our democracy. Perhaps most disturbing, his aim is not ideological. It is pure, unadulterated, run-amok self-interest.

The more Trump has assaulted our democracy, the more we look to the courts to serve as the last guardrail to protect us from a totalitarian dystopia. In the first few years following Trump’s 2016 election, that guardrail mostly held. But now that Trump has taken over the Republican party and stacked the courts, our legal system has given way just enough to put our democracy on a precipice. ‘Tis worrisome standing on that precipice with so little between us and thin air.

What you and I can do

In 2017, shortly after Trump’s election, Timothy Snyder published On Tyranny based on his 562-page account of Hitler and Stalin’s mass killings in Bloodlands. He distilled twenty lessons from these twentieth century horrors in a small 128-page book to help you and me resist the rise of tyranny today.

“History can help us to see, but history will not do the work for us.” Snyder wrote in a recent Substack newsletter. “We need to make history ourselves, in the name of a better future. That is within our grasp, if we all do what we can.”

Doing what we can, says Snyder in his most recent book On Freedom, includes fighting against tyranny and fighting for a better future. Fighting against tyranny is necessary for freedom, but as Snyder points out, it is not freedom itself. Freedom—in the positive sense—requires us to fight for a better world. Below is what you and I can do on each front.

Fighting against tyranny: Nobel-prize winning economists, those highest up in Trump’s administration, and the highest ranking military leaders under Trump — all agree: Donald J. Trump poses a clear and present danger to our democracy and our prosperity.

Former Republican leaders in Congress like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney have risked everything to cross partisan lines and put our country first by campaigning against Trump and for Kamala Harris. They are hoping that other Republicans will join them.

Not voting for Trump is not enough. Democrats, Independents, and Republicans — left, right, and center — must resist the temptation to vote for a third party or to not vote at all. We must all vote for the only candidate capable of beating Trump and preserving our democracy, and that candidate is Kamala Harris.

But voting for Kamala is not enough. We must act now to defeat Trump at the polls in two weeks. See the list below created by Markers for Democracy for what you can do now:

• Postcarding Campaigns—A channel for our portal, Postcards For Democracy #postcarding-pfd-campaigns and one for other organizations #postcarding-various-other-campaigns.
  

• Other Important Postcarding Channels — A channel to post photos of your postcards to inspire other writers #postcarding-post-your-postcard-photos-here and a channel to post when you have taken on too many postcard addresses and need help #postcarding-sos
  

• Election Night Channel—already planning for November 5th? Jump in to #election-week-2024 which reflects the possibility that we may not know the results of the election for several days
  

• Non-postcarding opportunities—#textbanking-phonebanking-canvassing-and-ballot-curing
  

• Poll Watchers—if you want to track the numbers, we’ve got a dedicated channel for that #2024-polls-and-commentary
  

• Ask Questions—we’re here to support each other, so no question is too small! #virtual-water-cooler or #slack-101

Or go to Indivisible.org where you can get connected to all kinds of things to do during these last two weeks before the election:

As Michelle Obama said at the Democratic National Convention, don’t just worry or despair:

Do Something!

Fighting for a better future. After the election, we must turn our attention to building a better future for all, not just some. That means bringing back into the fold those who Trump has hived off into an isolated and insulated world of alternative facts, conspiracy theories, and disinformation. “Terror can only rule over men who are isolated against each other,” Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Underlying the alternate facts that Trump followers consume is a reservoir of alienation so deep that facts alone can never reach them. According to research conducted by Public Agenda in 2022, nearly one-third of Americans are completely politically alienated—not because their preferred party isn’t in power, but because they don’t think their voice matters. No doubt, that percentage has only grown larger these past two years.

The implication? We must stop trying to build airtight cases and start building relationships across ideological divides.

Skeptical? Understood. But before dismissing the possibility outright, consider the transformation of Derek Black, former heir apparent to the white nationalist movement. In Eli Saslow’s book Rising Out of Hatred, Derek speaks to how “friends regardless” made it possible for him to journey out of that world:

People who disagreed with me were critical in this process. Especially those who are my friends regardless, but who let me know when we talked about it that they thought my beliefs were wrong and took the time to provide evidence and civil arguments. I didn’t always agree with their ideas, but I listened to them and they listened to me.

In my next post, I will uncover hidden facts about what citizens are doing across the country to reach across divides and welcome the alienated back into the fold, so never again do half of all Americans believe facts fabricated by a candidate intent on destroying our democracy.