November 27th, 2016
11-27-2016The Lying World of Consistency
Arthur Goldhammer argues that Trump's "farrago of falsehoods" threatens the common world that allows any society to exist.
"In his essay “The Decay of Lying,” Oscar Wilde refutes the charge that politicians are the consummate prevaricators. “They never rise beyond the level of misrepresentation,” he ironizes, “and actually condescend to prove, to discuss, to argue. How different from the temper of the true liar, with his frank fearless statements, his superb irresponsibility, his healthy, natural disdain of proof of any kind.” Wilde would therefore have been flabbergasted by the spectacle of Donald Trump, who embodies “the temper of the true liar” like no politician before him. The full catalog of his superb irresponsibility need not be rehearsed here. Everyone knows about his excursions into the birtherist fun house, his phantasmagoric evocation of Jersey City Muslims cheering the destruction of the Twin Towers, his baseless insinuation that an opponent’s father abetted the assassination of John F. Kennedy, his contemptuous confidence that Mexico would pay for the wall he would build to cut it off from the United States, and his jaw-dropping assertion that President Obama was “the founder” of ISIS, to mention only a few of his lunatic ravings—the mind boggles at the merest enumeration. Yet this man is to become the President of the United States. How could this have happened? What does the triumph of brazen fabulation portend for the future? What does it tell us about the state of the American psyche?... His farrago of falsehood bespeaks an era in which the meaning of democracy has been debased to the point where every claim of truth, no matter how flimsy, is treated equally. Faith in independent authority has withered; the once “lamestream media” is now the Lügenpresse (lying press), a term tellingly borrowed from Weimar Germany, where the distinction between truth and falsehood was enforced by party discipline. Tocqueville foresaw what this vacuum of intellectual authority portended: “No society can prosper without common beliefs,” he wrote. Indeed, “none can survive…for without common ideas, there is no common action, and without common action, men may still exist, but they will not constitute a social body.” Trump’s lies speak to this craving for a social body. His myth of past greatness, of a vanished glory that only he can restore, reflects a hunger for wholeness. Hungry Trumpians subsist on a diet of denial: They imagine a communion in which American supremacy is universally acknowledged, nonwhites and non-Christians know their place, and jobs long since forfeited to robots can be “brought back” by forcing China to its knees. As Tocqueville explained, each individual “retreats within the limits of the self and from that vantage ventures to judge the world.” Any dissent from this imaginary consensus is mocked. Such fables can survive only if never put to the test."As Donald Trump appoints people of color and women to his cabinet and as he flirts with a reconciliation with Nikki Haley and Mitt Romney, it is tempting to normalize Trump's election, to argue that his extreme comments were simply PR, part of a campaign of bluster. It is likely that Trump will tilt to the middle for a time. Doing so will consolidate his power. But as Marianne Constable wrote for the Arendt Center last week, Trump's "true" lies are based in his refusal to accord meaning to words. How are we to read Trump's new moderated tone? Do his moderate words merit more weight than his extremist words? The problem, as Constable argues, is that "Dialogue and discussion, including civil disagreement, depend on words. All become impossible when words cease to matter." Given the loss of dialogue, we are all thrust back on our individual hopes and personalized interpretations. There is an inflation of multiple and contradictory meanings that makes spurious all standards and truths. To understand the damage Trump's true lies may portend, it is important to see that he has set himself explicitly at the head of a movement. Movements need to move forward, which means that movements can never be satisfied with reaching a goal or upholding the status quo. Movements move by promising to fulfill a deep spiritual need. That is why movements mobilize masses who are longing for a “completely consistent, comprehensible, and predictable world.” There is what Hannah Arendt describes as a “desire to escape from reality because in [the mass of the people’s] essential homelessness they can no longer bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects…." For Arendt, “movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations.” In such a lying world, we are just one terrorist attack or war away from a mobilization in institutions are laid low and truth is finally abolished. This would be the full victory of cynicism, as I've argued elsewhere. —RBForm more information visit: http://democracyjournal.org/magazine/43/can-truth-survive-trump/
Advice for Americans
Timothy Snyder, one of our very best scholars of the Holocaust and German totalitarianism, has this advice for Americans.
"Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so. Here are twenty lessons from the twentieth century, adapted to the circumstances of today.
- Do not obey in advance. Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You've already done this, haven't you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.
- Defend an institution. Follow the courts or the media, or a court or a newspaper. Do not speak of "our institutions" unless you are making them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions don't protect themselves. They go down like dominoes unless each is defended from the beginning.
- Recall professional ethics. When the leaders of state set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become much more important. It is hard to break a rule-of-law state without lawyers, and it is hard to have show trials without judges.
- When listening to politicians, distinguish certain words. Look out for the expansive use of "terrorism" and "extremism." Be alive to the fatal notions of "exception" and "emergency." Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary....
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Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is
spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.
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Investigate. Figure things out for yourself. Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. Realize that some of what is on your screen
isthere to harm you. Bookmark PropOrNot or other sites that investigate foreign propaganda pushes....."
An Outrage to Common Sense
Ainsley LeSure writes that we need to take seriously the way Trump has mobilized race and racism in America.
"But in the middle of doing this, it hit me that these “complex” stories about white people who voted for Trump were not about journalists and scholars not seeing racism, but about them thinking that racism – the racist views of those they interviewed – were not all that significant. And then, Arendt creeped into my head, especially her claim that antisemitism is an outrage to common sense. By this she meant that it was really hard for people to accept Nazi’s at their word that “their chief discovery [was] the role of the Jewish people in world politics and their chief interest [was the] persecution of Jews all over the world”. Instead, people chose to believe that the centrality of antisemitism in the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany was simply an accident or a means for greater ends like the mobilization of the masses or enlarging Hitler’s presence as a demagogue. And like antisemitism particularly, racism as a general phenomenon strikes me as an outrage to common sense. It is evidenced by the journalistic and scholarly attempts to reckon with the racism of Trump and his supporters with complexity. Like those who simply couldn’t accept the centrality of antisemitism, the inability of many of us to accept the centrality of racism in the Trump phenomenon is a way to escape the seriousness of racism in the United States of America. And then, Arendt discloses for us how we might go about apprehending the seriousness of racism through the shadow of common sense. In Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt says that one does this by reckoning with the fact that antisemitism was an effective tool for establishing terror as a major weapon of government. Terror, for Arendt, describes punishment meted out by the state because it has been determined that a person has broken the law, not because of his actions, but for other arbitrary reasons. Prior to the Nazi’s use of antisemitism as a tool of terror in the twentieth century, Arendt says that despite a deeply class-stratified society in Western Europe, antisemitism had united the sentiments of gentiles against Jews. The antisemitic sentiments that grounded Western European society were not just widely-held negative beliefs about Jews, but also an organizing principle that (re)produced a social and economic order that was intrinsically antisemitic. These antisemitic sentiments not only established a world order but also a dangerous habit of knowing people independent of who they showed themselves to be through their actual actions, and in accordance to proclivities that had been attributed to them because of their race. This habit of race-thinking, or more aptly put race world-making, was dangerous because it was compatible with enforcing the law through terror, that is, when the state determined guilt and punishment for a person because he was a Jew, not because his actions had been demonstrated to be in violation of the law. And once law enforcers engage in this kind of terror, the rule of law has been undermined and the entire political community is in danger of collapsing."Form more information visit: https://medium.com/amor-mundi/the-significance-of-overt-racism-2ad366c33d97#.fxk5i2lit