The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

An analysis of online media election coverage by Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center suggests the opposite: “Although fake news—fabricated and verifiable false reporting—was a phenomenon during the election, it had a minor effect on the media ecosystem of the presidential election according to our findings.” ⁹⁵

The relationship between information and human behavior is exceedingly complex: but we seldom change our core beliefs because of a story we read online. That’s so whether the story is true or false. On the question of influence, too, the distinction between fake and real news tends to disappear. Mark Zuckerberg, responding to questions about Facebook’s role in the election, had the weight of evidence on his side when he stated, “Voters make decisions based on lived experience.” ⁹⁶ Predictably, Zuckerberg was harshly criticized for this comment, and has been compelled to walk it back.

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The panic over fake news that followed the election soon hardened into a theory of universal self-deception. Public opinion, the account went, had become untethered from reality, and democracy was now staggering into a “post-truth” era. This phrase first gained currency after Brexit and always retained a strong British flavor—Oxford Dictionary made “post-truth” its word of the year for 2016. But it was the US presidential election, and the scandalous rhetoric of Donald Trump, that clinched the deal.

Oxford Dictionary defined post-truth as “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” More literal definitions could be found. “Post-truth refers to blatant lies being routine across society,” one academic explained, “and it means that politicians can lie without condemnation.” ⁹⁷ In its take on the subject, The Economist named the politician in question:

. . . post-truth politics is more than just an invention of whingeing elites who have been outflanked. The term picks out the heart of what is new: the truth is not falsified, or contested, but of secondary importance. Once, the purpose of political lying was to create a false view of the world. The lies of men like Mr. Trump do not work like that. They are not intended to convince the elites, whom their target voters

It is depressing to observe how quickly the term found a home in our dismal political landscape. For elite opinion, fronting for liberal and progressive groups, post-truth became the final solution to the mystery of Donald Trump’s somersault to the presidency. At some point, these people believe, fake news metastasized into false consciousness: hence Trump. “The practice of post-truth —untrue assertion piled on untrue assertion—helped get Donald Trump to the White House,” declared Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post. “The more untruths he told, the more his supporters rewarded him for, as they saw it, telling it like it is.” ⁹⁹ The sincere despair in this statement masks, I think, a kind of relief. The elite disasters of 2016 were now neatly disconnected from empirical reality.

For conservatives and libertarians, post-truth aptly described an information environment dominated by liberalism and political correctness in the news media, the entertainment industry, and the university. These people recall a famous New York Times headline—“fake but accurate”—about a story critical of a Republican president. The main difference between “pre-truth” and the present, they insist, is that the other side is now bringing up the subject. ¹⁰⁰

So the meaning of post-truth is itself up for grabs.

A fair question is whether this skirmish has any place in my story. I’m going to suggest that it does have a place: that post-truth is a clumsy label for a social trajectory that leads, over broken terrain, to the nihilist and his nightmare, and beyond that to the contested grounds where the fate of the current elite class will be decided. We live in disconcerting times. Much of our mediated reality—and that entails all of our politics—has fractured along multiple lines. Digital reality, I said above, has been swallowed by the rant—and everyday life, increasingly, is digital. This is the day of the truther, the denier, the birther. I’m struck by how we constantly put forward, like a battered shield, the word “literally”—as in “Trump is literally Hitler.” We are not inclined to tease apart our will from the world.

A profound moral and political disorientation has driven us, stumbling, to this place. The question is whether elite complaints over post-truth make sense as an explanation. We have the evidence of Brexit and Trump: can we say, in consequence, that democracy has degenerated into an empire of lies? Two elite claims are of particular interest here, and deserve deeper reflection: that the internet is “the definitive vector of post-truth,” and that certain populist politicians, with President Trump in the vanguard, now use deceit to communicate a “brutal empathy” with the public’s prejudices. ¹⁰¹

neither trust nor like, but to reinforce prejudice. ⁹⁸

Let’s consider each in turn.

From the first, elites have treated the web as an existential threat. Teachers forbade students any taste of that forbidden fruit. The Pentagon, taking no chances, blocked access to social media in the building. The news media, which purports to interpose layers of editors and fact-checkers between the journalist and the public, routinely portrays the web as the mother of all lies. Anyone can say anything and publish it. No penalties are incurred for peddling falsehoods, even intentional ones.

In the actual evolution of the web, true or false have come to matter less than like or dislike, friend or unfriend, follow or unfollow. The great platforms of social media labor relentlessly to “harvest your attention”—Zeynep Tufekci’s phrase—by nudging you toward the like-minded, telling you what you already know, giving you what you have always wanted. ¹⁰² The effect—in Matthew d’Ancona’s phrase—has been “online huddling.” ¹⁰³ The public, which as a whole has risen in revolt against the established order, in its parts appears determined to defend a partial status quo—some source of identity or selfrecognition that is placed beyond the reach of doubt or change. Online stories that reinforce the source of identity are consumed as nourishment for the soul, regardless of accuracy. They confirm, externally, a subjective order. Only in this way does Trump get to be literally Hitler.

This development is troubling on many levels, but it can’t be used to explain radical political change—a move away from democracy to authoritarian populism, for instance. The web’s force of gravity draws me to myself. Social media solidifies my private status quo. I’m encouraged to feel smug and certain in my views: whatever lies I consume I already believe. Change would require dissatisfaction with my previous views, a move away from what I have been. That simply never happens on the web. The rage and rant of digital content presupposes a loss of trust in institutional authority that elite ideas about posttruth seem to rationalize away.

On the broader subject of lies on the web, a very different sense of the matter has been advanced by Andrey Miroshnichenko in his brilliant little book, Human as Media. Miroshnichenko discerns a “viral editor” eternally at work online: a “distributed being of the internet, a sort of Artificial Intelligence” composed of every user, which performs many of the same functions of fact-checking and review claimed by the media. The digital universe, Miroshnichenko holds, is not indifferent between truth and falsehood:

If a lie is significant, it will circulate until it reaches witnesses and experts who will denounce it, because they know the truth. If a lie is insignificant, no one will denounce it; but it won’t circulate.

Every example of a lie on the internet, actually, is an example of the disclosure of this lie. ¹⁰⁴

That is the strong version of a thesis I believe to be generally valid. If fake news had become a salient part of the 2016 campaign, for example, it would have been exposed and exploded. If it wasn’t exposed, it was because it never crossed the public’s awareness threshold. Politically, it did not matter. Post-truth in relation to the web describes a vast and elaborate body of lies, but very little deception and practically no impact.

What of Donald Trump and his fabricated empathy? The president stands at the swirling center of post-truth—and not without justice. He will say (or tweet) whatever it takes to shock the opposition into outrage. When it comes to voter fraud, the size of his crowds, the unemployment and murder rates, and on many, many other topics, Trump can’t resist the urge to bend reality to his theme. The New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN have kept a running tally of presidential falsehoods—in January 2018, the Post reported with a certain excitement that the president had broken the threshold of 2,000 “false or misleading claims.” The article went on: “The longer the president has been on the job, the more frequently he touts an assortment of exaggerated, dubious or false claims.” ¹⁰⁵

In the elite imagination, however, post-truth involves the power of lies to “shape public opinion” by pandering to prejudice. I’m not sure Trump’s fabrications fit this scheme. They deceive very few, and the effect, beyond commanding attention, is never flattering. Before and after the election, most Americans held a negative view of the man. In one May 2016 survey, 6 percent of Trump supporters said they liked him personally, and only 43 percent agreed with his political positions. These voters were driven largely by hostility to Hillary Clinton. ¹⁰⁶ A review of those who cast their ballots for Trump in November discovered an unstable coalition of perspectives, with highly fractured views on issues such as immigration and combating terrorism. How the lies of candidate Trump played across such diverse groups would be tough to determine. ¹⁰⁷

In fact, it’s difficult to measure the impact of deceit on an election. By the same token, if you are going to argue that the impact was large for the 2016 presidential race, you need to muster convincing evidence. Merely to say, “But he lied—and he won,” though accurate enough as a description, says nothing about causation.

The elite vision of a post-truth era ultimately rests on a fallacy. It assumes that there was once a time when voters acted on some sort of rational calculus based on “objective facts,” and were immune to “appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Consider Matthew d’Ancona’s condemnation of the tactics used by Brexit advocates: “This was Post-Truth politics at its purest—the triumph of the visceral over the rational, the deceptively simple over the honestly complex.” ¹⁰⁸ But that has always been the way. All the cunning dictators, like Hitler and Mussolini, persuaded by appealing to raw emotions—but so did the great democrats from Pericles to Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. It’s how human persuasion works.

Jonathan Haidt, one of the truly original minds in contemporary American psychology, uses a metaphor of the “elephant” for our powerful passions and instincts, and of a helpless “rider” for the rationalizing intellect. He then summarizes the latest research on persuasion:

When does the elephant listen to reason? The main way that we change our minds on moral issues is by interacting with other people. We are terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our own beliefs, but other people do us this favor, just as we are good at finding errors in other people’s beliefs. When discussions are hostile, the odds of change are slight. The elephant leans away from the opponent, and the rider works frantically to rebut the opponent’s charges.

But if there is affection, admiration, or a desire to please the other person, then the elephant leans toward that person, and the rider tries to find the truth in the other person’s arguments . . . ¹⁰⁹

Donald Trump, disliked even by his supporters, stood little chance of changing the minds of voters in the 2016 campaign, whether he spoke truth or lies. But that is not the point I want to make by bringing in Haidt as my witness. My point concerns the elite class. Nobody feels affection or admiration for the elites. The public has no desire to please them: it strives, rather, to knock the elites off their high perches into the dust. For the class that rules and speaks on behalf of national institutions to be stripped of authority—to lose the power to persuade— has been a traumatic and terrifying event. As Haidt would expect, the elites have chosen not to question their own worldview: they blame the lies of populists like Trump instead. That is their notion of post-truth.

Yet there may be more to this term, I am convinced, than is found in dictionary definitions or the self-serving denials of the elites. To tease out the content, though, I must first ask you, reader, to follow me into fairly tricky cognitive territory.

“What is truth?” Pontius Pilate asked—but that way lies madness. The notion that facts descend on us from a pure Platonic sphere, untainted by interpretive frames, has a powerful hold on the modern imagination. The CIA insists that it delivers intelligence, never policy, for example. Dealing in virginal data sounds more scientific. But what does data look like, devoid of structure? Nietzsche thought the whole thing was a rationalist prejudice. Marxists maintain that truth is a class construct—postmodernists, that it is a justification for power. And the father of Platonic truth was himself a proponent of the “noble lie.”

Thankfully, I am not interested here in the nature of truth: that is a mystery for the ages. My concern is with those shared interpretations of reality that provide the reasons and explanations necessary to political life. I’m going to argue that a crisis of authority can’t help but trigger a crisis of uncertainty. An overabundance of digital information in the hands of the public has buried alive many of the grand narratives that were once our shared source of meaning. With the fatal decline of the elites, the truth, like so much else, has begun to unbundle.

I want to make my terms very clear. I don’t believe reality is malleable, variable, or constructed. Reality is as unyielding as a policeman’s club. Unlike that club, however, the shared reality of 320 million persons can’t be experienced directly: it’s mediated. For the last century and a half, the elites, and even more the institutions they manage, have been the arbiters of mediated certainty and truth. The government addressed social “problems” and placed difficult national episodes in perspective. The news media selected for the public’s attention a handful of topics and events. Scientific institutions gave out trusted advice on health and other specialized matters.

Each of these institutions possessed a semi-monopoly over the information in its own domain. They were keepers of the stories that explained us to ourselves. They uttered, from above, the authoritative truth.

What happens when the mediators lose their legitimacy—when the shared stories that hold us together are depleted of their binding force? That’s easy to answer. Look around: we happen. The mirror in which we used to find ourselves faithfully reflected in the world has shattered. The great narratives are fracturing into shards. What passes for authority is devolving to the political war-band and the online mob—that is, to the shock troops of populism, left and right. Deprived of a legitimate authority to interpret events and settle factual disputes, we fly apart from each other—or rather, we flee into our own heads, into a subjectivized existence. We assume ornate and exotic identities, and bear them in the manner of those enormous wigs once worn at Versailles.

Here, I believe, is the source of that feeling of unreality or post-truth so prevalent today. Having lost faith in authority, the public has migrated to the broken pieces of the old narratives and explanations: shards of reality that deny the truth of all the others and often find them incomprehensible.

Let’s examine Donald Trump in this context. The president tells falsehoods. As might be expected, his opponents have condemned him as a deliberate liar—and this might well be the case. But many of Trump’s lies seem politically pointless.

Why would he complain about voter fraud in an election he won? What impact can the size of an inaugural crowd possibly have? Another thesis, no less problematic, can account for such odd behavior. The president may just be a creature of our fractured age: he speaks, subjectively and symbolically, from inside a shard of Trumpian truth. In that shallow place, where the world and his will are one, he can invent, at will, an endless supply of reasons for righteous rants.

At least the president is held accountable for his 2,000 falsehoods. The elites dwell in their own fragment of truth yet seem blissfully unaware. They tell us Trump is Hitler. They explain that their defeat is a conspiracy of lies. They insist that the world can be returned to what it was before November 2016. Most damaging, they are as willing as Trump to demolish the historical reality of their own institutions. An acting attorney general can refuse to implement a presidential executive order, for example. The head of a consumer agency can deny the chief executive’s authority to appoint her successor. A minor foreign service official can resign with a very public letter directing the secretary of state to “stop the bleeding” or “follow me out the door.” ¹¹⁰

No behavior is too fantastic if it raises the black flag of reaction against Trump. At the televised Grammy music awards, Hillary Clinton was invited to read from a book that claimed President Trump is, in essence, deranged. A female comic had a photo taken of herself holding up, in the style of Islamist executioners, something that looked like the president’s severed head.

Truth, for the elites, has come to mean that democracy will die in darkness unless the elected president is somehow overthrown.

Extremist kooks and cranks have always enjoyed wild conspiracy-mongering more than dull reality. With the collapse of the mediator class, this toxic mindset is seeping into the mainstream. When the neo-Nazis of The Stormer look on America, they see a “race war” against whites and “filthy Jew terrorists” in charge of the government. That is crazed bigotry posing as truth. But when the elites look on the neo-Nazis, they don’t see a tiny band of attention-starved bigots: they discern instead the awful consequences of Donald Trump in power. Nazis become a symbolic judgment on Trump—much as, for Trump, electoral fraud is a symbolic judgment on his enemies. Even if objectively false, both propositions embody truth as it should be. Once that door is open, strange things start to happen. The very liberal news media has glamorized neo-Nazis and racialists by lavishing attention on them wholly disproportionate to their numbers, making creepy marginal characters seem like important actors in US politics.

It isn’t irrelevant to point out that, in 2016, the media did the same with Donald Trump.

Truth at the university, Jonathan Haidt notes, is increasingly subservient to social justice. ¹¹¹ The reality of the world for the “antifas”—young members of selfstyled anti-fascist groups—consists of a V for Vendetta-like melodrama of oppression and revenge. The antifas have always believed that Hitler’s Germany and contemporary American life were fundamentally the same. That is their sliver of truth. Within the circle of the web and the war-band, it probably appears irrefutable.

Unlike the elites, antifas have taken the resistance to Trump’s election to its logical conclusion: violence, they proclaim, must be met with violence.

NO! In the Name of Humanity—We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America!

We recognize that the Trump/Pence Regime is illegitimate because it is fascist, that fascism must be stopped before it is too late, and that this means that the masses of people in their millions must be led to rise up and drive it from power. ¹¹²

This fantasy of revolution hasn’t yet occurred—but there has been real violence. Masked, black-clad antifa types have attacked pro-Trump and right-wing gatherings. Conservative speakers in universities have been bullied into silence. The February 2017 antifa riot in Berkeley to muzzle one such speaker ended with at least six persons injured and \$100,000 in property damage.

11.5 The antifa look at Berkeley ¹¹³

The unbundling of truth makes the business of democracy ever more difficult to conduct. As we fly ever farther apart, we can only hear each other when we scream. The result (I repeat) has been paralysis for democratic government. In nearly every instance of provocation and violence, officials at every level, elected and appointed, have chosen to play the part of silent observers. No arrests were made in the Berkeley riots. Few persons were arrested in Charlottesville after a day of street fighting—and most were “drunk people.” ¹¹⁴ This, I am persuaded, is where the fuzzy notion of post-truth acquires a club-like reality. The bearers of democratic legitimacy and agents of democratic law have become uncertain of their actual power. The keepers of the grand narratives, of our cosmic truths, appear unable to find a path to right action. The elites in their institutions are petrified by self-doubt.

Among the political left, there has been a robust debate whether to applaud or condemn antifa violence. The authorities that make life-and-death decisions are more concerned with not ending up on the wrong side of history. In the era of post-truth, with reality up for grabs, nobody wants to be perceived as anti-antifascist.