Whether it’s Haitians in Springfield, Ohio eating cats and dogs, federal officials withholding storm aid from Republican hurricane victims, or a supposedly fraud-ridden American voting system, the falsehoods spewed by the Trump-Vance campaign and its surrogates have intensified as election day approaches.
Faced with such mendacity, the US news media has struggled to perform its democratic function. By doing its best to present voters with a neutral view of the two candidates and their contrasting policy positions, plans and values, it suggests that the choice between them is a rational one. But when one ticket respects norms of truth and evidence and seeks to live up to them, however imperfectly, while the other wilfully tramples these norms in a bid to amass power, the deliberation at the core of the electoral process breaks down, becoming itself a kind of fiction. That we find ourselves here is no accident: it is Trump’s political vision working to plan. Will American democracy manage to save itself?
Disagreeing respectfully about how to interpret an acknowledged set of facts—and reaching reasoned compromise about how best to respond to them—is the backbone of democratic politics. This becomes impossible if one person or party seeks to establish themselves as the sole owner of “reality” by making up large swaths of it, while denigrating and disregarding the actual truth. A fabricated “reality” cannot be broadly shared and reasoned about. It belongs exclusively to its inventor. It answers only to his will, and may change, by fiat, at any moment. Trump knows perfectly well that he lost the 2020 election, but doubles down on election denial as a way of asserting this kind of reason-destroying power.
If you are a politician, the advantage of having people live in a fantasy world of your own design is that you render your own words and deeds immune to contestation, while inspiring followers to abandon faith in their own rational faculties. If “truth” is whatever Trump says, then there are no grounds on which to hold him to account and people cannot reason together about the world they share.
This is why he wants a world in which evidence is irrelevant. He can always be right in that world, whatever the factual record. So, it’s not that he doesn’t care that there is no substance to his false claims and an abundance of counterevidence to disprove them. On the contrary, normalising open contempt for truth and evidence is the point. This is the power play that explains the mindboggling rate at which he emits publicly verifiable falsehoods.
Those alarmed by the gravity of the situation often suggest that more democracy will save the American republic. Some commentators argue that improved voter turnout and increasing participation can act as a bulwark against tyranny. But the people can only function as a check on a would-be tyrant when they are reasonably well informed and rationally engaged. An electorate drunk on the lies of a demagogue, by contrast, is perfectly capable of voting to destroy the conditions upon which its own power and freedom depend. History is rife with examples, including the rise of Hitler, Mussolini, Ferdinand Marcos, Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin. Once big enough majorities have lost their grip on reality, having adopted what Timothy Snyder calls the “fascist attitude to truth”, then democratic participation brings us no closer to the hope, dignity and safety we associate with self-rule.
Given these horrors, why do so many fall for the lies? Succumbing to propaganda, as many did during fascism’s rise in Europe, can be addictively gratifying. A world where truth is whatever Trump wants it to be is pleasantly simplified: joining his crusade against invented enemies substitutes for the hard work of acknowledging difficult facts and reasoning together in the face of moral complexity. All that remains is the pleasure of hating the right people, to echo Senator Vance.
As the Enlightenment thinkers who framed the project of modern democracy understood, human beings can be ruled by reason or they can be ruled by arbitrary power. There is no third option. But in order for reason to gain a foothold against the rule of coercion, manipulation and arbitrary force, it has to operate within a culture of truth. Once truth no longer matters, reason becomes rudderless and impotent, and its systems corrupted. The formal trappings of democracy can continue under these conditions, but they become increasingly meaningless and ever so easy to topple.
Will the anti-truthers turn out in sufficient numbers to fritter away 248 years of American democracy? We will soon have an answer. But whatever the outcome, we should be sobered by the reign of unreason, for it remains democracy’s true enemy within. If history is any guide, the threat is no fabrication.
