Trump and nationalist, anti-immigrant leaders on the right in Europe like Marine Le Pen in France, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, and Matteo Salvini in Italy would inflame these feelings of fear and anger and disenfranchisement, offering scapegoats instead of solutions; while liberals and conservatives, worried about the rise of nativism and the politics of prejudice, warned that democratic institutions were coming under growing threat. Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,” written in 1919, amid the wreckage of World War I, experienced a huge revival in 2016—quoted, in news articles, more in the first half of that year than it had been in three decades as commentators of all political persuasions invoked its famous lines: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
The assault on truth and reason that reached fever pitch in America during the first year of the Trump presidency had been incubating for years on the fringe right. Clinton haters who were manufacturing nutty accusations about the death of Vince Foster in the 1990s and Tea Party paranoids who claimed that environmentalists wanted to control the temperature of your home and the color of cars you can buy hooked up, during the 2016 campaign, with Breitbart bloggers and alt-right trolls. And with Trump’s winning of the Republican nomination and the presidency, the extremist views of his most radical supporters—their racial and religious intolerance, their detestation of government, and their embrace of conspiracy thinking and misinformation—went mainstream.
According to a 2017 survey by The Washington Post, 47 percent of Republicans erroneously believe that Trump won the popular vote, 68 percent believe that millions of illegal immigrants voted in 2016, and more than half of Republicans say they would be okay with postponing the 2020 presidential election until such problems with illegal voting can be fixed. Another study conducted by political scientists at the University of Chicago showed that 25 percent of Americans believe that the 2008 crash was secretly orchestrated by a small cabal of bankers, 19 percent believe that the U.S. government had a hand in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and 11 percent even believe a theory made up by the researchers—that compact fluorescent lightbulbs were part of a government plot to make people more passive and easy to control.
Trump, who launched his political career by shamelessly promoting birtherism and who has spoken approvingly of the conspiracy theorist and shock jock Alex Jones, presided over an administration that became, in its first year, the very embodiment of anti-Enlightenment principles, repudiating the values of rationalism, tolerance, and empiricism in both its policies and its modus operandi—a reflection of the commander in chief’s erratic, impulsive decision-making style based not on knowledge but on instinct, whim, and preconceived (and often delusional) notions of how the world operates.
Trump made no effort to rectify his ignorance of domestic and foreign policy when he moved into the White House. His former chief strategist Stephen Bannon has said that Trump only “reads to reinforce”; and the president has remained determined to deny, diminish, or downplay intelligence concerning Russian interference in the 2016 election. Because such mentions tend to draw his ire and can disrupt his intelligence briefings, officials told The Washington Post that they sometimes included this material only in written versions of the president’s daily brief, which he reportedly rarely if ever reads.
Instead, the president seems to prefer getting his information from Fox News—in particular, the sycophantic morning show Fox & Friends—and from sources like Breitbart News and the National Enquirer. He reportedly spends as much as eight hours a day watching television—a habit that could not help but remind many readers of Chauncey Gardiner, the TV-addicted gardener who becomes a celebrity and rising political star in Jerzy Kosinski’s 1970 novel, Being There. Vice News also reported that Trump received a folder, twice a day, filled with flattering clips including “admiring tweets, transcripts of fawning TV interviews, praise-filled news stories, and sometimes just pictures of Trump on TV looking powerful.”
Such absurd details are unnerving rather than merely comical because this is not simply a Twilight Zone case of one fantasist living in a big white house in Washington, D.C. Trump’s proclivity for chaos has not been contained by those around him but has instead infected his entire administration. He asserts that “I’m the only one that matters” when it comes to policy making, and given his disdain for institutional knowledge he frequently ignores the advice of cabinet members and agencies, when he isn’t cutting them out of the loop entirely.
Ironically, the dysfunction that these habits fuel tends to ratify his supporters’ mistrust of Washington (one of the main reasons they voted for Trump in the first place), creating a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, which, in turn, breeds further cynicism and a reluctance to participate in the political process. A growing number of voters feel there is a gross disconnect between their views and government policies. Commonsense policies like mandatory background checks for gun purchases, supported by more than nine out of ten Americans, have been stymied by Congress, which is filled with members who rely on donations from the NRA. Eighty-seven percent of Americans said in a 2018 poll that they believe Dreamers should be allowed to stay in the States, and yet DACA has remained a political football. And 83 percent of Americans (including 75 percent of Republicans) say they support net neutrality, which was overturned by Trump’s FCC.
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The declining role of rational discourse—and the diminished role of common sense and fact-based policy—hardly started with Donald J. Trump. Rather, he represents the culmination of trends diagnosed in prescient books by Al Gore, Farhad Manjoo, and Susan Jacoby, published nearly a decade before he took up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Among the causes of this decline, Jacoby (The Age of American Unreason) cited an “addiction to infotainment,” the continuing strength of religious fundamentalism, “the popular equation of intellectualism with a liberalism supposedly at odds with traditional American values,” and an education system that “does a poor job of teaching not only basic skills but the logic underlying those skills.”
As for Gore (The Assault on Reason), he underscored the ailing condition of America as a participatory democracy (low voter turnout, an ill-informed electorate, campaigns dominated by money, and media manipulation) and “the persistent and sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary.”
At the forefront of Gore’s thinking was the Bush administration’s disastrous decision to invade Iraq and its cynical selling of that war to the public, distorting “America’s political reality by creating a new fear of Iraq that was hugely disproportionate to the actual danger” posed by a country that did not attack the United States on 9/11 and lacked the terrifying weapons of mass destruction that administration hawks scared Americans into thinking it possessed.
Indeed, the Iraq war remains a lesson in the calamities that can result when momentous decisions that affect the entire world are not made through a rational policy-making process and the judicious weighing of information and expert analysis, but are instead fueled by ideological certainty and the cherry picking of intelligence to support preconceived idées fixes.
From the start, administration hawks led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld pressed for “forward-leaning” intelligence that would help make the case for war. A shadowy operation called the Office of Special Plans was even set up at the Defense Department; its mission, according to a Pentagon adviser quoted by Seymour M. Hersh in The New Yorker, was to find evidence of what Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz already believed to be true—that Saddam Hussein had ties to al-Qaeda and that Iraq possessed a huge arsenal of biological, chemical, and possibly nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile, planning for the war on the ground ignored sober warnings from experts, like the army chief of staff, Eric K. Shinseki, wh
o testified that postwar Iraq would require “something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers.” His recommendation was quickly shot down, as were reports from the Rand Corporation and the Army War College, both of which also warned that postwar security and reconstruction in Iraq would require a large number of troops for an extended period of time. These assessments went unheeded—with fateful consequences—because they did not mesh with the administration’s willfully optimistic promises that the Iraqi people would welcome American troops as liberators and that resistance on the ground would be limited. “A cakewalk,” as one Rumsfeld ally put it.
The failure to send enough troops to secure the country and restore law and order; the sidelining of the State Department’s Future of Iraq Project (because of tensions with the Pentagon); the ad hoc decisions to dissolve the Iraqi army and to ban all senior members of the Baath Party: such disastrous and avoidable screwups resulted in a bungled American occupation that one soldier, assigned to the Coalition Provisional Authority, memorably described as “pasting feathers together, hoping for a duck.” In fact, the Iraq war would prove to be one of the young century’s most catastrophic events, exploding the geopolitics of the region and giving birth to ISIS and a still unspooling set of disasters for the people of Iraq, the region, and the world.
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Although Trump frequently criticized the decision to invade Iraq during the 2016 campaign, his White House has learned nothing from the Bush administration’s handling of that unnecessary and tragic war. Instead, it has doubled down on reverse-engineered policy making and the repudiation of experts.
For instance, the State Department has been hollowed out as a result of Steve Bannon’s vow to fight for the “deconstruction of the administrative state” and the White House’s suspicion of “deep state” professionals. The president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a thirty-six-year-old real-estate developer with no government experience, was handed the Middle East portfolio, while the shrinking State Department was increasingly sidelined. Many important positions stood unfilled at the end of Trump’s first year in office. This was partly because of downsizing and dereliction of duty, partly because of a reluctance to appoint diplomats who expressed reservations about the president’s policies (as in the case of the crucial role of ambassador to South Korea), and partly because of the exodus of foreign service talent from an agency that, under new management, no longer valued their skills at diplomacy, policy knowledge, or experience in far-flung regions of the world. Combined with Trump’s subversion of longtime alliances and trade accords and his steady undermining of democratic ideals, the carelessness with which his administration treated foreign policy led to world confidence in U.S. leadership plummeting in 2017 to a new low of 30 percent (below China and just above Russia), according to a Gallup poll.
In some respects, the Trump White House’s disdain for expertise and experience reflected larger attitudes percolating through American society. In his 2007 book, The Cult of the Amateur, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andrew Keen warned that the internet not only had democratized information beyond people’s wildest imaginings but also was replacing genuine knowledge with “the wisdom of the crowd,” dangerously blurring the lines between fact and opinion, informed argument and blustering speculation.
A decade later, the scholar Tom Nichols wrote in The Death of Expertise that a willful hostility toward established knowledge had emerged on both the right and the left, with people aggressively arguing that “every opinion on any matter is as good as every other.” Ignorance now was fashionable.
“If citizens do not bother to gain basic literacy in the issues that affect their lives,” Nichols wrote, “they abdicate control over those issues whether they like it or not. And when voters lose control of these important decisions, they risk the hijacking of their democracy by ignorant demagogues, or the more quiet and gradual decay of their democratic institutions into authoritarian technocracy.”
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The Trump White House’s preference for loyalty and ideological lockstep over knowledge is on display throughout the administration. Unqualified judges and agency heads were appointed because of cronyism, political connections, or a determination to undercut agencies that stood in the way of Trump’s massive deregulatory plans benefiting the fossil fuel industry and wealthy corporate donors. Rick Perry, who was famous for wanting to abolish the Department of Energy, was named to head it, presiding over cutbacks to renewable energy programs; and the new EPA head, Scott Pruitt, who had repeatedly sued the Environmental Protection Agency over the years, swiftly began dismantling and slow walking legislation designed to protect the environment.
The public—which opposed the GOP tax bill and worried that its health care would be taken away—was high-handedly ignored when its views failed to accord with Trump administration objectives or those of the Republican Congress. And when experts in a given field—like climate change, fiscal policy, or national security—raised inconvenient questions, they were sidelined, or worse. This, for instance, is what happened to the Congressional Budget Office (created decades ago as an independent, nonpartisan provider of cost estimates for legislation) when it reported that a proposed GOP health-care bill would leave millions more uninsured. Republicans began attacking the agency—not just its report, but its very existence. Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, Mick Mulvaney, asked whether the CBO’s time had “come and gone,” and other Republicans proposed slashing its budget and cutting its staff of 235 by 89 employees.
For that matter, the normal machinery of policy making—and the normal process of analysis and review—were routinely circumvented by the Trump administration, which violated such norms with knee-jerk predictability. Many moves were the irrational result of a kind of reverse engineering: deciding on an outcome the White House or the Republican Congress wanted, then trying to come up with rationales or selling points afterward. This was the very opposite of the scientific method, whereby data is systematically gathered and assessed to formulate and test hypotheses—a method the administration clearly had contempt for, given its orders to CDC analysts to avoid using the terms “science-based” and “evidence-based.” And it was a reminder that in Orwell’s dystopia in 1984 there is no word for “science,” because “the empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded,” represents an objective reality that threatens the power of Big Brother to determine what truth is.
In addition to announcing that it was withdrawing from the Paris climate accord (after Syria signed on, the United States was left as the lone country repudiating the global agreement), the Trump administration vowed to terminate President Obama’s Clean Power Plan and reverse a ban on offshore oil and gas drilling. Scientists were dismissed from government advisory boards, and plans were made to cut funding for an array of research programs in such fields as biomedicine, environmental science, engineering, and data analysis. The EPA alone was facing proposed cuts from the White House of $2.5 billion from its annual budget—a reduction of more than 23 percent.
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In April 2017, the March for Science, organized in Washington to protest the Trump administration’s antiscience policies, grew into more than four hundred marches in more than thirty-five nations, participants marching out of solidarity with colleagues in the United States and also out of concern for the status of science and reason in their own countries. Decisions made by the U.S. government about climate change and other global problems, after all, have a domino effect around the world—affecting joint enterprises and collaborative research, as well as efforts to find international solutions to crises affecting the planet.
British scientists worry about how Brexit will affect universities and research institutions in the U.K. and the ability of British students to study in Europe. Scientists in countries fro
m Australia to Germany to Mexico worry about the spread of attitudes devaluing science, evidence, and peer review. And doctors in Latin America and Africa worry that fake news about Zika and Ebola are spreading misinformation and fear.
Mike MacFerrin, a graduate student in glaciology working in Kangerlussuaq, a town of five hundred in Greenland, told Science magazine that the residents there had practical reasons to worry about climate change because runoff from the ice sheet had partially washed out a local bridge. “I liken the attacks on science to turning off the headlights,” he said. “We’re driving fast and people don’t want to see what’s coming up. Scientists—we’re the headlights.”
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One of the most harrowing accounts of just how quickly “the rule of raison”—faith in science, humanism, progress, and liberty—can give way to “its very opposite, terror and mass emotion,” was laid out by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig in his 1942 memoir, The World of Yesterday. Zweig witnessed two globe-shaking calamities in his life—World War I, followed by a brief respite, and then the cataclysmic rise of Hitler and descent into World War II. His memoir is an act of bearing witness to how Europe tore itself apart suicidally twice within decades—the story of the terrible “defeat of reason” and “the wildest triumph of brutality,” and a lesson, he hoped, for future generations.
Zweig wrote about growing up in a place and time when the miracles of science—the conquest of diseases, “the transmission of the human word in a second around the globe”—made progress seem inevitable, and even dire problems like poverty “no longer seemed insurmountable.” An optimism (which may remind some readers of the hopes that surged through the Western world after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989) informed his father’s generation, Zweig recalled: “They honestly believed that the divergencies and the boundaries between nations and sects would gradually melt away into a common humanity and that peace and security, the highest of treasures, would be shared by all mankind.”
The Death of Truth Page 2
