The Death of Politics

by Peter Wehner

  Take as an example the radio host Alex Jones, who runs the fake news website Infowars.com. Jones is a conspiracy monger who has alleged that the US government allowed the 9/11 attacks to happen and who claimed the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax.

  When pressed in an interview with journalist Megyn Kelly about the Sandy Hook massacre, Jones said, “I tend to believe that children probably did die there. But then you look at all the other evidence on the other side. I can see how other people believe that nobody died there.” But as Ms. Kelly pointed out, “There is no evidence on the other side.”47

  Nevertheless, according to Kelly, Jones’s YouTube monthly views reached 83 million in November 2016, more than five times higher than the previous November; Infowars.com got a temporary White House press pass for the first time; and Donald Trump, who was interviewed by Jones in December 2015, called him after the election to thank him for his help.

  As recently as a decade ago Alex Jones would have been viewed as a crank on the fringes of American political life, with very little influence. But in the Trump era he has been legitimized in the eyes of many. To them, he’s a trusted voice, a source of information and confirmation. As alluded to earlier in this chapter, the White House press secretary sent out a doctored video by an editor at Infowars to justify revoking the press pass for a CNN White House correspondent.

  To be sure, there is a continuum; some propagandists are worse than others. But the combined effects are deeply damaging. “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda,” according to the Russian dissident and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov. “It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”48

  In the new media ecosystem, then, everything is up for grabs. We often don’t have a common set of facts we’re working from. In the past our differences were generally over solutions, meaning different views on the best approaches and policies to address the problems we face. Today there are differences in epistemology, the theory of knowledge that allows us to distinguish facts and justified belief from opinion. As a result, people are increasingly living in their own realities, creating their own facts, writing their own scripts. Facts are to be molded like Play-Doh.

  I want to be clear: it’s not as though most Americans consider politics to be a fact-free zone, and most people would undoubtedly find Alex Jones’s influence on our political and civic culture to be harmful. The concern, though, is that a minority of reckless, nihilistic voices—who have the ability to garner much attention and cause much disruption—are poisoning our political culture. Their influence is disproportionate to their numbers and is threatening to kill American politics.

  It may be helpful to think of it like the concept of herd immunity. So long as a certain percentage of the population is immune from infection, the healthy herd provides protection to those who are not, since spread of the contagious disease is contained to an isolated few. But if a society drops below a threshold—say, 85 percent—herd immunity is lost. The disease spreads to the herd. And those who were protected no longer are.

  There can also be seepage. While the most outlandish conspiracies might not be believed, a general, corrosive distrust can spread. People begin to view as optional facts that in the past would have been accepted. It’s as if consumers of information are walking through a cafeteria, choosing the facts they like and walking past the ones they don’t. Again, this kind of thing has been present throughout much of our history. What’s different now is how widespread this phenomenon is.

  LIVING IN TWO UNIVERSES

  We are losing a common factual basis for our national life.

  In 2009 Rush Limbaugh, easily the most influential figure in the history of conservative talk radio and one of the dominant figures in conservatism over the last quarter century, devoted part of his show to what those on the right referred to as “Climategate,” a hacking scandal involving the release of more than one thousand emails among scientists at the Climate Research Unit of the UK’s University of East Anglia. Those who deny global warming claimed (wrongly) that the emails proved the fabrication of the global warming crisis.49 Limbaugh referred to the institutions of government, academia, science, and media as the “four corners of deceit.” And he went on to say this:

  We live in two universes. One universe is a lie. One universe is an entire lie. Everything run, dominated, and controlled by the left here and around the world is a lie. The other universe is where we are, and that’s where reality reigns supreme and we deal with it. And seldom do these two universes ever overlap.50

  David Roberts of Vox.com writes:

  In Limbaugh’s view, the core institutions and norms of American democracy have been irredeemably corrupted by an alien enemy. Their claims to transpartisan authority—authority that applies equally to all political factions and parties—are fraudulent. There are no transpartisan authorities; there is only zero-sum competition between tribes, the left and right. Two universes.51

  I don’t think Limbaugh would dispute that characterization, and in fact the intensity of his feelings has only increased in the intervening years. But here’s the point: if you believe conservatives and liberals live in two universes, one of which is a pack of lies while in the other reality reigns supreme, then compromise is impossible. Even argument becomes impossible since there are no shared facts and assumptions on which persuasion is possible. To compromise would be treasonous. Political opponents are enemies.

  Take as one example the aftermath of the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, in which seventeen people (primarily high school students) were massacred. In the past, tragedies such as this would have united people in grief and sympathy. No more. The charges leveled by each side against the other were instantaneous and incendiary. The left was saying that the right loves guns more than their children; the right was saying the left hates guns more than it loves their children. Each was accusing the other of being willing to sacrifice the lives of their children on the altar of their pro- and anti-gun ideology. This political impasse is belied by the fact that most polls indicate that the vast majority of Americans are worried about how to protect their children from gun violence.

  In such a toxic and mistrustful environment—partisan antipathy is at a record level, according to the Pew Research Center52—it’s hard to reason together. Debate becomes much more difficult. And when we lose the ability to persuade, all that’s left is compulsion and the exercise of raw power, intimidation, and silencing those with whom we disagree.

  We are becoming a country without shared facts or reference points. Yale Law professor Stephen L. Carter puts it this way:

  When disputes over facts are misconstrued as disputes over principles, the entire project of Enlightenment democracy is at risk. The liberalism of the Enlightenment rested critically on the supposition that agreement on the facts was a separate process from agreement on the values to be applied to them. The social theorist Karl Mannheim, in “Ideology and Utopia,” argued that we would never be able to separate the two, that we would always wind up seeing the facts through the lens of our preformed ideologies. Thus liberal democracy, in the Enlightenment sense, was bound to fail.53

  Our challenge is to prove Mannheim wrong, and right now we’re not doing as well as we should at that.

  WHAT WE CAN DO

  Everyone, including journalists, has a role to play if we are going to recover from this “post-truth” political moment. For our news channels, that starts, but hardly ends, with showing more ideological balance as a way to rebuild trust with Red America. (Only 11 percent of Republicans consider information from national news organizations to be very trustworthy, according to a 2017 Pew Research Center poll.)54

  In one study, half of the journalists surveyed identified themselves as independents. But among journalists who align with one of the two major parties, four in five said they’re Democrats.55 Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute, says, “The best data out there shows that
there are fewer Republicans working in traditional newsrooms and news generally than there used to be.”56

  The common rejoinder of journalists is that while as individuals they may be liberal, that does not influence their coverage. But the liberalism manifests itself in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, from story selection to tone and intonation to the line of questioning that’s pursued. Rosenstiel acknowledges that the imbalance “affects the discussion in newsrooms even when people are trying to be fair.”

  The result is that many people on the right have felt unheard, their views disrespected and delegitimized. In an effort to find an outlet, conservatives turned to alternative sources of information, from talk radio to the Fox News Channel to right-leaning websites. That was understandable, and in some respects it was healthy, offering a greater diversity in viewpoints than there once was. There was an imbalance and a need for correction.

  But something happened along the way. People who in the past viewed news outlets as biased now view them as fraudulent. That’s an unfair judgment, and yet we need to recognize that the attitude exists, it arose from a very real bias, and so long as that attitude continues, there’s little hope we can agree on a set of shared facts.

  This is only part of the task, though. Both journalists and news consumers also need to take it upon themselves to push back against rushing a story or wanting to sensationalize it. Journalists need to resist breathless reporting, jumping to premature conclusions, and galloping ahead of the facts. What we need, in a phrase, is self-restraint. The more ferocious the attacks made against the press, the more detached and dispassionate, fair-minded, and even-handed the press needs to become. As a friend has put it to me, “As things speed up, we need to slow down.” So, too, the American media.

  Maggie Haberman, an influential reporter for the New York Times, did her part to slow things down last year. After nine years, 187,000 tweets, and building up a list of close to 700,000 Twitter followers, she wrote a column announcing she was stepping away from Twitter. It was distorting discourse, she said, and she couldn’t turn off the noise.

  “The viciousness, toxic partisan anger, intellectual dishonesty, motive-questioning and sexism are at all-time highs,” Haberman wrote, “with no end in sight.” She added, “Twitter is now an anger video game for many users. It is the only platform on which people feel free to say things they’d never say to someone’s face. For me, it had become an enormous and pointless drain on my time and mental energy.”57 (She has since returned to Twitter, as have other journalists who temporarily forswore it.)

  Journalists also need to do less advocacy, to show less eagerness for stories to come out a certain way, to not allow adrenaline rushes to drive reporting. “Our facts need to be squeaky clean and uncorrupted,” CNN’s Jake Tapper said in a speech to the Los Angeles Press Club. “We are not the resistance, we are not the opposition, and we are here to tell the truth and report the facts regardless of whom those facts might benefit. . . . [L]et us be revolutionaries by telling the truth at this time of deceit. But let us also make sure that we get our facts right.”58

  Corporations need to do due diligence when it comes to the sites they are advertising on, to ensure that hateful and bigoted ones aren’t inadvertently being supported. And when it comes to misinformation/disinformation campaigns that are being coordinated by hostile regimes like Russia, we need to learn from countries like Ukraine, which has experienced this and is beginning to take steps to defend itself.

  One example of this is Stopfake.org, whose goal is to verify and refute disinformation and propaganda about events in Ukraine being circulated in the media and which now examines and analyzes all aspects of Kremlin propaganda, including in other countries and regions.59 “But perhaps the most important component of our effort,” former secretary of state Madeleine Albright has said,

  is to try to help foster constructive engagement between government, civil society, and technology firms. These companies have an interest in working with us on solutions, because disinformation is hurting their platforms and making them less usable. We cannot expect the technology companies to fight back on their own, but they cannot expect those of us working in civil society or government to solve the problem without their help. So we need the technology community to acknowledge the problem and be open to partnership.60

  There are structural solutions to look at, then—practical steps to help us repair our civic and political damage. But something else, something deeper, must change as well: citizens need to renew their commitment to truth itself and be willing to fight for it and to fight falsity.

  “Facts inform opinions, and opinions, inspired by different interests and passions, can differ widely and still be legitimate as long as they respect factual truth,” wrote the political theorist Hannah Arendt. She added, “Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute. In other words, factual truth informs political thought just as rational truth informs philosophical speculation.”61

  Destroy the foundation of factual truth, and lies will be normalized. This is what the Czech dissident (and later president) Václav Havel described in the late 1970s when he wrote about his fellow citizens making their own inner peace with a regime built on hypocrisy and falsehoods. They were “living within the lie.” In such a situation life becomes farcical, demoralizing, a theater of the absurd. It is soul destroying.

  The United States is still quite a long way from the situation Havel found himself in. But to keep it that way—to keep civic vandalism from spreading—we all have a role to play. The first thing is to refuse to become complicit in the lies, to refuse to believe them and certainly to not spread them, including lies that may help your political causes. Call out the most damaging lies—to friends, in social settings, on social media. Be civil, but be forceful. Name it. If enough people do, it actually can start a movement.

  One suggestion: start a discussion thread on Facebook or Twitter and tag your representative on it. Make it clear that when the president engages in a sustained attack on the truth, you expect your representative to speak out against it, and in some cases take specific actions to hold him accountable. It may be voting for censure, it may be insisting that Congress hold hearings on a matter in dispute, and it may be going on record that if the president impedes or kills a truth-seeking legal investigation then there will be a hellacious price to pay, from blocking all nominations and legislation to impeachment. It is a truism in politics: the way to make those in public office see the light is for them to feel the heat.

  Fatalism is never an option in a self-governing republic, and it’s a particularly bad attitude these days. Utilize the means that are available to you to influence your elected leaders. The best way to influence a member of Congress is to visit their office. Writing a letter to them or a letter to the editor tends to be more effective than a phone call. Better yet, show up at town hall meetings and public events. If you have financially supported a party that is aiding and abetting a compulsive liar, end the support—and give the reason why. Help create a constituency for new leadership that prizes integrity and esteems honor. This may strike you as being as realistic as Locke’s castle in the air. It’s not. People who have a corrupting influence have been voted into office; they can be voted out of office.

  Beyond that, as citizens we can reject party loyalties when they are at odds with truth. As important as our political parties are to the health of our nation, they are not more important than truth itself or to the ideals of governance both parties were built on. That is why we must refuse to support candidates who are chronically dishonest. In doing so, we are rejecting a corrosive approach to politics. One person acting alone may not make much of a difference. A lot of people acting together create a culture.

  There are other things that can be done as well, including not getting all your information from the same partisan sources every day. Diversify your reading and news habits. Become discriminating customers of
information. Cultivate critical reasoning skills. And remind yourself that the point of gathering information isn’t necessarily to reaffirm the views you already hold; it’s to gather information in order to better ascertain the truth. Try to interact with people who have a different political perspective than you do—and when you do, listen to understand, not just to refute.

  These are concrete steps that can be taken, but much of what needs to be done is in the realm of attitudes. As Havel put it,

  in its most original and broadest sense, living within the truth covers a vast territory whose outer limits are vague and difficult to map, a territory full of modest expressions of human volition, the vast majority of which will remain anonymous and whose political impact will probably never be felt or described any more concretely than simply as part of a social climate or mood. Most of these expressions remain elementary revolts against manipulation: you simply straighten your backbone and live in greater dignity as an individual.62

  Straightening our backbones and living with greater dignity as individuals—a day at a time, an act at a time—is sound advice when it comes to repairing the damage America has sustained.

  WORDS AS INSTRUMENTS OF PERSUASION AND REASON

  “Politics and the English Language” was published in 1946 in the journal Horizon and is perhaps George Orwell’s most famous and enduring essay. In it, he argues that the English language has become disfigured and degraded, “ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” Language, particularly political language, is not just a manifestation of our decline but also an instrument in it.

  The important thing to understand is that what Orwell is aiming for is clarity. He wants language to be an instrument to express rather than conceal or prevent thought, and he’s quite right about that.