Among the explanations that Peter Pomerantsev proposes in his piece at Granta for why we’ve entered a post-fact world are technology, globalization, the end of philosophical history, immaturity, post-modernism, and the Russians:
The flight into techno-fantasies is intertwined with economic and social uncertainty. If all the facts say you have no economic future then why would you want to hear facts? If you live in a world where a small event in China leads to livelihoods lost in Lyon, where your government seems to have no control over what is going on, then trust in the old institutions of authority – politicians, academics, the media – buckles. Which has led to Brexit leader Michael Gove’s claim that British people ‘have had enough of experts’, Trump’s rants at the ‘lamestream’ media and the online flowering of ‘alternative news’ sites. Paradoxically, people who don’t trust ‘the mainstream’ media are, a study from Northeastern University showed, more likely to swallow disinformation. ‘Surprisingly, consumers of alternative news, which are the users trying to avoid the mainstream media “mass-manipulationâ€, are the most responsive to the injection of false claims.’[1] Healthy scepticism ends in a search for wild conspiracies. Putin’s Kremlin-controlled television finds US conspiracies behind everything, Trump speculates that 9/11 was an inside job, and parts of the Brexit campaign saw Britain under attack from a Germano-Franco-European plot.
I think a lot of us have cultivated the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts in our heads at the same time. Think about this sentence: “Donald Trump lies all of the time so I’m voting for Hillary Clinton”.
I have a very simple explanation: it works. You can muse over why it works but clearly its working. We are preparing to elect a pathological liar to the presidency. Contrary to Parson Weems’s fable, George Washington undoubtedly told a lie every now and again but there was at least a soupçon of truth in what he said. We’ve come a long way, baby.
There’s nothing contradictory about the ‘lesser evil’ argument. It’s pretty straightforward. I think certain people who can’t stomach either candidate are going to extreme lengths not to ask if there is a lesser evil. It’s like they are afraid they might accidentally convince themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton.
I hope no one makes that argument. I think you can make the argument that Trump compulsively lies all of the time, while Hillary only does it on occasion, so I will vote for Hillary. I think one can make the argument that Hillary lies about more important stuff, or at least stuff I care about, so I will vote for Trump since he mostly just lies to make himself look better.
Steve
There’s also nothing wrong with holding two contradictory thoughts. Look at the Bible. You can think that it is the revealed word of God, and at the same time filled with factual inaccuracies and retroactive myth-making. Not only that does this work, but it’s better than being a literalist or someone who thinks that Judeo-Christianity is a lie because a few chapters in the Bible got some things wrong.
Likewise, there are people out there who want to believe in Hillary Clinton’s lies because they want to believe that she’s a better person than she is, and they want to believe that their own ideology is pure and without compromise.
She got caught with her hands in the cookie jar on the email issue, but this is how normal politicians get away with so much.
But Trump is doing something so ugly that it is breathtaking. He wants to create a terrible world in order to justify the inner lives of his followers, meaning that this world has to be a threat because otherwise it’s all in your head.
I don’t know how far this is going to go. Nobody does. But this is not a place where American politicians tend to end up.
George Washington for President
This link (scroll down) has excerpts from Washington’s debates at:
The First Republican presidential primary debate in Cleveland, Ohio on August 6, 2015;
The first Democratic primary debate in Las Vegas, Nevada on October 13, 2015; and
The third Republican presidential primary debate in Boulder, Colorado on October 28, 2015.
I think one of the advantages of the more recent trend towards “social history” instead of the “great men history” is that it lets us see that the common people behind even great political and social movements were often misinformed, conspiratorial, bigoted, illogical, etc. Not completely wrongheaded, but their collective view contain a lot of oddities in their individualized expression. So, I don’t see anything new here at the grass-roots.
Its really the elites that are wanting.