Who’s Fooled
There is a political science axiom: if you repeat the same thing, over and over again, ultimately, no matter how absurd, a percentage of the population will believe it’s true. Abraham Lincoln (may have) said it best: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” And there is a further “corollary” to that axiom: “If you’re going to tell a lie, make it a whopper”. No one would believe you would tell THAT big a falsehood.
I don’t need to infringe on “Godwin’s Law” for an example of this. Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin in the 1950’s proved the point in a speech to the Women’s Republican Club of Wheeling, West Virginia. He held up a sheaf of papers and said he had the names of “…two hundred known Communists in the State Department”. He didn’t; there weren’t even names on the papers, but it didn’t matter. McCarthy started an era of distrust in American institutions, from the Government to the movies, that still echoes to this day. And even though McCarthy was ultimately repudiated (“…have you no sense of decency sir”), an entire era of American History carries his name, and his “Big Lie”; McCarthyism.
Post-Truth Era
Our present “Post-Truth” era is saturated with “Big Lies”. Just this week, Robert Kennedy Jr, the son of revered Senator Bobby Kennedy; said he wasn’t against vaccines, or anti-Semitic, or racist. He said all of that under oath in front of a Congressional Committee, in spite of his own anti-vaccination, anti-Semitic and racist comments being read to him. It doesn’t matter – we are in an era when it’s OK to say something one day, lie about it the next, and deny the whole matter on the third.
The State of Florida, by law, now requires schools to teach that enslaved Americans learned “personal skills” that benefitted them. The fact that those skills were taught not to “benefit” the enslaved, but to profit the owners isn’t included in the lesson plan. But in our current “Post-Truth” era, manipulating historic facts to make it “palatable” to some students (and more importantly, some parents) is just fine. Like McCarthy’s names or Kennedy’s anti-vaccination, it’s OK to ignore the truth. Glad I’m not teaching eighth grade history in Florida. Even forty years ago, I wasn’t sugar-coating America’s history of enslavement to my classroom.
Watch “conservative” media. Joe Biden is addled, infirm, senile, AND the master of a grand “Biden Crime Family”. Oh, and he’s a Socialist or a Communist or some kind of “ist” that WE DON’T LIKE. (Just an aside: I’m a Liberal, a newspeak Progressive, and Biden isn’t even that. He’s a traditional Democratic moderate, in an era where there is little “moderation”).
And climate change – well it’s “inevitable”, nature not industry, and there’s nothing we can do but apply more sunblock and run the air conditioners (electricity, 79% provided by fossil fuels). Sorry about that, future generations.
Both Sides
To be fair, it’s not just one side of the political spectrum that is post-truth. “My” side says that all MAGA supporters are “dumb” and “racist” and self-centered. While I would agree that the MAGA ideology is racist and self-centered, I know many Trump supporters who are good neighbors, and want “good” for their friends, families and the Nation. We don’t agree on how to get there. And we even don’t agree on where we’ve been.
And maybe that’s the point. Forty years ago, when I was teaching American History to eighth graders, there was a “place” in the middle where we could “agree to disagree”. We would vigorously argue our issues, but came from a single point of “fact”. That point no longer exists, it’s been rubbed out by the totally separate sets of “postulates” that each side holds as “the truth”.
My truth is no longer your truth – and perhaps that’s the ONLY thing we can agree on. And that’s not enough foundation to continue our Nation.
