One of my favorite stories about Winston Churchill goes like this.
Unfortunately, the story is what we would now call fake news. The same anecdote has been attributed at various times to George Bernard Shaw, Groucho Marx, Mark Twain, W.C. Fields, Bertrand Russell, H.G. Wells, and, implausibly, Woodrow Wilson.
In time, it will probably be ascribed to Donald Trump.
But the story came to mind last week, when the Washington Post’s Dan Balz asked, “Does it bother anyone that President Trump has been caught lying? Does it bother anyone that this is not new? Does it bother anyone that the president has been shown to be a liar?”
Stephen Hayes and I discussed the question on the Daily Standard podcast last week.
Of course, we pretty much know the answer. Many Americans, perhaps most, do indeed care. But in an age of tribal and transactional politics, a lot of folks frankly don’t, and are not afraid to say so:
Blunt’s comments echoed USA Today’s report from a focus group of Trump supporters: “Yes, they think President Trump’s lying about Stormy Daniels. And no, they really do not care.”
This is no longer a bug. It is a feature, wherein the indifference to Trump’s mendacity has become as much a reflex as the right’s newfound moral relativism. We are no longer even haggling about the price.
At first (or second, or third) blush, this seems jarring. But, as Jonah Goldberg has written, conservatism has been beset with what he calls “Alinsky envy” for some time now. Since the left demonizes, slanders, and lies, he noted, a whole cottage industry on the right has been built around the insistence that “We should do it too!”
But this is where Hannah Arendt once again proves her indispensability. Trumpism’s blending of tribalism with transactionalism is also reflected in what Arendt identified as the “curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism” in demagogic politics. In many ways the developments are parallel, as tribalism provides a mass political base that helps politicians and pundits alike rationalize the bargains they make. And the gullibility of voters who take their news from Gateway Pundit or Facebook groups provides the raw material for the cynical acceptance of untruth. Arendt explained the phenomenon this way:
This mixture of gullibility and world-weary cynicism, Arendt wrote, dispelled “the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism the vice of superior and refined minds.”
The masters of this sort of propaganda understood that they could change their stories with impunity, because they would see their deceptions as a form of 8-dimensional chess.
Remarkably, she wrote that nearly 70 years ago, long before the rise of our own alternative reality media ecosystems. But Arendt understood the endgame here; a tsunami of lies isn’t aimed at getting people to believe what the propagandist is saying. Rather, it’s to induce chronic disbelief, or an indifferent shrug. Who knows what to believe? Who cares? What is truth?
“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lie, for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, “ wrote Arendt, “but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.”
