Reality-based

Of the many things about today’s American political climate that I’m bummed about, the biggest is probably the rise of “post-truth.”

Although it’s hard to imagine today, one of the complaints I remember during the 2000 presidential campaign was that Bush and Gore were too blandly similar.¹ Of course, Bush won controversially, then 9/11 happened, followed by war and quagmire in Afghanistan and Iraq, and by the run-up to the 2004 election the idea that the Democrats and Republicans were in any way too similar seemed like a distant memory. Despite what seemed to me to be a litany of failures, Bush won a second term.

Shortly before that election (though I read it much later), journalist Ron Suskind wrote an article in the New York Times about the Bush administration’s mentality of absolute confidence and its willingness to close its eyes when confronted with evidence that contravened its prior beliefs. The article featured the following now-infamous quote:

The aide [an anonymous senior Bush official] said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

There’s more good stuff in the article along these lines. And I’ve seen this theme echoed in other things I’ve read and seen about America’s mid-2000s debacles in the Middle East - for example, the book The Assassin’s Gate, by George Packer, or the documentary No End in Sight, by Charles Ferguson. The Bush administration had a pre-equipped plan and ideology and was unwilling to adjust either to the realities that it encountered.

I didn’t anticipate that this attitude would not be discredited, but would in fact become a more permanent feature of the Republican Party. In the last several years, and especially during the Trump 2016 campaign and subsequent presidency, I have been really dispirited by the American right’s willingness to subjugate facts to ideology.

Twisting and reinterpreting evidence to support your views is nothing new. “Hearing what you want to hear” is only human. What’s new to me is the way this is now considered a virtue. The way Suskind “murmured something about enlightenment principles” before getting overrun by Bush’s aide is hauntingly reminiscent of political dialogue today. And while fairness obligates me to say that sometimes I see this issue on the left, I think it’s dwarfed by the magnitude of the problem on the right.

The transformation of the GOP into a cult of Trump, as George Will put it, means that the right rejects any evidence contrary to Trump’s position, which leads to a broader rejection of facts and politically neutral expert opinion. And it doesn’t seem to be a question of general increased skepticism; witness the doctors who deal with patients who resist their professional expertise and advice but readily believe claims about COVID they read on social media.² Skepticism is one thing, but the simultaneous credence given to unreliable sources is not defensible.

COVID has really crystallized post-truth. The fact that mask-wearing, a mild inconvenience with clear motivations in public health, can be turned into a political football blows my mind. If Trump had called for masks right off the bat, and always been the pro-mask guy, I believe that Republicans would have accepted them. But because Trump staked his position against masks, many Republicans now interpret mask-related evidence and expert opinion in terms of being pro- or anti-Trump and decide what to believe on that basis.

It’s gotten much worse under Trump, but I see the seeds of what the GOP is today back in 2004, in that quote about the “reality-based community,” in the idea that truths, even scientific truths, could be whatever you said they were.