Slate "The Lies Were Always the Point" (important read, I think)
The GOP has abandoned truth. Trump is ancillary to that choice.
BY DAHLIA LITHWICK
JULY 13, 20214:03 PM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/07/lies-reality-political-problem-republicans-sidney-powell-lin-wood.html
If Adam Serwer is correct and the cruelty was the point for Trump’s Republican Party from 2016 to 2020, then post-2020, it is possible that the lie has become the point. Incubating, amplifying, and polishing lies is now the full-time occupation of much of the GOP. Faced with the choice between governing and lying, they have decided to be purveyors of fiction.
Trump, who had little mastery of most skills, was always a wizard at this move.
Back when Donald Trump was the main one telling lies and his boosters were scrambling all around him to make it so, there was a certain comic quality to it all: What was the point in distorting weather maps or crowd sizes just to flatter a weirdo narcissist? Experts in authoritarianism were warning that this type of manipulation was how strongmen cling to power, sure, but it seemed easy enough to push it away and assume that once he was no longer president, the persistent flattery and adjusting of reality for his benefit would stop. But it’s now clear that the falsehood itself is the endgame. As historian Timothy Snyder cautioned after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, “When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions.” That’s why debates about whether Trumpism can exist post-Trump or why the GOP has refused to abandon Trump miss the point. The point is that the GOP has abandoned truth. Trump himself is ancillary to that move
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For years, Trump used the phrase “many people are saying” to essentially mean “someday people will be saying.” He did so understanding that if you say such things enough times, someone somewhere will parrot it as a fundamental truth, and then your initial statement will be true(ish—many people will be saying the untrue thing). “Many people are saying [this lie]” was always code for “if we get people to say [this lie], it will seem true.” Trump’s admission of that principle at CPAC on Sunday gave away the game. He confessed, about polling numbers, that “if it’s bad, I say it’s fake. If it’s good, I say, that’s the most accurate poll perhaps ever.” The lie thus goes from a fiction in the lizard brain of a dangerously delusional man to headline news to gospel for people who have been trained to invert whatever they see from the news. In which case why wouldn’t Rudy Giuliani advise Trump on election night 2020 that he should simply lie and claim victory? That had been the game all along.
Responding to the lies has been an epistemological sinkhole for institutions charged with truth maintenance and fact management for years now. The media is in an intramural meltdown about how to handle people who lie on cable news. Huge social media companies are still doing less-than-spectacularly at policing dangerous fictions. The courts are attempting to separate the liars from their lies, by sanctioning the liars. But when simply spreading the lie is the point, that proves trickier than you might imagine. At a hearing before a federal court in Detroit on Monday, in which a judge probed how it could be the case that Trump’s election lawyers filed hundreds of pages of unverified speculation and gobsmacking errors in a case seeking to decertify Joe Biden’s victory in Michigan, the problem was laid bare: A Zoom screen full of attorneys bound by sworn obligations of candor, civility, and truth joyfully contended that people were saying false things. Lawyers representing Trump’s campaign, including Sidney Powell and Lin Wood were called out by U.S. District Court Judge Linda Parker for bolstering their pleadings with false, unsupported, and speculative claims by random conspiracy theorists who believed lies about flipped votes, the U.S. Postal Service, and illegal ballots that they saw on the news. Wood and another attorney, Emily Newman, had the good sense to blame all the other attorneys. But in the main, the lawyers’ defense was that if many people believed these lies, counsel had no independent obligation to ascertain whether the lies were true. Some of these attorneys went so far as to insist that the only way to test the lies would have been at a full and costly trial. Others insisted that opposing counsel and the judge herself had a duty to examine each of the lies before calling them lies, despite the fact that they never had any basis in truth.
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it is an infuriating read to folks like us, but important - read it all if you can.
= new reply since forum marked as read
