The Death of Truth

In his 2015 book, A War for the Soul of America, the historian Andrew Hartman wrote that the traditionalists who “resisted the cultural changes set into motion during the sixties” and “identified with the normative Americanism of the 1950s” seemed to have lost the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. By the twenty-first century, Hartman wrote, “a growing majority of Americans now accept and even embrace what at the time seemed like a new nation. In this light, the late-twentieth-century culture wars should be understood as an adjustment period. The nation struggled over cultural change in order to adjust to it. The culture wars compelled Americans, even conservatives, to acknowledge transformations to American life. And although acknowledgment often came in the form of rejection, it was also the first step to resignation, if not outright acceptance.”

As it turns out, this optimistic assessment was radically premature, much the way that Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History?” (arguing that with the implosion of Soviet Communism liberal democracy had triumphed and would become “the final form of human government”) was premature. A Freedom House report concluded that “with populist and nationalist forces making significant gains in democratic states, 2016 marked the eleventh consecutive year of decline in global freedom.” And in 2017, Fukuyama said he was concerned about “a slow erosion of institutions” and democratic norms under President Trump; twenty-five years earlier, he said, he “didn’t have a sense or a theory about how democracies can go backward” but now realized “they clearly can.”

As for the culture wars, they quickly came roaring back. Hard-core segments of the Republican base—the Tea Party, birthers, right-wing evangelicals, white nationalists—had mobilized against President Obama and his policies. And Trump, as both candidate and president, would pour gasoline on these social and political fractures—as a way to both gin up his base and distract attention from his policy failures and many scandals. He exploited the partisan divides in American society, appealing to the fears of white working-class voters worried about a changing world, while giving them scapegoats he selected—immigrants, African Americans, women, Muslims—as targets for their anger. It’s no coincidence that Russian trolls—working to get Trump elected while trying to undermine faith in the U.S. democratic system—were, at the same time, using fake social media accounts in efforts to further amplify divisions among Americans. For instance, it turned out that Russian trolls used an impostor Facebook account called “Heart of Texas” to organize a protest called “Stop the Islamization of Texas” in May 2016 and another impostor Facebook account called “United Muslims of America” to organize a counterprotest at the same time and place.

Some of the most eloquent critics of Trump’s politics of fear and division have been conservatives like Steve Schmidt, Nicolle Wallace, Joe Scarborough, Jennifer Rubin, Max Boot, David Frum, Bill Kristol, Michael Gerson, and the Republican senators John McCain and Jeff Flake. But most of the GOP rallied behind Trump, rationalizing his lies, his disdain for expertise, his contempt for many of the very ideals America was founded upon. For such Trump enablers, party trumped everything—morality, national security, fiscal responsibility, common sense, and common decency. In the wake of stories about Trump’s alleged affair with the porn star Stormy Daniels, evangelicals came to his defense: Jerry Falwell Jr. said “all these things were years ago,” and Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said he and his supporters were willing to give Trump a pass for his personal behavior.

It’s an ironic development, given where conservatives stood during the first wave of the culture wars in the 1980s and 1990s. Back then, it was conservatives who promoted themselves as guardians of tradition, expertise, and the rule of law, standing in opposition to what they saw as the decline of reason and a repudiation of Western values. In his 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind, the political philosophy professor Allan Bloom railed against relativism and condemned 1960s campus protests in which, he said, “commitment was understood to be profounder than science, passion than reason.” And the scholar Gertrude Himmelfarb warned that the writing and teaching of history had been politicized by a new generation of postmodernists: in viewing the past through the lenses of variables like gender and race, she argued, postmodernists were implying not just that all truths are contingent but that “it is not only futile but positively baneful to aspire to them.”

Some critics unfairly tried to lump the pluralistic impulses of multiculturalism together with the arguments of radical postmodernists who mocked the very possibility of teaching (or writing) history fairly. The former offered a crucial antidote to traditional narratives of American exceptionalism and Western triumphalism by opening the once narrow gates of history to the voices of women, African Americans, Native Americans, immigrants, and other heretofore marginalized points of view. Multiculturalism underscored the incompleteness of much history writing, as Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob argued in their incisive and common-sense-filled book, Telling the Truth About History, and offered the possibility of a more inclusive, more choral perspective. But they also warned that extreme views could lead to the dangerously reductive belief that “knowledge about the past is simply an ideological construction intended to serve particular interests, making history a series of myths establishing or reinforcing group identities.”

Science, too, came under attack by radical postmodernists, who argued that scientific theories are socially constructed: they are informed by the identity of the person positing the theory and the values of the culture in which they are formed; therefore, science cannot possibly make claims to neutrality or universal truths.

“The postmodern view fit well with the ambivalence toward science that developed after the bomb and during the Cold War,” Shawn Otto wrote in The War on Science. Among left-leaning academics in the humanities departments of universities, he went on, “science came to be seen as the province of a hawkish, pro-business, right-wing power structure—polluting, uncaring, greedy, mechanistic, sexist, racist, imperialist, homophobic, oppressive, intolerant. A heartless ideology that cared little for the spiritual or holistic wellness of our souls, our bodies, or our Mother Earth.”

It was ridiculous, of course, to argue that a researcher’s cultural background could affect verifiable scientific facts; as Otto succinctly put it, “Atmospheric CO2 is the same whether the scientist measuring it is a Somali woman or an Argentine man.” But such postmodernist arguments would clear the way for today’s anti-vaxxers and global warming deniers, who refuse to accept the consensus opinion of the overwhelming majority of scientists.

As on so many other subjects, Orwell saw the perils of this sort of thinking decades ago. In a 1943 essay, he wrote, “What is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable.”

“It is just this common basis of agreement,” he went on, “with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘Science.’ There is only ‘German Science,’ ‘Jewish Science,’ etc.” When truth is so fragmented, so relative, Orwell noted, a path is opened for some “Leader, or some ruling clique” to dictate what is to be believed: “If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’—well, it never happened.”

People trying to win respectability for clearly discredited theories—or, in the case of Holocaust revisionists, trying to whitewash entire chapters of history—exploited the postmodernist argument that all truths are partial. Deconstructionist history, the scholar Deborah E. Lipstadt observed in Denying the Holocaust, has “the potential to alter dramatically the way established truth is transmitted from generation to generation.” And it can foster an intellectual climate in which “no fact, no event, and no aspect of history has any fixed meaning or content. Any truth can be retold. Any fact can be recast. There is no ultimate historical reality.”

POSTMODERNISM NOT ONLY rejected all meta-narratives but also emphasized the instability of language. One of postmodernism’s founding fathers, Jacques Derrida—who would achieve celebrity status on American campuses in the 1970s and 1980s thanks in large part to such disciples as Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller—used the word “deconstruction” to describe the sort of textual analysis he pioneered that would be applied not just to literature but to history, architecture, and the social sciences as well.

Deconstruction posited that all texts are unstable and irreducibly complex and that ever variable meanings are imputed by readers and observers. In focusing on the possible contradictions and ambiguities of a text (and articulating such arguments in deliberately tangled and pretentious prose), it promulgated an extreme relativism that was ultimately nihilistic in its implications: anything could mean anything; an author’s intent did not matter, could not in fact be discerned; there was no such thing as an obvious or commonsense reading, because everything had an infinitude of meanings. In short, there was no such thing as truth.

As David Lehman recounted in his astute book Signs of the Times, the worst suspicions of critics of deconstruction were confirmed when the Paul de Man scandal exploded in 1987 and deconstructionist rationales were advanced to defend the indefensible.

De Man, a professor at Yale and one of deconstruction’s brightest stars, had achieved an almost cultlike following in academic circles. Students and colleagues described him as a brilliant, charismatic, and charming scholar who had fled Nazi Europe, where, he implied, he had been a member of the Belgian Resistance. A very different portrait

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