Much has been made about our turbulent present moment, especially the rise of demagogic leaders who often disparage the media as a danger to the people and not to trust them and other erstwhile purveyors of objectivity: scientists, diplomats, intelligence agencies. Pundits are increasingly coining this era of rising protectionism, isolationism, xenophobia and distrust of globalization and government institutions as "post-truth," evoking the ghosts of 1984 and Animal Farm. Continuing in this vein is former New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani, with her 2018 mini-treatise The Death of Truth: Notes of Falsehood in the Age of Trump.
Unlike many of the current collection of published media, Kakutani's analysis focuses on the cultural and philosophical undercurrents of our times, drawing from a comprehensive array of fictional and non-fictional sources (Orwell to de Tocqueville to T. S. Elliot to more contemporary writers like the outspoken Putin critic Masha Gessen) to try and answer the million-dollar question: is Trump's toxic blend of authoritarian tendencies, brashness, inexpertise, pettiness, and distrust of experts unique or is representative of a historical waxing and waning of reactionary sentiment? To this end, Kakutani divides her analysis into nine topical chapters covering the manipulation of reality that comes from the corruption of language, the role of the Internet in our personal and political lives, fake news, and propaganda.
However, like the subtitle Notes implies, the chapters end up reading more like a loosely bound cataloguing of recent trends, almost a recitation of journalists' coverage of Trump's dishonesty sprinkled with literary parallels and corollaries. Kakutani treads familiar ground of President Trump's estranged relationship with the truth, but is covering so much material that the analysis becomes superficial and hurried, jumping from topic to topic. The common thread tying all these varying chapter-essays is Kakutani's interpretation of postmodernism as the driving force behind today's era of Trumpian "culture wars" (Kakutani, 2018, p. 31). A philosophy pioneered by French theorists Foucault and Derrida in the late 20th century, postmodernism rejects the concept of a completely objective reality, as human perception necessarily adds in subjectivity to how one interprets and understands their reality. Examples of variables influencing this interpretation are categories such as race, gender, socioeconomic class, ideology and the larger culture and political moment one inhabits.
Because this philosophical perspective accepts multiple perspectives as correct, more narratives from marginalized groups can be brought into the conversation, correctly so. The downside to this, Kakutani argues, is that postmodernism can be used to justify the dismissal of expertise, with language prone to being stretched and corrupted to fit multiple narratives one feels should be true: from the fact that a shady cabal of globalists is controlling things behind the scenes to the detriment of the common person to the fact that immigration is tanking the economy (both are mainstays of many of today's far-right groups) to the fact that vaccines cause autism (something that is false) or that President Obama was secretly born in Kenya (an infamous strain of dishonest and racist far-right political thought known as birtherism).
I must concede that Kakutani does have a point, that postmodernist perspectives and how they've become ingrained into our cultural and political lexicons have probably played a role in allowing fringe elements (especially those on the far-right) to weaponize it to attack the foundations of our democratic republic and others around the world: politicians are actually puppets of special interests, the federal government nothing but an overreaching, bloated, and inefficient entity, and the other political party an adversary. As with any idea, how one chooses to use it is the problem, not necessarily the idea itself (case in point: the Internet can be used as a democratizing force, to help share ideas across national borders and spark innovation and can-and is-also used to stir up instability via the spread of noxious and false ideas by state-sponsored or lone-wolf trolls alike). To me, postmodernism gets too much of a bad rap in The Death of Truth. Sure, its ideas can be twisted from producing literary masterpieces and to helping to instill a sense of multiculturalism in our society (definitely positives), for the purpose of producing and enabling demagogues by cunning individuals like Breitbart News darling Steve Bannon. Notwithstanding the latter, to me, the corruption of postmodernism and its related schools of thought are one factor of many driving today's bizarro world.
Other relevant factors, like income, racial, and gender inequality, the role of technology (from the radio to the Internet) in confusing the truth and inhibiting critical thinking, and the use of propaganda have influenced the geopolitical landscape long before postmodernism emerged, serving to cast aspersions (some of this suspicion was definitely warranted, especially in situations where this was used to fuel reformist impulses to improve those institutions) on objective arbiters of truth and problem-solving. Dictators have always played fast with the truth, promised easy solutions to complex woes, and caused untold suffering. Today's propagandists and dictatorships the world over, from North Korea to Russia to today's alt-right movements have merely co-opted an old playbook used repeatedly throughout history to shape the geopolitical landscape (and their peoples' perception of it) in order to stay in power. Us versus them attitudes and accompanying forms of toxic nationalism and militarism have been evoked repeatedly in the name of vanquishing age-old problems undergirding society that established institutions couldn't and achieving that unachievable, perfect utopia. The Internet undoubtedly magnifies the reach of fake news bots, trolls, and dictators that lead the charge against institutions at all levels of government, allowing the world's Trumps and Putins to reach more people and ultimately end up better following and reinforcing this well-worn script. Therefore, it seems a bit unfair to lay Trumpism and other similar philosophies solely at the feet of postmodernist thought when a bevy of other factors contribute to today's social, economic, political, and cultural woes.
In the end, Kakutani's The Death of Truth comes across as erudite (reflecting her well-read background), yet flawed. It is okay to feel contempt and outrage for what the Trumps of the world are doing, but to rage on about the injustices committed against the people and democratic institutions without offering an antidote merely serves to fuel the very cynicism and apathy that we all need to conquer in order to fight back on behalf of democracy. We need to do better.
Works Cited:
Kakutani, Michiko. (2018). The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump. New York: Tim Duggan Books.
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