Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn’t mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar. -Edward R. Murrow (1908 – 1965) American broadcast journalist
lie: A lie is a statement made by one who does not believe it with the intention that someone else shall be led to believe it. – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Humans have all lied; it is part of our nature. Therefore we can, without causing controversy, say that all U.S. Presidents have lied at one time or another, with or without malevolent intent. Donald Trump has gained notoriety for the number and audacity of his many lies, though according to The Washington Post, our President’s so-called lies are not lies but “false statements”. And WaPo has a point. There are many English words that variously shade what we commonly call a “lie”, and Roget’s Thesaurus devotes half a page to the word untruth. An important factor is the intent of the person delivering the words. After so many years of analyzing Donald Trump’s record and his seeming disregard for whether something he says or writes is true or false, it is probably fair to say that he meets the standard for what professor Harry Frankfurt of Princeton University calls a “bullshitter”. You can read all about the subject in his fascinating analysis titled, On Bullshit. According to Frankfurt, a bullshitter is a person who has no concern for whether or not what he is saying is true or false; you know, like the guy who sits at the end of the neighborhood bar. So Trump bullshits; he does not lie. But is it intentional, his behavior, or is it simply part of his psychological make-up? Can he turn on and off as needs be what appears to some to be
pathological?
By now you must be wondering: What does any of this have to do with authoritarianism? Well, what is true and what is false has much to do with authoritarianism, and Donald Trump is aiding and abetting our country’s drift towards it, even if you do not think his actions are intentional.
Authoritarianism is, according to one definition, “a political system characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in democracy, separation of powers, civil liberties, and the rule of law. Political scientists have created typologies describing variations of authoritarian forms of government. Authoritarian regimes may be either autocratic or oligarchic and may be based upon the rule of a party or the military. States that have a blurred boundary between democracy and authoritarianism have sometimes been characterized as “hybrid democracies”, “hybrid regimes” or “competitive authoritarian” states.
An authoritarian system works well with a compliant populace. Philosopher Hannah Arendt, in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, wrote, “the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction…and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.” And we get there by having people in power using bullshit to blur those distinctions until enough people can no longer trust what they hear or read. In other words, the more confused everyone is about what is going on, what is real and what is not real, the easier it is to maintain power and authority. Think of it as pollution of or poisoning of the body politic of democracy.
This confusion can be disorienting. Noted historian Heather Cox Richardson recently wrote in her daily “Letters from an American” series, “it is starting to seem like the best way to interpret social media posts from President Donald Trump is through the lens of professional wrestling.” It was always fake, a kabuki theater for the American masses, employing a term called “kayfabe”, the shared agreement between audience and actors that what was pretend would be accepted as real. Then came “neokayfabe”, in which producers and consumers tended to lose the ability to distinguish between what’s real and what isn’t.” Then there is the unreality of “gaslighting”, a type of psychological abuse that involves manipulating someone into questioning their own reality, perceptions, or
memories. Neokayfabe and gaslighting echo of totalitarianism, a world in which the distinction between fact and fiction and true and false no longer exist for its inhabitants.
We may have elected to the Presidency a person who does not find it necessary to distinguish between lies and truth, who has no concern about whether what he says is true or false, and who may be a victim of his own neokayfabe theater, a situation exacerbated by a compliant if not disoriented constituency. With apologies to Rod Serling, we may have entered a dimension little known to man; a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as
infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of delusion, an area which we might call “The Trump Zone”.
References for further reading:
Lying In State . Eric Alterman (2020)
Letters from an American. Heather Cox Richardson December 26, 2024
On Bullshit. Henry Frankfurt January 30, 2005
On the Origins of Authoritarianism. Hannah Arendt (1951)
On Tyranny Democratic Town Committee website commentary
Richard Waterman