Post Trump, Post Truth January 10, 2021 But first . . . You simply must watch this. It will uplift, make clear, and reassure. Three cheers for Arnold Schwarzenegger. Also . . . The “West Wing Reunion” on HBO Max reminds us what America should be. It’s interrupted not by commercials for auto insurance but by exhortations to vote.* Given the level of talent involved — Michelle Obama, Rob Lowe, Lin Manuel Miranda, Allison Janney, Aaron Sorkin, Bradley Whitford, and more — the exhortations are both entertaining and compelling. It was staged as a benefit for When We All Vote. (If you don’t have time to watch, or HBO Max, this story will give you the gist.) If there’s a young child or grandchild in your life, buy her or him one of these Future Voter t-shirts! And now . . . Timothy Snyder in the indispensable New York Times on “The American Abyss“: . . . Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president. . . . Like historical fascist leaders, Trump has presented himself as the single source of truth. His use of the term “fake news” echoed the Nazi smear Lügenpresse (“lying press”); like the Nazis, he referred to reporters as “enemies of the people.” Like Adolf Hitler, he came to power at a moment when the conventional press had taken a beating; the financial crisis of 2008 did to American newspapers what the Great Depression did to German ones. The Nazis thought that they could use radio to replace the old pluralism of the newspaper; Trump tried to do the same with Twitter. Thanks to technological capacity and personal talent, Donald Trump lied at a pace perhaps unmatched by any other leader in history. For the most part these were small lies, and their main effect was cumulative. To believe in all of them was to accept the authority of a single man, because to believe in all of them was to disbelieve everything else. Once such personal authority was established, the president could treat everyone else as the liars; he even had the power to turn someone from a trusted adviser into a dishonest scoundrel with a single tweet. Yet so long as he was unable to enforce some truly big lie, some fantasy that created an alternative reality where people could live and die, his pre-fascism fell short of the thing itself. Some of his lies were, admittedly, medium-size: that he was a successful businessman; that Russia did not support him in 2016; that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Such medium-size lies were the standard fare of aspiring authoritarians in the 21st century. In Poland the right-wing party built a martyrdom cult around assigning blame to political rivals for an airplane crash that killed the nation’s president. Hungary’s Viktor Orban blames a vanishingly small number of Muslim refugees for his country’s problems. But such claims were not quite big lies; they stretched but did not rend what Hannah Arendt called “the fabric of factuality.” One historical big lie discussed by Arendt is Joseph Stalin’s explanation of starvation in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-33. The state had collectivized agriculture, then applied a series of punitive measures to Ukraine that ensured millions would die. Yet the official line was that the starving were provocateurs, agents of Western powers who hated socialism so much they were killing themselves. A still grander fiction, in Arendt’s account, is Hitlerian anti-Semitism: the claims that Jews ran the world, Jews were responsible for ideas that poisoned German minds, Jews stabbed Germany in the back during the First World War. Intriguingly, Arendt thought big lies work only in lonely minds; their coherence substitutes for experience and companionship. In November 2020, reaching millions of lonely minds through social media, Trump told a lie that was dangerously ambitious: that he had won an election that in fact he had lost. This lie was big in every pertinent respect: not as big as “Jews run the world,” but big enough. The significance of the matter at hand was great: the right to rule the most powerful country in the world and the efficacy and trustworthiness of its succession procedures. The level of mendacity was profound. The claim was not only wrong, but it was also made in bad faith, amid unreliable sources. It challenged not just evidence but logic: Just how could (and why would) an election have been rigged against a Republican president but not against Republican senators and representatives? Trump had to speak, absurdly, of a “Rigged (for President) Election.” . . . The full essay — with photographs — is worth your time. Friday’s reference to abortion troubled some of you. I updated it with a footnote that I hope shows respect for those concerns. *”You ask a kid why they didn’t vote and they’ll tell you: they don’t care about politics. All politicians are the same, and they’re above it. So let’s run down a quick list. Do you hope to have a job one day? You care about politics. Do you have a student loan or credit card debt? You care about politics…”