It’s said that we’re entitled to our own opinions, but not our own facts. Then again, maybe we are! Consider Donald Trump’s account of New Jersey Muslims cheering the fall of the World Trade Center; or Carly Fiorina’s graphic descriptions of non-existent details in an anti-abortion video; or Hillary Clinton’s ‘08 story of landing under fire in the Balkans.
And this practice has a long history. Thomas Jefferson stoutly denied libeling John Adams, even when confronted with evidence in his own handwriting. One critic said Theodore Roosevelt’s account of the Spanish-American War should be called Alone in Cuba, and his cousin Franklin claimed to have written Haiti’s constitution. John Kennedy campaigned on a non-existent “missile gap” favoring the Soviet Union. Both he and his opponent, Vice-President Richard Nixon, knew this was false, but Kennedy lied with impunity, knowing national security restrictions prevented Nixon from revealing the truth.
We’ve seen politicians stretch the truth, ignore the truth, deny the truth, make assertions “unencumbered by the thought process” as the Car Talk guys used to say – many times. What’s new is an apparently outright contempt for the truth: embracing supposed “facts” without reference to their validity because, if they support my view of the world, they’re obviously true. Yours are obviously false if they differ from mine. And this behavior has gone well beyond politics. It’s now a characteristic of our national culture rather than an exception to it.
The notion that we might learn from each other through honest discussion of our differences is disappearing, replaced by hyper-partisanship and demonization. Compromise is no longer agreement by mutual concession, but total surrender by the other side.
Underlying and reinforcing this, is a media and communications culture allowing us to hear or read only what we wish, to “unfriend” those who disagree, to craft and inhabit our own truth without subjecting it to any test of validity. This increasingly leads Americans to segregate themselves not by income or race but by political belief. We don’t wish to live with those who disagree with us politically. Apparently the greatest threat to our national security is each other.
How very sad; and from the point of view of the survival of our democratic republic, how very, very dangerous.
