The phenomenon of the breakdown of shared facts—and indeed shared reality—in the American polity calls to my mind Hannah Arendt’s writings on truth in politics. Arendt writes that factual truth is so dangerous to tyrants because it has a kind of coercive power that prevents them from obtaining a monopoly on power in a given community: the existence of a factual truth arises outside of the political realm and is not based on political consensus, thus generating an independent sphere of influence that the tyrant cannot erode. Responding to this “stubbornness” of truth, despots seek to transform what is a fact into a kind of opinion–and thereby to muddy the distinction between what actually happened and what ought to have happened. They can do this because facts are no more “self-evident” than competing opinions about them: there is no intrinsic logic that can explain them as if they were, say, a mathematical equation. This is where the tellers of lies possess an advantage over the tellers of truth: once the former group renders truth into merely an opinion, they can create an alternative set of opinions (“alternative facts,” if you will) that can appeal much more strongly to their desired political community than actual factual truth. 

I don’t think the Trump administration has read much Arendt, but it’s clear from the readings this week that they’re taking advantage of the media ecosystem that has become more fragmented than ever over the past couple of decades. As Hughes writes, the “idea of shared facts” has been dissolved, and “it is much harder to have anything like a single national conversation about an issue. We are having all of these separate conversations in separate formats on separate platforms, sometimes talking past each other, often not even hearing each other.” Losing a shared set of facts means that we are left with entirely separate and polarized conversations that do not feel particularly obliged to base their opinions on reality. Indeed, Hughes points out that there still is some level of reporting going on by mainstream outlets, but then an “army of podcasters and content creators and YouTubers and TikTok influencers” takes that news and tries to integrate it into the opinions that they have been empowered to disseminate. Although Hughes seems to imply that it is a good thing that reporting can get disseminated to the public by being “mediated through many other people distributing their insights,” it still means that someone can shop around for the set of facts to which they wish to be exposed, and dismissing facts disseminated on other platforms as mere opinion. 

Trump and his administration seem to have attenuated this dynamic. I was struck by the audacity of his actions against traditional news outlets—particularly his baseless lawsuit against 60 Minutes. Despite Helmore pointing out that he lacked “any serious evidence” of bias in the show, he still went ahead with the lawsuit: the lack of grounding for his case didn’t matter, because the opinion–and story–he could create to demonize the show could be more convincing to his base than reality itself. Perhaps in a court of law his lack of factual basis would be a liability, but he could take advantage of the fact that his fight was in the political realm–which, as Arendt points out, relies on common consensus into which the coercion of stubborn, factual truth intrudes–to exact the concessions he sought. In this case study, we see Arendt’s warning come through: “the result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.” It didn’t matter to Trump’s base whether or not his attacks were informed by evidence. Perhaps those attacks could create their own “evidence”: why would the president attack a news outlet unless he knew it was guilty? But perhaps they didn’t care one way or the other about Trump’s evidence: they just wanted the result he sought.