Still from “1984” (1984)
Monday
I suspect we will see an increasing number of allusions to George Orwell’s 1984 as Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency unfolds. Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine uses the 1948 novel to figure out what differentiates Trump from other politicians.
Chait mentions Trump’s “promiscuous” lying and his authoritarian tendencies but acknowledges that mendacity and authoritarianism aren’t unique to Trump. The presumptive Republican nominee stands out, however, in the way that he combines the two and then takes them to levels we haven’t seen before:
Trump’s many critics have seized upon both traits as his two major disqualifications for the presidency, yet both of them frustratingly defy easy quantification. All politicians lie some, and many of them lie a lot, and most presidents also push the limits of their authority in ways that can frighten their opponents. So what is so uniquely dangerous about Trump? Perhaps the answer is that both of these qualities are, in a sense, the same thing. His contempt for objective truth is the rejection of democratic accountability, an implicit demand that his supporters place undying faith in him. Because the only measure of truth he accepts is what he claims at any given moment, the power his supporters vest in him is unlimited.
Chait points out that if Trump’s supporters grant him special dispensation to define truth however he desires, then the normal political laws no longer apply:
The normal rules of political lying hold that when the lie has been exposed, or certainly when it has been confessed, the jig is up. You have to stop lying about it and tell the truth, or at least retreat to a different lie. Trump bends the rules of the universe to his own will, at no apparent cost. His brazenness is another utterly unique characteristic. His confidence that he can make the truth whatever he wishes at any moment, and toggle back and forth between incompatible realities at will, without any cost to himself, is a display of dominance. Possibly Trump’s most important statement of the campaign was his idle boast that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue without losing any votes.
Orwell’s novel, Chait observes, captures the relationship between dictatorial authority and “the power to manipulate any fact into a binary but permeable scheme”:
The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford were guilty of the crimes they were charged with. He had never seen the photograph that disproved their guilt. It had never existed, he had invented it. He remembered remembering contrary things, but those were false memories, products of self-deception.
Chait concludes that, while “truth and reason are weapons of the powerless against the powerless,” Trump has found ways to neutralize these weapons:
There is no external doctrine he can be measured against, not even conservative dogma, which he embraces or discards at will and with no recognition of having done so. Trump’s version of truth is multiple truths, the only consistent element of which is Trump himself is always, by definition, correct. Trump’s mind is so difficult to grapple with because it is an authoritarian epistemology that lies outside the democratic norms that have shaped all of our collective experiences.
It is vital, therefore, that those whose professions call for high ideals and a commitment to truth–journalists, educators, religious leaders, judges, politicians, and public servants of all kinds–do their jobs. Donald Trump’s emergence is what we get when we fall short.
