Not too long ago, I saw a bumper sticker that read: “Facts Matter.” In this case, it only took me a couple of seconds to imagine the identity of the driver - young and liberal, the sort of person who posts on social media about how awful Donald Trump is pretty much every time he opens his mouth, someone who watches John Oliver and/or Samantha Bee clips. Someone not all that unlike me, that is. At the very least, someone who is on my “team,” politically speaking. (Politics has definitely become a team sport. And I think it will be a while before it stops being one. And we certainly can’t stop it from being one just by saying it shouldn’t be.) And putting that bumper sticker on her car (I instinctively imagine the driver as a woman, in her twenties or thirties) is her way of making a statement against Donald Trump and all he stands for.
But ten years ago - or, hell, even two or three - if I had seen that exact same bumper sticker, it would have conjured up a very different mental image. This driver would be a middle-aged man, conservative. Possibly an avid fan of Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity. Definitely someone who rails against “political correctness” and believes that young people these days, particularly on college campuses, are too sensitive and entitled. The sort of “facts” that he would believe in defending are things like “women are physically weaker than men” or “there are only two biological sexes.” Or maybe things like “black Americans commit more crimes on average than white Americans” - who knows. I’ll try to avoid the temptation to stereotype this guy too harshly. The point is: the statement this driver would be making by slapping that bumper on his car is a statement against the wishy-washy, moral relativist views of liberals.
Remember when that’s what they used to accuse us of being?
There’s been a shift over the past few years. Now it is largely the Trumpians who talk about truth being relative - remember “alternative facts?" - and the anti-Trump crowd who are the staunch defenders of facts and objectivity.
I’m interested in two main things here. First of all, how did this happen? I can’t pretend to have a definitive answer, but I do have a couple of theories that I’d like to explore. Second, and more importantly, who is right? And for this one, I do have my answer, but it’s kind of an uncomfortable one for me. Because in this case, I’m pretty sure it’s Donald Trump.
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I consider that there are basically two ways of understanding the world. This is an oversimplification, of course (just as it always is when someone says there are only two of anything) - but I find it to be a useful framework. There are lots of different ways to refer to them, but I am going to use the terms modern and postmodern. The modern paradigm basically posits that we pretty much perceive the world the way it really is, that truth and meaning are objective and can be arrived at through rationality, that tools like science and logic allow us to reach certainty about things. Enlightenment thinking, basically. The postmodern paradigm, in contrast, sees truth and meaning as relative because pretty much everything is a matter of interpretation. Nietzsche and Heidegger and Sartre - and pretty much every annoying hippie stoner you knew in college. Full disclosure: my sympathies lie with the postmodern worldview.
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| Taken from one of those pamphlets your Christian neighbors will be giving out on Halloween |
These two worldviews are not inherently tied to politics. I think they are more fundamental than politics. Certainly, there are historical examples of movements that were politically liberal but modern in their worldviews - the progressives of the early twentieth century, for instance, who believed they could use scientific principles to create efficient systems like assembly lines. However, in recent years, I think we have become accustomed to associating modernist thinking with conservative politics and postmodernist thinking with liberal politics. I mean, consider the line, “If you aren’t liberal when you’re twenty, you have no heart; if you’re not conservative when you’re forty, you have no brain.” Conservatives are supposed to be the thinkers; liberals the bleeding-heart feelers. And what is assumed to go along with your bleeding heart? A mind so open that your brain falls out. Tolerance and diversity taken to ridiculous, contradictory extremes.
Or flip it around - what was the usual way that liberals would criticize conservatives in the pre-Trump era? Cold, unfeeling, heartless. Acting in rational self-interest, perhaps, but unable or maybe unwilling to care about the marginalized and the downtrodden. Ebenezer Scrooge or, his green counterpart, the Grinch.
There are absolutely still elements of this stuff around, of course. The old stereotypes still linger in our culture like ghosts. Any criticism of Paul Ryan, for instance, is pretty much indistinguishable from how someone would have criticized conservatives ten years ago. And a lot of the vilification and mockery of “social justice warriors” accuses them of valuing “feels over reals.”
But there has also been an important shift in the past couple of years corresponding with the rise of Trump. Trumpism has become its own thing, a sort of postmodern conservatism. (And yeah, you could say that Trump isn’t a real conservative. But first of all, that’s pretty much just a “no true Scotsman” argument, where the goal posts for who counts as a conservative are constantly moved to wherever the speaker wants them to be. But more importantly, the plans of Trump and those around him include such things as: lowering taxes, especially on the wealthy; reducing the size and scope of government agencies; cutting funding to social programs; being tough on immigration and drugs; reducing access to abortion and birth control; and rolling back LGBT rights. If that’s not conservative bread-and-butter [conservative biscuits-and-gravy], then what is? In fact, I think what a lot of people are really picking up on when they say “Trump’s not a conservative” is the same postmodern tendency that I am trying to discuss here.)
In what way is Trumpism postmodern? Well, he and his surrogates certainly seem to believe that truth and meaning are relative rather than absolute. Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts" line is the pièce de résistance of this whole thing, but the administration’s whole approach is based on the notion that truth doesn’t really matter - or exist. They say whatever they want to in order to advance their agenda. And it is working. While they are not abiding by any of the established “rules”, they are definitely succeeding in the task of persuading people. The election itself is the best proof of that. But even after that - nearly half of those who voted for him still believe he won the popular vote, and an even larger group believes
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| The liberal version would be "kale and quinoa" |
And being fact-checked does not bother Trump or those who speak for him. They believe that bias - whether it belongs to an individual or an organization - negatively impacts the ability to be objective about anything. Therefore, they can discredit anything that comes from the “liberal media.” Trump has also recognized that one’s personal background can be an influence upon one’s judgment - as when he claimed that a Mexican-American judge could not be impartial in a case involving him. (Of course, a true postmodernist would also recognize that a white judge could not be objective, either, because he too would have past experiences that colored his judgment. But more on the half-hearted nature of Trumpian postmodernism later.)
And they have plainly recognized that words do not have fixed meanings: they took “fake news” and turned it from meaning a deliberately deceptive news story to meaning, basically, anything they don’t like. (As demonstrated in this Samantha Bee clip which, incidentally, is what got me thinking about all this in the first place, although I think it suggests the wrong conclusion.) And again - they’ve been successful at this. Now no one ever even says “fake news” unless they’re trying to imitate Trump, whether sincerely or mockingly. The meaning of the term has been transformed.
The examples could go on and on. Nietzsche, perhaps the most important postmodern thinker of all time (in my book, he definitely is, and I think you could make the case that the past one hundred and fifty years of Western thought has pretty much been just “footnotes to Nietzsche” the way it used to be to Plato) - he made a distinction between master morality and slave morality. Trumpists divide the world into “alphas” - who take what they want - and “cucks,” who are content to let other men have it. Nietzsche also said that human existence life was about “will to power.” I mean, let’s just pause for a second. Who would be more likely to use a phrase like that: Donald Trump or motherfucking Tim Kaine? Right, exactly.
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So now for the first important question: how did we get here? Let’s not give Donald Trump too much credit - he did not create any of this himself, as an individual. Nor was it whatever shadowy figure we are currently assuming is “really” pulling the strings on the puppet-king (it used to be Steve Bannon; I’ve got to wonder who we’re going to blame now.) No - as many smart people (and me) have said before, it was the cultural atmosphere that created Trump, not the other way around.
My first theory is that the alliance of postmodernism and conservatism began as a sort of sarcasm which gradually transformed into sincerity. I mean, the other side has always kind of done this weird thing where they pretend to believe in what we believe in - in order to make us realize how absurd it is, I guess. Or just to demonstrate to each other that they understand how absurd it is. They will say things like “my gender identity is refrigerator!!!!” or “now that marriage is all about love, I’m going to marry BACON!!!!” The point being that the supposedly open-minded postmodernist liberal has to accept even these ridiculous examples because they postmodern thinking allows for them.
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| Who would EVER choose rocky road over MCC???? |
Reductio ad absurdum is a legitimate rhetorical technique, of course. But I have always found it strange how gung-ho they are about it. It’s almost like they are obsessed with postmodernism - in the same way that social conservatives like Rick Santorum sometimes come across as obsessed with homosexuality, seem to spend more time thinking about the gory details of gay sex than even gay people do. Postmodern ideas clearly interest them, even if they don’t subscribe to them.
I suppose it’s kind of like this. You spend your childhood and adolescence in a community that is wholly devoted to Christianity - you believe in God, you read the Bible, you pray every night. You know that you can’t do anything that goes against God’s commandments because it means that you will be sent to Hell. You sort of implicitly assume that everyone is either a good Christian like you or else a godless, murdering, raping piece of shit. But then, one day, you meet an atheist. And this atheist seems to be a fairly average person - not a fantastic one, necessarily, he’s not friggen Mr. Rogers or anything, but certainly someone who doesn’t kill or rape or intentionally deceive people.
Maybe that’s when you start to obsess about the idea of atheism. You’ve just been exposed to it for the first time, so now it interests you. It doesn’t matter whether this interest is positive or negative, just that it exists. You start to say things like, “How can an atheist be a moral person? If you don’t believe in God, where’s your morality come from?” Or maybe it’s, “I don’t trust atheists. Even when they seem nice, you still have got to remember there’s nothing stopping them from snapping and killing you.” Of course, this is a rather superficial and misguided understanding of atheism, but that’s not surprising since this person has just been exposed to it for the first time. So too for postmodernism. Those edgy “I identify as an attack helicopter” statements are the same sort of thing - an attempt to show the absurdity of a worldview that you have only just been introduced to.
But then suppose this hypothetical person does somehow come around, after a while, and realize there is no God. (By the way, this isn’t just an analogy. I do see postmodernism and atheism as fundamentally linked. I’m not sure how you can really be one without the other. Which is one of the reasons why I suspect that Donald Trump’s postmodernism might be pretend. Or else his Christianity is bullshit. Or maybe both. Probably both.) Then, you realize the truth of Dostoevsky’s famous line: “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” You can do anything! You can rape or murder or even be gay!
When this is a new revelation for you, you’re bound to dwell on it for a little while. It’s just like before, except that this time it is personally relevant. Maybe you pull a Raskolnikov and actually murder a little old lady whose only crime was being a shrewd businesswoman - just because you can. Or you don’t do anything but you sure do think about it a lot.
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| Yeah, he's a little smug, but he is right on this. |
And the same is true of all tenets of postmodernism. (The big difference is that I don’t think there’s any such thing as a lifelong postmodernist. We are all exposed to both modern and postmodern ways of thinking in our culture and I think we all adopt both stances to some degree at one point or another.) When you’re first exposed to them, they may seem shocking and revolutionary. There’s no such thing as objective truth! All meaning is subjective! Everyone interprets the world in a unique way based on their background and experiences! Holy shit. And so that’s the first theory - that Trump and anyone who supports him are people to whom postmodern ideas are new and so they are still sort of playing around with them. Partially in jest, partially in earnest. Somewhere between the guy who’s just met an atheist and the convert. Baby’s first postmodernism.
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The second theory is that, because we live in a culture that contains a mix of both modern and postmodern ideas, Trumpists have been familiar with postmodernism for a long time - perhaps their entire lives - but only in a very superficial way. (In a way, I sort of think this is true of all of us to some degree. We tend to operate on a day-to-day basis as though words do have fixed, standard meanings - we rely on tools like dictionaries to tell us what they mean; we believe in the authority of science; we listen to people like Neil deGrasse Tyson, arguably America’s foremost modernist thinker; we tend to trust our own senses most of the time. But we are also undeniably influenced by postmodernism as well, especially when it comes to ethics and morality. So we are all a weird mélange of the two, which is especially interesting because they’re pretty much incompatible ideologies.)
I mean, let’s think about it for a second. What are the chances that Donald Trump has ever spent a long, quiet night in reading Derrida or Foucault - or hell, even taken five minutes to skim their Wikipedia pages? Reading comprehension abilities aside (and I would pay a lot of money to watch the sitting President of the United States take one of the reading tests that the eighth graders at my school are required to take and see the results) - he’s not really known as the most thoughtful person in the world. He’s not even the most thoughtful person in his family. (Still holding out hopes for Tiffany to prove she’s decent, to be the Ron Reagan, Jr. of her family.) So his understanding of these things is probably not very deep or nuanced. Nor does there seem to be anyone around him who does understand and appreciate the significance of a postmodern approach to truth, meaning, and morality, and is influencing him.
So a Trumpist who has heard “the meaning of words is subjective” may misunderstand this to mean something more like “the meaning of every word is completely arbitrary.” Which is not the point at all. Just as no one is legitimately claiming that “refrigerator” counts as a legitimate gender identity - no one worth taking seriously, anyway - no one is really saying that the word “tree” means the same thing as the word “cow” just because one asshole uses one instead of the other. It’s a more complicated point than that. Sure, the sound “tree” could, over time, come to signify “four legged farm animal with spots that produces milk” - but only if there were an actual speech community that used the word like that, and that would probably only happen over a long period of time.
(Remember the book Frindle from elementary school? About the kid who wanted to prove a point to his teacher so he got everyone to use the word “frindle” instead of “pen” and she fought against him every step of the way, but then finally conceded that he had won when the word “frindle” appeared in a dictionary. Man, talk about something that blends the modern and the postmodern. Frindle acknowledges that language evolves through usage over time, but still weirdly holds up the dictionary as the arbiter of “real” meaning. Or at least that uptight, stick-in-the-mud fifth grade teacher does.)
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| Holy shit. |
More importantly, there is nothing about any postmodern principle that suggests an obligation to act in a particular way. They are descriptions of the way the world seems to work, not prescriptions. An is that does not entail any ought. But the superficial, misguided Trumpian interpretation is something like: meaning is subjective, therefore we should change the meaning of words whenever we feel like it. Or: objective facts do not exist, therefore let’s lie as much as we possibly can. Indeed, it is really not so much an interpretation of postmodernism as it is an application of postmodernism. Which means it doesn’t matter whether they actually believe in this shit or not, and makes it seem likely again that they probably don’t.
So that's the third theory - that they aren't postmodernists at all, just opportunists who happen to be using postmodernism to gain and retain power.
It’s just like when people took Darwin’s theory of natural selection and distorted it into Social Darwinism. The mere fact that weaker members of a species tend to die before they can procreate does not compel you to kill off the members of your species that you perceive as “lesser.” Nor does that fact forbid you from trying to save humans or animals who might die without assistance. Descriptions of the world are neutral; they don’t tell you anything about what you should or shouldn’t do. And - in both cases - I think there’s a pretty good chance that they would have done it anyway and found a different rationale. So if we don’t blame Darwin for eugenics, let’s not blame postmodernism for Trump, either.
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What we need to be careful about, though, is the way that we respond to Trump. As I mentioned at the beginning, I think there is a movement among liberals to pivot back to modernism because postmodernism smells too Trumpy. It’s present in that “facts matter” bumper sticker. It’s also present in that Samantha Bee clip that talks about the way Trump and Conway use words. And that's what I am afraid of here. We’ve got to be better than that. Because falling back on modern understandings of truth and meaning is ultimately going to be untenable, unless we’re going to go all the way back to pre-Kantian times. Unless we're going to declare our belief in something that, as far as I am concerned, is tantamount to God.
The first step has got to be recognizing that none of this is anything new.
“Post-truth” was named the 2016 Word of the Year by Oxford Dictionary. And there have been news stories written all throughout the past two years echoing the same point. “We are now living in a post-truth era.” But that’s bullshit. Not because there is still objective truth out there. But because there never was.
Let’s go back to that Mexican judge who Trump claimed was biased because of his ethnicity. Well, he was technically right about that. But he was wrong in his implication that a white judge would have been unbiased. Any human being you put on that bench would have had previous experiences, thoughts, and emotions that would impact the way that he or she ruled on that case - that’s just part of being a human being. And the challenge of being a human being is recognizing that we have those biases and will never completely transcend them, that we will never be objective, but trying to be as fair as we can anyway.
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| Cute. |
TL;DR (Since these things keep getting longer and longer):
Postmodernism: “There is always going to be uncertainty in meaning.”
Postmodern Conservatism / Trumpism: “There is always going to be uncertainty in meaning. Therefore, let’s make our meanings as unclear as possible.”
Modernist liberalism: “Certainty in meaning is possible.”
Postmodern anti-Trump liberalism: “There is always going to be uncertainty in meaning. Therefore, let us use our understanding of that to try to improve our communication.”
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