Barack Obama believes that “there are no red states or blue states, just the United States,” and Sophia McClennen agrees with him, sort of. In a Saturday piece for Salon, the Penn State professor declared that since “the GOP attacks on the idea of the truth and on the concept of fact-checking are only going to get more absurd,” before long “we won’t code maps by blue and red states; we will code them by whether their voters favor facts or fantasy.”
According to McClennen, in roughly the year 2000 “it became increasingly possible to connect fact-aversion to the GOP. Partisanship was no longer driven by political differences on how to deal with reality; it was divided over what constituted reality itself.” She snarked that “the Republican brain” has an “allergic reaction” to truth and decried the hostility to fact-checking manifested by conservative writers such as Jonah Goldberg and Mark Hemingway.
“This new assault on fact-checking is simply the latest step in a long-term right-wing attack on the neutrality of the media,” McClennen charged. “This development, of course, is not surprising given the way that fact-checking has become a recognized form of political journalism.” Moreover, the co-author of Is Satire Saving Our Nation? Mockery and American Politics asserted that certain non-journalists have mad verification skills: “Some of the very best fact-checking comes from comedians. Political satirists like [Jon] Stewart and [Stephen] Colbert have dedicated their careers to functioning like watchdogs to politicians and the media.”
McClennen mused that “there seems little doubt” that “these new attacks on facts [are] a sign of the destruction of our democracy” and added, “When the party in power is closely tied to a systematic attack on truth the prospects for a healthy democracy are not encouraging.” The stakes, she indicated, are high (bolding added):
For [Hannah] Arendt the mark of totalitarianism was the pervasive nature of ideological thinking. Under that scheme the mind is simply closed to correcting information and it holds to an ideologically consistent view of the world -- one that is understood as true despite an absence of supporting evidence.
Many have wondered whether the election of Trump suggests that the United States has moved from a democracy to a totalitarian, possibly even fascist, regime, but it may well be that the Trump era attacks on truth exceed Arendt’s theories of totalitarianism and truth. In the Trump era, the battle isn’t over truth versus reality. The battle is over whether or not we as a nation agree that truth even matters at all.
