George Santos betrayed our trust. His lies further fractured our fragile faith in democracy. While he was not the first flimflam man to bamboozle us, had his ruse gone undetected might he have been emboldened to tell lies more malignant to our besieged body politic? Lies can kill. Democracy is impossible without Truth.
Lies do not erase the past, only postpone a reckoning. Many were fooled by the government's agitprop that the U.S. was winning in Vietnam until reality intruded with the Pentagon Papers. Many acquiesced to neocon justifications for the U.S. invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein possessed "weapons of mass destruction" until a 2004 Senate report revealed that Bush administration intel was erroneous.
Eventually Americans accepted the painful Truth about Vietnam and Iraq but by the time of these revelations, the tragedies were in their final excruciating acts. In both cases initially Congress and press were complicit in these presidential Lies. (Uppercase used for emphasis; for a history of presidential deception see Eric Alterman's When Presidents Lie.)
Journalism is the first draft of history, but now there is no information commons that parses the past and present, no shared narratives imperative for democracy. Letters to the editor are circumscribed, contributing to our provincialism. Even Wikipedia, in 2016 regarded by The Atlantic as "the last bastion of shared reality," is disparaged as an "assault on history" in the December Harper's Magazine.
Now anyone with a blog can be a "journalist" not subject to fact-checking or ethics. The irony of this democratization of information is that perhaps we are less informed. This "infodemic" is a retraction from critical thought rendering us susceptible to Lies. As Yale historian Timothy Snyder observed, "As we lose people who produce facts, we are in danger of losing the very idea of truth. The death of truth brings about the death of democracy, since people can rule only when they have the facts they need to defend themselves from power."
We are inclined to confirmation bias, our tendency to prefer information that affirms our pre-existing beliefs. But learning, and thus democracy, demands our willingness to consider thinking contrary to our biases and to evaluate evidence based on methods innovated by ancient Greeks. These enduring evidentiary standards by which we learn truths. (Hemingway said writers need a "built-in, shockproof, shit detector," but perhaps more than ever should apply to all of us.) And those truths are being assaulted by Trump's acolytes, who recite his Litany of Lies. Recall the creed often ascribed to Nazi Joseph Goebbels: "Repeat the lie often enough and it becomes truth."
"Live not by lies."
- ALEXEI NAVALNY (1976-2024) -
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Authoritarians feed on Lies and fear. If news is an unrelieved screed of anxiety, dread and despair — a "tyranny of the now"— and we have scant historical knowledge and only parochial understanding of the present, there will be a duplicitous demagogue to enlighten us. Trump's bombast, "I alone can fix it," is not benign. For those acquainted with 1920s Germany, Trump's "I am your warrior, I am your retribution" is terrifyingly resonant. Would we have the courage to call out the emperor if he has no clothes?
To distract from the exhausting "breaking news" noise, we demand more entertainment, sensational distractions from a reality perceived as horrifying. We are "amusing ourselves to death." More bread and circuses will not salvage our democracy, presuming even that remains a common cause.
As news becomes vacuous, it is eviscerated of content that educates, devoid of historical context. Broadcast journalists become entertainers, personalities pandering to profits. Celebrities and football gladiators are venerated. Civic virtue doesn't play in Peoria but Santos sells. Thus the Fourth Estate, fundamental to democracy, devolves into another crass consumer commodity. As Ray Bradbury noted in Fahrenheit 451, "The mind drinks less and less." This "closing of the American mind" is a slow-growing metastasis taking generations. Compare the dense text of a front page of a 1930s Spokane Daily Chronicle (when only 30% of the city's population graduated from high school) with the text-lite front page of today's Spokesman-Review, when 90% of Spokane students have acquired a high school diploma.
If our news sources are tribally insular with a reckless disdain for Truth, history is a casualty. Scholars of history risk being marginalized as anachronistic if not expendable as colleges become appendages of the private sector prioritizing STEM careers over critically thinking citizens versed in history and humanities.
According to the American Historical Association, college history majors have precipitously declined and in 2020 constituted only 1.25% of graduates, the lowest since 1949 when statistics were first collected. In 2020, only 4% of college graduates majored in English, history, foreign language, literature or philosophy. According to the Modern Language Association, in 2020, 650 colleges terminated their foreign language programs.
With a scarcity of history majors, and most of them opting for professions other than teaching, secondary school history instruction will be relegated to the underqualified, obligated to teach diluted curricula and predisposed to self-censorship to avert inquisitors of the Right and Left.
Ignorance of history renders citizens pliable to fabrications of the past and Lies. Consider Ron DeSantis' claim in defense of Florida's new history curriculum that Black people acquired beneficial skills from slavery. Presumably DeSantis, like Trump, knows that his Lies are trumpery (which in Shakespeare denotes "nonsense"), but his Gone with the Wind narrative is red meat for his supplicants. As political animals, they understand that the path to authoritarian power is to incite the irrational. Truth is malleable. It worked for a time in Nazi Germany. Alas, we are not fated to remain ensnared like the Angel of History, captive to Lies that desecrate our Founding Fathers' sacred trust.
On the hustings, Lincoln asked an audience of farmers how many legs a dog has if you count the tail. "Five!" they hollered. Lincoln said the answer was four. "That you called a tail a leg does not make it a leg." ♦
John Hagney taught high school and college history for 45 years. He was a U.S. Presidential Scholar Distinguished Teacher. His oral history of Gorbachev's reforms was the first work on the subject and has been translated into six languages.
