IF YOU WANT TO UNDERSTAND AMERICA UNDER TRUMP, THAT HANNAH ARENDT QUOTE WON'T HELP YOU

You've probably seen this quotation:

From The Origins of Totalitarian, essential reading in a post truth world.

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— hoverFrog (@hoverfrog.bsky.social) November 24, 2024 at 3:18 PM

Writing for Bard's Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, Roger Berkowitz notes that this is a fake quote. However, Arendt said something similar in her last public interview in 1973:

"The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please."

Either way, this observation is not useful if you want to understand what's happening in America now. Perhaps it described what's happened in other countries, but it doesn't describe what's happening here.

There's a story in The New York Times today about Oakdale, California, a city of approximately 20,000 citizens that's become a news desert. In the past,

Nightly news broadcasts played on living room televisions. Copies of local newspapers lined doorsteps on Sunday mornings. The town even had two media outlets dedicated to rodeo and horse roping news.

But that version of Oakdale is a thing of the past.

First the nearby newspapers shrank, and hundreds of local reporters in the region became handfuls. Then came the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020, and the pandemic; suddenly cable networks long deemed trustworthy were peddlers of fake news, on the right and the left.

Let's ignore the glib both-sides-do-it statement at the end of that passage. The Times story is describing a recognizable change in how Americans learn what's going on, or don't learn.

Eventually, in 2020, a rumor spread:

As local news outlets shrank throughout the Central Valley in the 2010s, Facebook groups dedicated to local events started popping up in their place. And for years, they were harmless. But that changed in 2020.

... as new members joined by the thousands, conspiracy theories and political debates overtook posts about school board meetings and local elections.

Then, the militia incident happened.

... It was a weekend morning in June, and the downtown farmers’ market had been replaced by a scene resembling a military operation.

Gunmen patrolled the sidewalks dressed head to toe in brown camouflage; store windows were boarded up; some of the men perched from the rooftops in tactical gear, brandishing rifles.

The militia was prepared to defend against an imminent threat: Black Lives Matter protesters, they believed, were plotting to invade the town and would be arriving on buses from the Bay Area at any moment.

They waited and waited. But the protesters never came.

The men were drawn to Oakdale by a false rumor spread in a Facebook group called All Things Oakdale, which over the years had become the town’s primary forum for local news.

People in the community tried to limit the spread of misinformation. But the effort backfired. The woman who started All Things Oakdale

made the Facebook group private and banned political discussions altogether. To help with fact-checking and moderation, she enlisted Kari Conversa, a pet care store owner, and Christopher Smith, an Oakdale City Council member and commercial plumbing distribution manager.

But the new focus on moderation had an unintended effect: Frustrated residents whose comments were removed began to create their own groups in protest, with names like Oakdale Incident Feed First Amendment Approved and Oakdale Incident Feed UNFILTERED. Soon enough, the spinoffs were becoming more popular than the original group.

Of course, right-wingers responded by creating their own groups and censoring those with accurate information that contradicted their priors.

Among the largest of these Facebook groups is Stanislaus News, which has 75,000 members and has become the go-to source of information for crime in the area....

The group was founded by Mark Davis, a former bail bonds salesman in the nearby city of Modesto who was himself banned from a different group dedicated to local news in 2019. Along with his wife, Mr. Davis spends hours a day monitoring local police and emergency services scanners, translating the radio codes into updates that are often posted hours ahead of local news reports.

The group has also become a repository for Mr. Davis’s personal musings about Mr. Trump and Elon Musk’s so called Department of Government Efficiency, to the frustration of many residents who just want to read about local happenings.

“THIS PAGE WAS NOT INTENDED FOR POLITICAL PURPOSES,” one commenter wrote on a recent post about Mr. Musk.

The group is closely aligned with the Modesto Police Department, which uses it to make daily posts of its own. “This is a PRO law enforcement group,” reads one of Mr. Davis’s rules. “If you are not, then this is not the group for you.”

Some residents say Mr. Davis’s rules have hurt their efforts to spread important news, like in December, when surveillance footage posted to the group of a fatal shooting at a convenience store appeared to contradict the sheriff’s report of how the altercation began. Members of the group began to post new details about the case — until Mr. Davis stepped in to ban them.

Blake Coronado, who runs a nonprofit that helps find missing people and relies on Facebook groups for engagement, was one of the members who posted. After visiting the crime scene in person to share his findings, Mr. Coronado said, comments on his post were disabled within minutes. A day later, he was banned.

“I was shocked, because to my knowledge we didn’t even break any rules,” he said in an interview. “If we’re not going to hold our police department accountable, how is that helping our community?”

Let's go back to the Hannah Arendt quote. In Oakdale, California, do you see people who don't believe "anything any longer"? Do you see people who are cynical about everything they're told?

I see right-wingers who fervently believe in the truth -- but the truth, to them, is whatever they're told by people they like. If Donald Trump says it, it's the truth. If Elon Musk says it, it's the truth. If the police say it, it's the truth. (Presumably, they make an exceptoion for the police who worked at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.)

I also see people on the other side who believe that truth exists, but their version of the truth is the actual truth. They think it's knowable and reportable, even if learning what's true and spreading the truth are becoming more and more difficult.

This is our national information environment in microcosm. The majority of us are looking for the truth; right-wingers are looking for their truths.

Right-wing leaders lie, but the lies don't leave their followers unable to make up their minds. The followers fervently believe what they're told by the people they trust, even if it contradicts what the people they trust told them in the past. Twenty or so years ago, right-wingers fervently believed in the Iraq War and saw George W. Bush as God's emissary on earth. Today, under the influence of the man they now believe is God's emissary on earth, Donald Trump, they fervently believe that the Iraq War was a scam sold to us by the enemy ("globalists"), and they believe Bush was so terrible he might as well have been a Democrat. It's not at all true that, on the right, "nobody believes anything any longer." They simply believe the opposite of what they believed a generation ago. But there is a belief that doesn't change: that their enemies are evil and their most-admired Republican heroes are bearers of absolute truth.

Since I first encountered this idea, I've been skeptical. As a rule, authoritarians inspire belief, not cynicism. Most authoritarians have more popular support -- and thus inspire more belief -- than Trump does. But conservatism in the Reagan/Gingrich/Limbaugh/Fox/Trump era has always been a country within a country -- and within that country, belief in right-wing "truth" is unwavering. To the rest of us, the constant lies are apparently meant to send a message: Not There is no truth but Yes, there's truth -- and good luck trying to get anyone to believe the truth with us around.