Who knows exactly when the “truth wars” started, but we can be sure that they have reached a crescendo. In a recent essay, historian Timothy Snyder argued that truth is under attack in America. If it succumbs, he argues, fascism will follow because, without truth to adjudicate disputes, only force remains. Never mind that actually existing fascism was a theory of political truth, and that dictators such as Mussolini and Hitler saw themselves as foes of liberal relativism. Snyder has a point. Americans are engaged in a protracted conflict to determine what they should collectively hold as true, and they are failing in the quest.
Last month, we saw how the Trump experiment came to an end. The illusion that the election had been stolen and that armies of patriots would rise to rectify the injustice was tested in the storming of the Capitol. It collapsed like a thunderclap. Many who had embraced Trump’s web of fictions suddenly abandoned ship. It helped that the fantasy was so extreme it could never have survived the test of reality.
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