SIPA USA/PA Images. All rights reserved.Amongst the many questions to have crossed everyone’s minds recently, one of them is no doubt: ‘how did we get here?’ We have seen pundits and analysts and politicians talk about those left behind by globalisation, about the failure of liberalism and neoliberalism, about the depths of misogyny and racism in the American psyche, about systematic gerrymandering, about disenfranchisement, anti-elitist sentiment, popular frustration, the working man’s forgotten burden. There are varying amounts of insight to be found in all of these explanations, each contributing to the multifaceted and irreducibly complex analysis that will inevitably be needed so that we on the left can effectively respond to the rise of a newly invigorated far-right. Nonetheless, something, always, remains missing.
With Donald Trump’s inauguration, at the beginning of fascism in the White House, I want to look at one factor that has brought us here: the specifically American style of truthfulness. The mammoth task of understanding how Trump has risen to power cannot be reduced to a single factor, but I hope to add my own insight by pointing to the relationship between history and norms of truth. I hope to open a space for critique by destabilising previously given norms that have thus far been perceived as unproblematic, eternal, self-evident, given, transcendental, pre-discursive assumptions that structure the very possibility of debate – not as the social-historical constructs they really are, built atop disqualified knowledge, unknown struggle, and delegitimised suffering, norms as fragile as Trump’s small-handed masculinity.
Before examining the concrete historical events that have constituted the American style of truthfulness, we need to talk about two understandings of truth and their respective relationships to the political realm. Cambridge philosopher and Nietzsche expert Bernard Williams distinguishes between truth and truthfulness, a distinction I think broadly helpful for my purposes here. Briefly, truth denotes a correspondence between the contents of the world – the facts of the matter, how things really are – and our representations of them; truth is born of a relationship between the world and our ideas about it. This, to my mind, is relatively uninteresting, minimalistic. Truthfulness, on the other hand, relates to the various cultural practices associated with the value of truth – the methods by which we uncover it, why truth is better than falsity, the uses that it can be put to, which truths are self-evident and which require justification.
