Necessary Academia #3: Debatable truths and self-evident lies

One thing I’ve thought a lot about since watching Trump’s speech at the RNC last week is, what is our duty in interrogating Trump’s words for truth? Not necessarily as Democrats or liberals, not as political activists, but as human beings concerned about the future of American values, and the structure of our society interpersonally and institutionally. Then there’s the question of the value in attending to Trump’s antics in any capacity: Ignoring him is to resign from protecting the most basic tenets of social justice and morality, but obsessing over each racist tweet adds fodder for whatever political reality television network he spins-off from Fox News when he leaves office. On Thursday, I felt an overwhelming anxiety watching him deliver his speech to a crowd of nearly two thousand unmasked, tightly packed Americans on the South Lawn of the house we-the people-pay to keep up and running. There is a danger in the rhetoric that underwrites “not my president”. Donald J. Trump is, unequivocally, the president of the United States of America, and yet he makes clear his leadership responsibility is owed only to those that voted for him. His citizens are his voters, his opposition is anti-American. 

Intrinsic to that distinction is Donald Trump’s intent on redefining for himself what it means to be American. I subscribe whole-heartedly to the belief that this novel strain of racism, xenophobia, sexism and propagandized populism is one in which Trump is a super-spreader, but not a creator. However, on Thursday night Donald Trump cemented his intent to holistically rewrite the last four years and redesign American principles and values in his image. 

Political partisanship aside, we stand at a crossroads of interrogating Trump’s version of the truth or allowing a compulsive liar to rewrite our history and dictate our future: we must listen, collect the poison and boil it down to reveal its thinly-encased fallacies. With that, I have embarked on unpacking pieces of Trump’s 2020 RNC speech that I believe to be particularly misleading and/or egregiously antithetical to commonly understood American values. The following is a direct quotation from Trump’s speech. 

“We will rekindle new faith in our values, new pride in our history and a new spirit of unity that can only be realized through love for our great country.”

One must be exceedingly delicate in any comparison of Trump, or any political figure to the most destructive demagogues and fascists of the last century and a half. Comparisons of genocides, ethnic cleansings and mass killings are ill-advised and ineffective, nor do I intend on predicting from my couch if/when the next scourge of eugenics-driven totalitarianism may take hold. I want to be clear about an element of the American story that finds itself opaque in our public schools: at every stage of the American story, from its foundation to its constitution to the legislation and amendments that followed, the kidnapping and enslavement of Africans was met with blatant and inconspicuously lucid criticism and dissent for its political hypocrisy, moral depravity and pervasive injustice. This dissent was met with...Virginia.

I am kidding, of course (to an extent) but that is to say that the tired narrative of a country that had not matured in its morals to the modern stage of comprehending basic human rights is as odious as it is ignorant. The only argument to be had in this regard is whether the enslavement itself was more damaging to American society than the propaganda that went into justifying it, and the normalization of corporate/landowning elites segregating the working class and convincing them that their interests stand in opposition. 

Circling back, even upon circumventing our all-encompassing responsibility for the atrocity and institution of slavery, we’ve yet to touch on the forced relocation and mass killing of Indigenous Peoples, a century’s worth of bigotry-driven policies toward Asian immigrants, Japanese internment, and senators rounding up suspected communists in the ‘50s, just to name a few. Unless we wholeheartedly and structurally address these willful institutional failures and the deliberation, the twisted mindfulness of the legislative bodies that made them possible, the idea of “[taking] pride in our history” via a method only possible “through love of our great country” is deeply unsettling and downright confusing. 

Be wary of any politician that tells you there is only one way to express and embody patriotism. Furthermore, if we are to get on board with the right’s reinvigorated love affair with our founding white men, let us not forget that their form of patriotism as the first Americans encompassed organized dissidence, glorified instances of looting and violent protest that culminated in waging a war against what they believed to be an unjustly oppressive system, in hope of building a stronger one. Finally, there is a tangible reality for America that involves the realization of a future we can take pride in, a future in which we recenter ourselves on the common good and focus obsessively on creating something that resembles equal opportunity, freedom and protection of liberty for the diverse members of our society. The path to this future cannot be paved in denial, exceptionalism and American egotism, but rather in humility and a willingness for macro-vulnerability. We must ask ourselves what is more important, protecting our image, or protecting our people?

At risk of repeating an argument that has no doubt found redundancy in the media, as I continue reading over the transcript of Trump’s speech, I find myself sincerely disturbed by a willingness to present to the American people a level of untruth so obscenely disjointed so as to be somehow self-preserving. At one point, Trump mentions “instead of following the science, Joe Biden wants to inflict a painful shutdown on the entire country”. Trump is referencing a comment Biden made in which he explains with little room for misinterpretation: “I would shut [the country] down. I would listen to the scientists”. Biden had been asked what he would do if a shutdown was recommended by scientists as a reaction to a second wave of COVID-19 in tandem with the flu. Trump, inexplicably, follows the previous comment with, “My administration has a very different approach. To save as many lives as possible, we are focusing on the science, the facts and the data...we want to see so many of those great states be opened by Democrats. We want them to be open.” 

It is a problem in and of itself to have a sitting president openly construct his own version of facts. It is a more serious problem to have a president deny the validity of empirically gathered, peer-reviewed, replicated research on anything from economic policy to climate change. I find it unprecedented for the leader of a nation founded on a commitment to self-evident truths to stand before nearly two-thousand Americans, in the middle of a global pandemic of an infectious disease that has taken at least 180,000 American lives so far, and denounce his opponent’s choice to explicitly follow scientific recommendations. Trump’s alternative, predictably, is to follow his own science to a different end, a rushed economic reopening that would preserve his best political talking point. 

As sincerely as I believe many on the right are in their search for the founding patriarchs’ posthumous approval of their interpretation of our institutional documents, Trump’s speech left a dearth of anything resembling a self-evident truth. The Declaration reads, “when a long train of abuses and usurpations...evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” This is the underpinning of the American experiment and this is our current project. It is not only in our best interest to fight for the truth, it is our duty and it is the ultimate patriotic action.

We can enter the room together, coming from polarized stations, our mental pods, and unload our armor of pride with the common goal of unpacking the words of our founding patriarchs. We can enter in discord and find motion toward harmony only if we enforce an unforgiving, rigid doctrine of accountability from our representative leaders. 

There must be a distinction between spinning the truth and conjuring up your own from the dust of deficits and failures. America is not eternal, America is immature, inexperienced and malleable. Can we agree that, of the most literally self-evident truths in the Declaration is our duty to protect liberty from a corrupt and self-interested political force at all costs? We may be prone as humans to accept that suffering, but it is our prerogative and our self-actualizing purpose as citizens of an experimental government system to work to fulfill the vision of a progressively just and equitable society. 

America was not built on self-evident truths-America was conceived in a painstaking search for them. We must keep searching. It is our duty as Americans to guard future security for those who have not been protected by privilege throughout our past.