In 1987, a conservative philosophy professor named Allan Bloom published a surprise bestseller about American higher education, “The Closing of the American Mind.” The big problem at universities wasn't racism or sexism, Bloom argued, but relativism.
“There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative,” Bloom wrote.
You don't have to buy everything in Bloom's book — including his notorious dismissal of rock music — to see that he was on to something. My students are more reluctant than ever to make strong assertions about reality. Some students have even told me that they doubt such a thing exists. There's no singular reality — there's just “your reality,” and “my reality,” and everybody else's.
For years, I have warned them that one cannot have a democracy on that premise. If there is no fixed truth, the people with the most power will define it for us, and we will have no solid ground for contesting them.
Welcome to the United States under President Trump.
The problem is not just that Trump lies. It is that he has eroded the very idea of truth. It doesn't matter whether something is real or not — all that counts is whether it serves him. Remember Trump's story about Haitians eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio? Eventually, Trump and his minions admitted it was untrue. But they also said it was good and necessary, because it focused public attention on an issue that fired up their political base — undocumented immigration.
“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes,” explained JD Vance, before he was elected vice president. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do.”
So we don't care that the cats-and-dogs claim was false, or that it triggered bomb threats and school closures. We will “create stories” that empower us. And nobody will know — or care — if they are true or not.
A much bigger lie, of course, is that Trump won the 2020 election. You would think that would matter less, given that he won in 2024. But you would be wrong. If your only goal is power, you have to stamp out any fact that weakens you.
That's why one of Trump's first acts, upon regaining the presidency, was to pardon the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 to prevent his opponent's victory from being certified. Their convictions represented a standing assertion of a reality that lives outside of Trump. He cannot countenance that.
And once he has discarded actual reality, he can say — and do — anything. He can fire federal workers and slash agencies because they are “woke,” whatever that means. He can blame an aircraft disaster upon diversity, equity and inclusion or DEI practices without citing a single piece of evidence.
How many people actually believe what Trump says? That's the wrong question. He's not trying to persuade us with facts; he's trying to make us ignore facts. And once that happens, our democracy will end.
If that terrifies you — and I hope it does — there's only one thing you can do: Hold fast to the truth.
Do not hold to “your truth,” nor to anyone else's. Rather, hold to a truth the exists separately from whatever any of us say, or think, or desire.
And the only way to do that is to scrutinize your own beliefs, and to make sure — as best you can — that they correspond to reality. My fellow liberals engage in misinformation, too. And we can't challenge Trump's assaults on truth if we're undermining it themselves.
Here's a prominent example: Nearly half of self-identified liberals say that 1,000 or more unarmed Black men are shot and killed by police each year. The correct number is closer to two dozen. That's hardly an “epidemic.” And calling it that misrepresents reality.
You might reply that it's a good misrepresentation, because it makes people aware of broader problems around race and criminal justice. But now you are echoing Trump and Vance, who lie to prop up their own truth.
To this day, many people on the left still insist that Michael Brown was raising his hands in surrender when police killed him in Ferguson, Mo. in 2014. Never mind that a Department of Justice investigation showed that claim was “inconsistent with the physical and forensic evidence.” We have our truth and we're sticking with it — evidence be damned.
But evidence always matters, no matter what Trump's example tells us. When we ignore it, for any reason, we concede the game to him.
There is a reality out there, existing independently of what each of us believes. As soon as we stop believing in it, it's game over for democracy.
Allan Bloom understood that. And so, in his own dark way, does Trump.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He serves on the advisory board of the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest.
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