The Death of Truth review: How fake US election news generated more readers

Following US President Donald Trump on Twitter can be very gratifying. His nicknames for archrivals, his flippant use of messaging lingo and a demeanour that most presidents would be horrified to be identified with make for excellent lunchtime entertainment. At the heart of it, though, is a serious breakdown of language, objectivity and humanitarian values. Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times’s award-winning former literary critic, unpacks the phenomenon of warped relativism that is replacing an objective truth through a long history of literary works that seemed to have clairvoyantly warned us of the times we now live in. The Death of Truth takes on Right-wing propagandist narrative with some clarity.

A post-truth, post-race, post-feminist world is being pushed down people’s throats in the US, denying entire cultural groups the centuries of struggles they have overcome. “Black Lives Matter” is countered with “all lives matter” and a “#MeToo” moment is termed unrealistic and alarmist because “not all men” are villains. Kakutani wastes no prose setting the context — the context is the subject. She minces no words while talking about Trump and his “personal assault on the English language”. A captivating chapter, titled “The Co-Opting of Language”, examines Trump’s incoherence as being a marker of the “chaos he creates and thrives on”, besides being “an essential instrument in a liar’s tool kit”. There is, of course, a lengthy examination of “covfefe” and other such nursery balderdash.

The strangest “culture war” that Kakutani manages to define is the so-called alt-right’s perversion of the postmodernist phenomenon. The “new” Right has used the theory that that all truth is narrative to turn objectivity on its head and spin a web of half-truths and dizzying disinformation. In a chapter titled “The New Culture Wars” she writes, “Most ironic still is the populist Right’s appropriation of postmodernist arguments and its embrace of the philosophical repudiation of objectivity — schools of thought affiliated for decades with the Left and with the very elite academic circles that Trump and company scorn.” It’s an interesting argument and one that makes you sit up, but only if you have at least a passing familiarity with the works of Jacques Derrida or Jean Baudrillard. Postmodernism itself is a school of thought that contains many conflicting thoughts-within-thoughts. It may have been prudent to instead link contemporary politics to more accessible philosophers, or even theatrical traditions such as the carnivalesque or absurdism.

More usefully, Kakutani explores phenomena such as Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which can be seen as providing direct source material for the language used by the alt-right today — a reliance on exaggerated numbers and “greatness”, among others. A visit to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam comes to mind. The introductory tour available with pre-booked tickets is particularly gripping, especially in the eerie similarities it draws between the rise of Hitler and the strange attraction of right-wing ideology across the world today. The “Night of Broken Glass” in 1938, for instance, was termed at the time as being a spontaneous act of violence against the Jewish community in Germany. A young presenter explained how the Nazis, by absolving themselves of the blame for rioting, ensured that the violence became a headless, nameless monster that cannot be fought.

But Trump’s assault on language and on democratic values, according to Kakutani, is much more dangerous than a mere breakdown of language. She writes of Trump’s ability to use phrases and invert them to mean the opposite of what they are conventionally supposed to. “Fake news”, for instance, becomes the reports that journalists publish against his government, rather than the patently absurd tweets and partisan views that the president himself supports.

And with diminishing attention spans and the rise of social media, fake news is no longer just a perverse version of “real” news that can be laughed at or wished away. Kakutani writes about how fake US election news stories on Facebook generated more reader engagement than top news reports from leading news organisations such as The New York Times or The Washington Post. Britain virtually mimicked this trend during the “Vote Leave” campaign, where falsified data and xenophobia was used to manipulate the vote in favour of Brexit.

The Death of Truth. Author: Michiko Kakutani Publisher: William Collins Pages: 208 Price: Rs 599

Those who have been paying attention will know that such parallels have been drawn often and with sobering clarity. Even if long-form news reportage is too time-consuming for the general reader, American journalists, writers, actors, politicians and activists have been vocal on social media about the social rot that the current US government typifies. A stellar television series called The Good Fight has devoted nearly two seasons to the absurdities of the current government and any sane person’s inability to grasp what is happening to the country.

In chronicling such resistance, though, Kakutani’s book falls short. She fails to bring in more contemporary references and acts of resistance from icons of popular culture. One would have expected more literary references and a historical interpretation of what led to the Trump phenomenon, especially from a journalist who has had the privilege of being so immersed in the literary world. Kakutani brings in a few references, but a large portion of these is too America-specific to resonate with a non-American reader. Over 30 pages of the book are dedicated to meticulous notes, but one still doesn’t get the nuanced perspective expected from this literary critic.

What one gets instead is a jargon-ridden lesson in postmodernist thought and a highbrow version of what is already being debated. The book is thankfully brief and the crash course in philosophical traditions is at least not too tedious. For an Indian reader, though, its utility might be limited — unless, of course, he or she can draw parallels closer home with the rise of the new, robust Right in the US and the world.