How to Win a War Against Reality

How does a democracy work if its citizens do not have a shared sense of reality? Not very well. A country whose people cannot agree on where they stand now will not agree on where they are going. This is where Americans find themselves in 2025, and they did not arrive at this juncture yesterday. The deep divisions that exist have grown over the decades, dating at least to the end of the Cold War in 1991, and are now metastasizing at an alarming rate. These divisions have many causes, from climate change to COVID-19, unchecked migration to growing wealth inequality, and other factors. People who live with chronic division and uncertainty are vulnerable. It may not take much to get them to sign on to a politics of certainty.

Authoritarian governments, be they communist or fascist, offer such certainty in the place of doubt. They do this by creating a story of the nation’s origins intended to explain and justify the order the regime imposes on its people. It is a mythologized version of the actual past, always available for updating as present circumstances demand. It eliminates most doubt about what will happen next because, as Soviet citizens used to joke, “The future is certain; it’s the past that keeps changing.” Such a history creates specific expectations of the future by stipulating what is desirable and what is possible, who is in and who is out, who is hero and who is villain. This kind of historical narrative is essential in regimes that aspire to control the population, and it’s been well studied in the USSR, Communist China, and Nazi Germany. We now see it deployed in a number of liberal democracies as they move increasingly to more authoritarian governments. 

Take the United States. By this fractured logic, Make America Great Again (MAGA) means that America once was great, is no longer, but can be restored to its prelapsarian state, when whites sat firmly at the top of the ethnic hierarchy that constitutes the United States. Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy and self-identified liberal, is deeply troubled that many liberal democracies across the globe are morphing into illiberal democracies before our very eyes. In “Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future,” he argues that all authoritarian regimes know the value of a unified, if largely mythologized, view of past, present, and future. He wrote his book to warn us that we in the United States are on the cusp of becoming an authoritarian nation or, in Stanley’s account, fascist. By explaining “the mechanisms by which democracy is attacked, the ways myths and lies are used to justify actions such as wars, and scapegoating of groups, we can defend against these attacks, and even reverse the tide.”

To Stanley, the hallmark of fascism, as opposed to run-of-the-mill authoritarianism, is the sorting of humans into hierarchies of value, a view he laid out in his earlier book “How Fascism Works.” Stanley details these classifying mechanisms by way of specific examples from the recent past: British colonials in Kenya, who cast the native population as less than human; Narendra Modi in India, who grants all Hindus a higher status by virtue of being Hindu; Victor Orban in Hungary, who appeals to an ethnic nationalism; and of course, the Nazi regime in Germany, which set the gold standard for dehumanization. All countries put men above women. And all place LGBTQ+ people on the lowest rung of the ladder.

Not unexpectedly for a professor, Stanley homes in on education as a primary, if not the primary, lever that fascist regimes wield in their war against fact-based history. Any historical account has to decide first on the scope of the inquiry. Writing history demands selecting from an abundance of facts, events, timescales, actors, and narratives. Every account will leave some things out of the narrative and elevate the importance of others. Conservatives in America complain that the education provided by people like Stanley at Yale University leaves conservative figures and ideas out of the picture, erasing their presence in history (and on the faculty), even turning them into villains when they appear at all. As counterpoint, Stanley cites historical examples of proto-fascists such as the British colonial regime in Kenya and fascists in Nazi Germany who write non-whites out of history. 

Perhaps because Stanley is a philosopher, not a historian, his explanations of how fascist practices warp history do not include the kind of context that makes the reader aware of just how contingent historical events can be. The soul of fascist, totalitarian, or indeed all ideological origin tales is teleological. Narratives unfold in a specific and irreversible direction already embedded in their original DNA. Such narratives exclude chance and contingency as possible factors in long-term historical outcomes. A critique of fascist narratives has to include a critique of teleology itself. Teleology is the core dynamic of this kind of history, though it remains hidden in Stanley’s account. His approach is fact based and analytically precise, delineating cause and effect in a manner that buttresses his argument well. That said, this very precision makes his occasional lapses into partisan rhetoric jarring. Referring to the 2023 congressional investigations into antisemitism on college campuses, he casually refers to a university president who “is dragged before Congress,” when in fact she is called to testify and did not visibly resist. Stanley refers to Christopher Columbus as “a genocidal colonialist bent on exploiting indigenous people for material gain,” matter-of-factly, apparently unselfconsciously using precisely the “woke” language that inflames culture warriors on the right. Such language would be a small matter if Stanley weren’t so intently focused on the importance of countering the fascists’ rhetorical strategies by embracing open, nonjudgmental debate.

Where Stanley shines is in his argument that education is really the crucial element in fascists’ ability to move young minds into certain beliefs, such as national greatness, purity, and innocence. When given this set of beliefs, a young person, eager to know how they can contribute to the nation’s well-being, is persuaded that their greatest contribution is to fight progressive values and progressive people themselves. The Trump administration’s attack on higher education is no doubt a bitter pill. It aims to eradicate the kind of liberal education that Stanley offers at Yale. This book is his response. He assures us that if we are disheartened to see “progress towards multi-racial democracy receding before our very eyes,” we can “reverse the tide” now that we are armed with a deeper understanding of how democracy is attacked. “Without a common understanding of reality, and a common sense of history, social and economic equality are impossible.”

The fabrication of the past is also the subject of Steve Benen’s book “Ministry of Truth. Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.” Benen, a producer on the Rachel Maddow Show, keeps his eye tightly focused on the past decade, still fresh in the minds of readers. His account tracks closely how the Republican Party conducted “a war on the recent past.” He attempts an anatomy of a very unsettling phenomenon: the success of a gaslighting campaign Trump and his supporters perpetrated against the American public and even against fellow Republicans who are not MAGA enough for Trump.

Benen reports that time and again, members of the Republican Party—foremost Donald Trump—get away with telling their constituents that what they just witnessed is not true. The lies range from the sublime to the ridiculous. The Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was not a riot or an attempted coup or even violent. It was a nice family-friendly outing. The size of the crowd at Trump’s first inauguration was not in fact nothing special. On the contrary, it was the largest crowd ever to attend an inauguration, ever in all of history, by several factors. These brazen denials of reality became a pattern, as did fellow Republicans at first downplaying these fabrications and then eventually parroting them.

How is it possible to gaslight at least half the nation? Benen concludes the Republican tactic has four components. First, the Republicans simply don’t care about reality. Second, they have absolutely no shame about lying and sticking to their lie. Third, the most egregious liars are surrounded by those who aid and abet them in their mendacity. At best they shrug off the lies; at worst they repeat them. And finally, Republicans repeat their lies ad nauseum and at the top of their lungs, believing that if something is repeated often enough, loudly enough, it will stick. “Taken together, a picture emerges of a Republican Party that’s grown reliant on a brute-force rhetorical strategy, taking developments that unfolded in recent memory and replacing them with a politically advantageous alternate reality.”

For those of us who lived through these events, much of this will be familiar. It is no less disturbing for that. By writing about the how of something as baffling as this gaslighting, Benen begs the question of why. He is clear that he sets out to explain the how, not the why. Nor does he promise a solution to the problem. Even so, without providing at least some context, the actions he describes appear curiously unmotivated, which they surely are not. For example, Benen briefly mentions the 1776 Commission as one example of on-the-fly mythmaking in the service of Trump’s reelection. He does not mention the 1619 Project that preceded it (and many people thought had provoked it). Without mention of the rhetoric, protests, and other actions deployed by progressives to push their own agenda, Benen elides the important dynamic of partisan escalation that marks the present and recent past.

Perhaps it is Benen’s long experience as a journalist, who as a rule don’t have the time or space to provide the backstory of a given event. Nonetheless, in a book, such detailed reporting inevitably raises the question Benen doesn’t attempt to answer: Why do Republicans behave in this bizarre and dishonest way? What motivates them? Where do their ideas come from? Why do perfectly sane adults in positions of great authority (e.g., members of Congress) repeat them with a straight face? Who is orchestrating what Benen insists is a well-thought-out strategy? This is where the book begins to lose a certain coherence. He refers interchangeably to the Republicans, the GOP, and Trump as the perpetrators of these falsehoods. But in the period he’s writing about (2016-2023), the Republican Party was not a monolith. In the early years of Trump’s ascendancy, the party was split, quite acrimoniously, between those who supported Trump and those who were against him. It took years for Trump to complete his hostile takeover of the Republican Party. The story of exactly how this happened is hidden somewhere in this narrative, but not drawn out. As expected, there is a reference to Orwell. But the technique Benen describes so clearly and so often is less Orwellian than a gift to Trump from his mentor, Roy Cohn. When accused of a crime, a lie, an indiscretion, or an immoral act, Cohn’s strategy was to deny, deny, deny. Follow that up with accusing your accuser of the very action you are accused of. Threaten to sue. Escalate the rhetoric faster and faster, to keep people on the back foot. Make it all so fierce and outside the bounds of reasonable behavior that people are left spluttering with indignation. Indignation and shame are not parts of the Trump psyche, except as tools to wield against others.

It is only in the last few pages that Benen mentions the Republican base, and he has little to say about them. But it is the voter at home at whom all this rhetoric is aimed. The Republicans’ strategy would be empty and impotent if voters did not accept it. Ultimately, America’s politics rests with those who show up at the ballot box and choose their leaders. That’s the democratic process. Now that Stanley and Benen have done much to unpack the techniques of Trump’s Republican Party, we need to study how that rhetoric landed with voters and persuaded them.

Stanley and Benen remind us that the truth matters. Facts matter. They point out how easily people in times of great uncertainty can be manipulated by narratives that resolve those uncertainties and promise a better future. We are moving further and faster into an age where alternative facts proliferate, aided and abetted by technologies that increase the ability to create very convincing fakes. In this world, it’s our gullibility that is the real threat to democracy and national security. But to understand why the political divide among Americans runs so deep, we need to look beyond the effectiveness of propaganda. We need to look at the values that Americans hold in common—democracy, equality, and self-determination. Who enjoys these rights? Are there some citizens whose intrinsic worth ranks them higher in a democracy than others? In this time of high partisanship, we are divided by a fundamental disagreement over who is entitled to exercise the full rights that democracy affords. Stanley reminds us that in a democracy, we have equal claim to these. They are not to be measured by our ranking in a “hierarchy of values,” but by our claim to full humanity.