The Death of Truth

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The Death of Truth
Michiko Kakutani

From a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic comes an impassioned critique of the West’s retreat from reason.‘The Death of Truth is destined to become the defining treatise of our age’ David Grann‘The first great book of the Trump administration … essential reading’ Rolling StoneWe live in a time when the very idea of objective truth is mocked and discounted by the US President. Discredited conspiracy theories and ideologies have resurfaced, proven science is once more up for debate, and Russian propaganda floods our screens. The wisdom of the crowd has usurped research and expertise, and we are each left clinging to the beliefs that best confirm our biases.How did truth become an endangered species? This decline began decades ago, and in The Death of Truth, former New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani takes a penetrating look at the cultural forces that contributed to this gathering storm. In social media and literature, television, academia, and political campaigns, Kakutani identifies the trends – originating on both the right and the left – that have combined to elevate subjectivity over factuality, science, and common values. And she returns us to the words of the great critics of authoritarianism, writers like George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, whose work is newly and eerily relevant.With remarkable erudition and insight, Kakutani offers a provocative diagnosis of our current condition and presents a path forward for our truth-challenged times.

Copyright (#ude0af5bc-df71-58f8-9f2b-b2c65399d133)

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

First published in the United States by Tim Duggan Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York in 2018

Copyright © Michiko Kakutani 2018

Snake image on cover © Getty Images

Michiko Kakutani asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Frontispiece: Truth has died, plate 79 of ‘The Disasters of War’, 1810–14, pub. 1863 (etching), Goya y Lucientes, Francisco Jose de (1746–1828)/Private Collection/Index/Bridgeman Images

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008312787

Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9780008312794

Version: 2018-06-07

Dedication (#ude0af5bc-df71-58f8-9f2b-b2c65399d133)

For journalists everywhere working to report the news

Contents

COVER (#uf36ac99a-8c79-554f-aa50-1fb2b854b9ed)

TITLE PAGE (#u242287dc-94c4-5b85-8d27-8207c1f26d38)

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

INTRODUCTION

1. THE DECLINE AND FALL OF REASON (#u6fb1eb19-6558-5a99-adb1-892674481c30)

2. THE NEW CULTURE WARS (#uac9d9c5d-e676-5266-9d7e-b12f65f71bdd)

3. “MOI” AND THE RISE OF SUBJECTIVITY (#litres_trial_promo)

4. THE VANISHING OF REALITY (#litres_trial_promo)

5. THE CO-OPTING OF LANGUAGE (#litres_trial_promo)

6. FILTERS, SILOS, AND TRIBES (#litres_trial_promo)

7. ATTENTION DEFICIT (#litres_trial_promo)

8. “THE FIREHOSE OF FALSEHOOD”: PROPAGANDA AND FAKE NEWS (#litres_trial_promo)

9. THE SCHADENFREUDE OF THE TROLLS (#litres_trial_promo)

EPILOGUE

NOTES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)

INTRODUCTION (#ude0af5bc-df71-58f8-9f2b-b2c65399d133)

TWO OF THE MOST MONSTROUS REGIMES in human history came to power in the twentieth century, and both were predicated upon the violation and despoiling of truth, upon the knowledge that cynicism and weariness and fear can make people susceptible to the lies and false promises of leaders bent on unconditional power. As Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The ideal subject (#litres_trial_promo) of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

What’s alarming to the contemporary reader is that Arendt’s words increasingly sound less like a dispatch from another century than a chilling mirror of the political and cultural landscape we inhabit today—a world in which fake news and lies are pumped out in industrial volume by Russian troll factories, emitted in an endless stream from the mouth and Twitter feed of the president of the United States, and sent flying across the world through social media accounts at lightning speed. Nationalism, tribalism, dislocation, fears of social change, and the hatred of outsiders are on the rise again as people, locked in their partisan silos and filter bubbles, are losing a sense of shared reality and the ability to communicate across social and sectarian lines.

This is not to draw a direct analogy between today’s circumstances and the overwhelming horrors of the World War II era but to look at some of the conditions and attitudes—what Margaret Atwood has called the “danger flags” (#litres_trial_promo) in Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm—that make a people susceptible to demagoguery and political manipulation, and nations easy prey for would-be autocrats. To examine how a disregard for facts, the displacement of reason by emotion, and the corrosion of language are diminishing the very value of truth, and what that means for America and the world.

“The historian knows how (#litres_trial_promo) vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life,” Arendt wrote in a 1971 essay, “Lying in Politics”; “it is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams of falsehoods or simply allowed to fall into oblivion. Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs.”

The term “truth decay” (used by the Rand Corporation to describe the “diminishing role of facts (#litres_trial_promo) and analysis” in American public life) has joined the post-truth lexicon that includes such now familiar phrases as “fake news” and “alternative facts.” And it’s not just fake news either: it’s also fake science (manufactured by climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers), fake history (promoted by Holocaust revisionists and white supremacists), fake Americans on Facebook (created by Russian trolls), and fake followers and “likes” on social media (generated by bots).

Trump, the forty-fifth president of the United States, lies so prolifically and with such velocity that The Washington Post calculated that he’d made 2,140 false or misleading claims (#litres_trial_promo) during his first year in office—an average of nearly 5.9 a day. His lies—about everything from the investigations into Russian interference in the election, to his popularity and achievements, to how much TV he watches—are only the brightest blinking red light of many warnings of his assault on democratic institutions and norms. He routinely assails the press, the justice system, the intelligence agencies, the electoral system, and the civil servants who make our government tick.

Nor is the assault on truth confined to the United States. Around the world, waves of populism and fundamentalism are elevating appeals to fear and anger over reasoned debate, eroding democratic institutions, and replacing expertise with the wisdom of the crowd. False claims about the (#litres_trial_promo) U.K.’s financial relationship with the EU (emblazoned on a Vote Leave campaign bus) helped swing the vote in favor of Brexit, and Russia ramped up its sowing of dezinformatsiya in the run-up to elections in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and other countries in concerted propaganda efforts to discredit and destabilize democracies.

Pope Francis reminded us, “There is no such thing (#litres_trial_promo) as harmless disinformation; trusting in falsehood can have dire consequences.” Former president Barack Obama observed that “one of the biggest challenges (#litres_trial_promo) we have to our democracy is the degree to which we do not share a common baseline of facts”; people today are “operating in completely different information universes.” And the Republican senator Jeff Flake gave a speech in which he warned that “2017 was a year (#litres_trial_promo) which saw the truth—objective, empirical, evidence-based truth—more battered and abused than any other in the history of our country, at the hands of the most powerful figure in our government.”

How did this happen? What are the roots of falsehood in the Trump era? How did truth and reason become such endangered species, and what does their impending demise portend for our public discourse and the future of our politics and governance? That is the subject of this book.

IT’S EASY ENOUGH to see Trump—a candidate who launched his political career on the original sin of birtherism—as a black swan who ascended to office because of a perfect storm of factors: a frustrated electorate still hurting from the backwash of the 2008 financial crash; Russian interference in the election and a deluge of pro-Trump fake news stories on social media; a highly polarizing opponent who came to symbolize the Washington elite that populists decried; and an estimated five billion dollars in free (#litres_trial_promo) campaign coverage from media outlets obsessed with the views and clicks that the former reality-TV star generated.

If a novelist had concocted a villain like Trump—a larger-than-life, over-the-top avatar of narcissism, mendacity, ignorance, prejudice, boorishness, demagoguery, and tyrannical impulses (not to mention someone who consumes as many as a dozen Diet Cokes a day (#litres_trial_promo))—she or he would likely be accused of extreme contrivance and implausibility. In fact, the president of the United States often seems less like a persuasive character than some manic cartoon artist’s mashup of Ubu Roi, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, and a character discarded by Molière.

But the more clownish aspects of Trump the personality should not blind us to the monumentally serious consequences of his assault on truth and the rule of law, and the vulnerabilities he has exposed in our institutions and digital communications. It is unlikely that a candidate (#litres_trial_promo) who had already been exposed during the campaign for his history of lying and deceptive business practices would have gained such popular support were portions of the public not somehow blasé about truth telling and were there not more systemic problems with how people get their information and how they’ve come to think in increasingly partisan terms.

With Trump, the personal is political, and in many respects he is less a comic-book anomaly than an extreme, bizarro-world apotheosis of many of the broader, intertwined attitudes undermining truth today, from the merging of news and politics with entertainment, to the toxic polarization that’s overtaken American politics, to the growing populist contempt for expertise.

These attitudes, in turn, are emblematic of dynamics that have been churning beneath the surface of daily life for years, creating the perfect ecosystem in which Veritas, the goddess of truth (as she was depicted by Goya in a famous print titled “Truth Has Died”), could fall mortally ill.

For decades now, objectivity—or even the idea that people can aspire toward ascertaining the best available truth—has been falling out of favor. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s well-known observation—“Everyone is entitled (#litres_trial_promo) to his own opinion, but not to his own facts”—is more timely than ever: polarization has grown so extreme that voters in Red State America and Blue State America have a hard time even agreeing on the same facts. This has been going on since a solar system of right-wing news sites orbiting around Fox News and Breitbart News consolidated its gravitational hold over the Republican base, and it’s been exponentially accelerated by social media, which connects users with like-minded members and supplies them with customized news feeds that reinforce their preconceptions, allowing them to live in ever narrower, windowless silos.

For that matter, relativism has been ascendant since the culture wars began in the 1960s. Back then, it was embraced by the New Left, eager to expose the biases of Western, bourgeois, male-dominated thinking; and by academics promoting the gospel of postmodernism, which argued that there are no universal truths, only smaller personal truths—perceptions shaped by the cultural and social forces of one’s day. Since then, relativistic arguments have been hijacked by the populist Right, including creationists and climate change deniers who insist that their views be taught alongside “science-based” theories.

Relativism, of course, synced perfectly with the narcissism and subjectivity that had been on the rise, from Tom Wolfe’s “Me Decade,” on through the selfie age of self-esteem. No surprise then that the Rashomon effect—the point of view that everything depends on your point of view—has permeated our culture, from popular novels like Fates and Furies, to the television series The Affair, which hinge upon the idea of competing realities or unreliable narrators.

I’ve been reading and writing about many of these issues for nearly four decades, going back to the rise of deconstruction and battles over the literary canon on college campuses; debates over the fictionalized retelling of history in movies like Oliver Stone’s JFK and Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty; efforts made by both the Clinton and Bush administrations to avoid transparency and define reality on their own terms; Donald Trump’s war on language and efforts to normalize the abnormal; and the consequences that technology has had on how we process and share information. In these pages, I hope to draw upon my readings of books and current events to connect some of the dots about the assault on truth and situate them in context with broader social and political dynamics that have been percolating through our culture for years. I also hope to highlight some of the prescient books and writings from the past that shed light on our current predicament.

Truth is a cornerstone of our democracy. As the former acting attorney general Sally Yates has observed, truth is one of the things that separates us from an autocracy: “We can debate policies (#litres_trial_promo) and issues, and we should. But those debates must be based on common facts rather than raw appeals to emotion and fear through polarizing rhetoric and fabrications.

“Not only is there such a thing as objective truth, failing to tell the truth matters. We can’t control whether our public servants lie to us. But we can control whether we hold them accountable for those lies or whether, in either a state of exhaustion or to protect our own political objectives, we look the other way and normalize an indifference to truth.”

1 (#ulink_0a48d459-695a-567f-b831-37be237c0fa4)

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF REASON (#ulink_0a48d459-695a-567f-b831-37be237c0fa4)

This is an apple (#litres_trial_promo).

Some people might try to tell you that it’s a banana.

They might scream “Banana, banana, banana” over and over and over again.

They might put BANANA in all caps.

You might even start to believe that this is a banana.

But it’s not.

This is an apple.

—CNN COMMERCIAL, SHOWING A PHOTOGRAPH OF AN APPLE

IN HIS 1838 LYCEUM ADDRESS, A YOUNG ABRAHAM Lincoln spoke to his concern that as memories of the Revolution receded into the past, the nation’s liberty was threatened by a disregard for the government’s institutions, which protect the civil and religious liberties bequeathed by the founders. To preserve the rule of law and prevent the rise of a would-be tyrant who might “spring up amongst us (#litres_trial_promo),” sober reason—“cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason”—would be required. To remain “free to the last,” he exhorted his audience, reason must be embraced by the American people, along with “sound morality and, in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws.”

As Lincoln well knew, the founders of America established the young republic on the Enlightenment principles of reason, liberty, progress, and religious tolerance. And the constitutional architecture they crafted was based on a rational system of checks and balances to guard against the possibility, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, of “a man unprincipled (#litres_trial_promo) in private life” and “bold in his temper” one day arising who might “mount the hobby horse of popularity” and “flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day” in order to embarrass the government and “throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”

The system was far from perfect, but it has endured for more than two centuries thanks to its resilience and capacity to accommodate essential change. Leaders like Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and Barack Obama viewed America as a work in progress—a country in the process of perfecting itself. And they tried to speed that work, mindful, in the words of Dr. King, that “progress is neither automatic (#litres_trial_promo) nor inevitable” but requiring of continuous dedication and struggle. What had been achieved since the Civil War and the civil rights movement was a reminder of all the work yet to be done, but also a testament to President Obama’s faith that Americans “can constantly remake ourselves (#litres_trial_promo) to fit our larger dreams,” and the Enlightenment faith in what George Washington called the great “experiment entrusted to the hands (#litres_trial_promo) of the American people.”

Alongside this optimistic vision of America as a nation that could become a shining “city upon a hill,” there’s also been a dark, irrational counter-theme in U.S. history, which has now reasserted itself with a vengeance—to the point where reason not only is being undermined but seems to have been tossed out the window, along with facts, informed debate, and deliberative policy making. Science is under attack, and so is expertise of every sort—be it expertise in foreign policy, national security, economics, or education.

Philip Roth called this counternarrative “the indigenous American berserk (#litres_trial_promo),” and the historian Richard Hofstadter famously described it as “the paranoid style”—an outlook animated by “heated exaggeration (#litres_trial_promo), suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” and focused on perceived threats to “a nation, a culture (#litres_trial_promo), a way of life.” Hofstadter’s 1964 essay was spurred by Barry Goldwater’s campaign and the right-wing movement around it, just as his 1963 book, Anti-intellectualism in American Life, was conceived in response to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s notorious witch hunts and the larger political and social backdrop of the 1950s.

Goldwater lost his presidential bid, and McCarthyism burned itself out after a lawyer for the U.S. Army, Joseph Welch, had the courage to stand up to McCarthy. “Have you no sense (#litres_trial_promo) of decency, sir, at long last?” Welch asked. “Have you left no sense of decency?”

The venomous McCarthy, who hurled accusations of disloyalty throughout Washington (“the State Department harbors (#litres_trial_promo) a nest of Communists and Communist sympathizers,” he warned President Truman in 1950), was rebuked by the Senate in 1954, and with the Soviets’ launch of Sputnik in 1957 the menacing antirationalism of the day began to recede, giving way to the space race and a concerted effort to improve the nation’s science programs.

Hofstadter observed that the paranoid style tends to occur in “episodic waves (#litres_trial_promo).” The anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant (#litres_trial_promo) Know-Nothing Party reached its height in 1855, with forty-three members of Congress openly avowing their allegiance. Its power quickly began to dissipate the following year, after the party split along sectional lines, though the intolerance it embodied would remain, like a virus, in the political system, waiting to reemerge.

In the case of the modern right wing, Hofstadter argued that it tended to be mobilized by a sense of grievance and dispossession. “America has been largely taken (#litres_trial_promo) away from them,” he wrote, and they may feel that “they have no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions.”

In the case of millennial-era America (and much of western Europe, too), these were grievances exacerbated by changing demographics and changing social mores that had made some members of the white working class feel increasingly marginalized; by growing income inequalities accelerated by the financial crisis of 2008; and by forces like globalization and technology that were stealing manufacturing jobs and injecting daily life with a new uncertainty and angst.

Trump and nationalist, anti-immigrant leaders (#litres_trial_promo) on the right in Europe like Marine Le Pen in France, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, and Matteo Salvini in Italy would inflame these feelings of fear and anger and disenfranchisement, offering scapegoats instead of solutions; while liberals and conservatives, worried about the rise of nativism and the politics of prejudice, warned that democratic institutions were coming under growing threat. Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,” written in 1919, amid the wreckage of World War I, experienced a huge revival in 2016—quoted, in news articles (#litres_trial_promo), more in the first half of that year than it had been in three decades as commentators of all political persuasions invoked its famous lines: “Things fall apart (#litres_trial_promo); the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

The assault on truth and reason that reached fever pitch in America during the first year of the Trump presidency had been incubating for years on the fringe right. Clinton haters who were manufacturing nutty accusations about the death of Vince Foster in the 1990s and Tea Party paranoids who claimed (#litres_trial_promo) that environmentalists wanted to control the temperature of your home and the color of cars you can buy hooked up, during the 2016 campaign, with Breitbart bloggers and alt-right trolls. And with Trump’s winning of the Republican nomination and the presidency, the extremist views of his most radical supporters—their racial and religious intolerance, their detestation of government, and their embrace of conspiracy thinking and misinformation—went mainstream.

According to a 2017 survey (#litres_trial_promo) by The Washington Post, 47 percent of Republicans erroneously believe that Trump won the popular vote, 68 percent believe that millions of illegal immigrants voted in 2016, and more than half of Republicans say they would be okay with postponing the 2020 presidential election until such problems with illegal voting can be fixed. Another study conducted (#litres_trial_promo) by political scientists at the University of Chicago showed that 25 percent of Americans believe that the 2008 crash was secretly orchestrated by a small cabal of bankers, 19 percent believe that the U.S. government had a hand in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and 11 percent even believe a theory made up by the researchers—that compact fluorescent lightbulbs were part of a government plot to make people more passive and easy to control.

Trump, who launched his political (#litres_trial_promo) career by shamelessly promoting birtherism and who has spoken approvingly of the conspiracy theorist and shock jock Alex Jones, presided over an administration that became, in its first year, the very embodiment of anti-Enlightenment principles, repudiating the values of rationalism, tolerance, and empiricism in both its policies and its modus operandi—a reflection of the commander in chief’s erratic, impulsive decision-making style based not on knowledge but on instinct, whim, and preconceived (and often delusional) notions of how the world operates.

Trump made no effort to rectify his ignorance of domestic and foreign policy when he moved into the White House. His former chief strategist (#litres_trial_promo) Stephen Bannon has said that Trump only “reads to reinforce (#litres_trial_promo)”; and the president has remained determined to deny, diminish, or downplay intelligence concerning Russian interference in the 2016 election. Because such mentions tend (#litres_trial_promo) to draw his ire and can disrupt his intelligence briefings, officials told The Washington Post that they sometimes included this material only in written versions of the president’s daily brief, which he reportedly rarely if ever reads.

Instead, the president seems to prefer getting his information from Fox News—in particular, the sycophantic morning show Fox & Friends—and from sources like Breitbart News (#litres_trial_promo) and the National Enquirer. He reportedly spends as much as eight hours a day watching (#litres_trial_promo) television—a habit that could not help but remind many readers of Chauncey Gardiner, the TV-addicted gardener who becomes a celebrity and rising political star in Jerzy Kosinski’s 1970 novel, Being There. Vice News also reported that Trump received a folder, twice a day, filled with flattering clips including “admiring tweets, transcripts (#litres_trial_promo) of fawning TV interviews, praise-filled news stories, and sometimes just pictures of Trump on TV looking powerful.”

Such absurd details are unnerving rather than merely comical because this is not simply a Twilight Zone case of one fantasist living in a big white house in Washington, D.C. Trump’s proclivity for chaos has not been contained by those around him but has instead infected his entire administration. He asserts that “I’m the only one (#litres_trial_promo) that matters” when it comes to policy making, and given his disdain for institutional knowledge he frequently ignores the advice of cabinet members and agencies, when he isn’t cutting them out of the loop entirely.

Ironically, the dysfunction that these habits fuel tends to ratify his supporters’ mistrust of Washington (one of the main reasons they voted for Trump in the first place), creating a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, which, in turn, breeds further cynicism and a reluctance to participate in the political process. A growing number of voters feel there is a gross disconnect between their views and government policies. Commonsense policies like (#litres_trial_promo) mandatory background checks for gun purchases, supported by more than nine out of ten Americans, have been stymied by Congress, which is filled with members who rely on donations from the NRA. Eighty-seven percent of Americans (#litres_trial_promo) said in a 2018 poll that they believe Dreamers should be allowed to stay in the States, and yet DACA has remained a political football. And 83 percent of Americans (#litres_trial_promo) (including 75 percent of Republicans) say they support net neutrality, which was overturned by Trump’s FCC.

THE DECLINING ROLE of rational discourse—and the diminished role of common sense and fact-based policy—hardly started with Donald J. Trump. Rather, he represents the culmination of trends diagnosed in prescient books by Al Gore, Farhad Manjoo, and Susan Jacoby, published nearly a decade before he took up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Among the causes of this decline, Jacoby (The Age of American Unreason) cited an “addiction to infotainment (#litres_trial_promo),” the continuing strength of religious fundamentalism, “the popular equation of intellectualism (#litres_trial_promo) with a liberalism supposedly at odds with traditional American values,” and an education system that “does a poor job of teaching (#litres_trial_promo) not only basic skills but the logic underlying those skills.”

As for Gore (The Assault on Reason), he underscored the ailing condition of America as a participatory democracy (low voter turnout, an ill-informed electorate, campaigns dominated by money, and media manipulation) and “the persistent and sustained reliance (#litres_trial_promo) on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary.”

At the forefront of Gore’s thinking was the Bush administration’s disastrous decision to invade Iraq and its cynical selling of that war to the public, distorting “America’s political reality (#litres_trial_promo) by creating a new fear of Iraq that was hugely disproportionate to the actual danger” posed by a country that did not attack the United States on 9/11 and lacked the terrifying weapons of mass destruction that administration hawks scared Americans into thinking it possessed.

Indeed, the Iraq war remains (#litres_trial_promo) a lesson in the calamities that can result when momentous decisions that affect the entire world are not made through a rational policy-making process and the judicious weighing of information and expert analysis, but are instead fueled by ideological certainty and the cherry picking of intelligence to support preconceived idées fixes.

From the start, administration hawks led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld pressed for “forward-leaning” intelligence that would help make the case for war. A shadowy operation called the Office of Special Plans was even set up at the Defense Department; its mission, according to a Pentagon adviser quoted by Seymour M. Hersh in The New Yorker, was to find evidence of what Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz already believed to be true—that Saddam Hussein had ties to al-Qaeda and that Iraq possessed a huge arsenal of biological, chemical, and possibly nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, planning for the war on the ground ignored sober warnings from experts, like the army chief of staff, Eric K. Shinseki, who testified that postwar Iraq would require “something on the order of several (#litres_trial_promo) hundred thousand soldiers.” His recommendation was quickly shot down, as were reports from the Rand Corporation and the Army War College, both of which also warned that postwar security and reconstruction in Iraq would require a large number of troops for an extended period of time. These assessments went unheeded—with fateful consequences—because they did not mesh with the administration’s willfully optimistic promises that the Iraqi people would welcome American troops as liberators and that resistance on the ground would be limited. “A cakewalk (#litres_trial_promo),” as one Rumsfeld ally put it.

The failure to send enough troops to secure the country and restore law and order; the sidelining of the State Department’s Future of Iraq Project (because of tensions with the Pentagon); the ad hoc decisions to dissolve the Iraqi army and to ban all senior members of the Baath Party: such disastrous and avoidable screwups resulted in a bungled American occupation that one soldier, assigned to the Coalition Provisional Authority, memorably described as “pasting feathers together (#litres_trial_promo), hoping for a duck.” In fact, the Iraq war would prove to be one of the young century’s most catastrophic events, exploding the geopolitics of the region and giving birth to ISIS and a still unspooling set of disasters for the people of Iraq, the region, and the world.

ALTHOUGH TRUMP frequently criticized (#litres_trial_promo) the decision to invade Iraq during the 2016 campaign, his White House has learned nothing from the Bush administration’s handling of that unnecessary and tragic war. Instead, it has doubled down on reverse-engineered policy making and the repudiation of experts.

For instance, the State Department has been hollowed out as a result of Steve Bannon’s vow to fight for the “deconstruction of the administrative state (#litres_trial_promo)” and the White House’s suspicion of “deep state” professionals. The president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a thirty-six-year-old real-estate developer with no government experience, was handed the Middle East portfolio, while the shrinking State Department was increasingly sidelined. Many important positions stood unfilled at the end of Trump’s first year in office. This was partly because of downsizing and dereliction of duty, partly because of a reluctance to appoint diplomats who expressed reservations about the president’s policies (as in the case of the crucial role of ambassador (#litres_trial_promo) to South Korea), and partly because of the exodus of foreign service talent from an agency that, under new management, no longer valued their skills at diplomacy, policy knowledge, or experience in far-flung regions of the world. Combined with Trump’s subversion of longtime alliances and trade accords and his steady undermining of democratic ideals, the carelessness with which his administration treated foreign policy led to world confidence in U.S. leadership (#litres_trial_promo) plummeting in 2017 to a new low of 30 percent (below China and just above Russia), according to a Gallup poll.

In some respects, the Trump White House’s disdain for expertise and experience reflected larger attitudes percolating through American society. In his 2007 book, The Cult of the Amateur, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andrew Keen warned that the internet not only had democratized information beyond people’s wildest imaginings but also was replacing genuine knowledge with “the wisdom of the crowd (#litres_trial_promo),” dangerously blurring the lines between fact and opinion, informed argument and blustering speculation.

A decade later, the scholar Tom Nichols wrote in The Death of Expertise that a willful hostility toward established knowledge had emerged on both the right and the left, with people aggressively arguing that “every opinion on any matter (#litres_trial_promo) is as good as every other.” Ignorance now was fashionable.