When we substitute a philosophic truth for politics, as I observed in yesterday’s post on the new political correctness, both truth and politics are compromised, and in extreme form, totalitarian culture prevails.  On the other hand, factual truth is the ground upon which a sound politics is based.  As Hannah Arendt underscores, “the politically most relevant truths are factual.”  That Trotsky could be air brushed out of the history of the Bolshevik revolution, contrary to the factual truth that he was a key figure, commander of the Red Army, second only to Lenin, is definitive of the totalitarian condition.  I know we haven’t gotten to this point, but there are worrying tendencies.

Fact denial seems to be the order of the day, from fictoids of varying degrees of absurdity (Obama the Kenyan post-colonial philosopher and the like), to denial of scientific findings: including evolution, climate change and basic economics.  (I can’t get over the fact that it seems to be official Republican Party policy that cutting taxes doesn’t increase deficits.)

The political consequences of denying the truth of facts are linked with the substitution of truth for politics.   In order to make the contrast between the two different types of truth and their relationship with politics clear, Arendt reflects upon the beginning of WWI.   The causes of the war are open to interpretation.  The aggressive intentions of Axis or the Allies can be emphasized, as can the intentional or the unanticipated consequences of political alliances.  The state of capitalism and imperialism in crisis may be understood as being central.  Yet, when it comes to the border of Belgium, it is factually the case that Germany invaded Belgium and not the other way around.  A free politics cannot be based on an imposed interpretation.  There must be an openness to opposing views.  But a free politics also cannot be based on a factual lie, such as the proposition that Belgium’s invasion of Germany opened WWI.

Arendt observes how Trotsky expressed his fealty to the truth of the Communist Party, in The Origins of Totalitarianism.   And, in her classic essay, “Truth and Politics,” she notes his tragic fate:  eliminated from Soviet history books and then assassinated.  The assassination followed the lie.

I am concerned that our politics are more and more becoming involved in this sort of vicious circle.  Fictoids are the least of our problems.  If we politically debate energy and transportation policy with one side denying the facts of climate change, to take the prime example, the debate will not yield consequential compromise and consensus, we will not be able to act effectively. We will be ill prepared to politically respond to the very real economic challenges of the future, and our capacities to address a central global problem will all but disappear.

Other nations free of know nothing politics will be working to adapt to the changes that are forthcoming.  They will have new energy industries and high speed rail systems, while the United States will decay.  But since the United States has the largest economy, by far, our gas guzzling pollution machine could bring the whole world down with us.  It’s time to face facts.

I think the relationship between truth and politics is one of the key challenges of our times.  Get the relationship right and there is a reasonable chance that we will be able to address our problems successfully.  Get it wrong and our chances are slim.  There are many indications that we are getting it wrong, already observed in passing in DC, as we have discussed the problem of fictoids and as we have been noting the general development of the paranoid style of politics, and the threat of theocracy and ideological thinking.  This week we will focus on this issue.

My guide in these matters is Hannah Arendt. She maintains, on the one hand, that there has to be a separation between the pursuit of truth and political power, but on the other hand, politics that are based on factual lies are deeply problematic.

Today’s post will be about the dangers of conflating an interpretive or ideological truth and politics, tomorrow’s post, about the need politics has for factual truth.  We will then continue exploring this issue for the rest of the week.

The Conflation of Truth and Politics

Trotsky once declared, when he was still a loyal Bolshevik, Arendt observes in her magnum opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism: “We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right.”  The correct reading of Marxism, the official party theory, forms the policy; the policy enforced confirms the Party’s truth. Truth and politics are conflated and the result is that neither the independent value of truth nor the independent value of politics exists.  This is the true meaning of political correctness.

In Soviet history, this resulted in immense tragedy and suffering.  Thus the dynamic of totalitarian horrors when indeed for a broad population Trostky’s way of being right was the only way of being right.  Atheism, collective farms, grand industrial steel works, and the like were mandated by the truth of Marxism, and the power of the Party confirmed truth.  Because “religion is the opiate of the people,” as Marx declared, Party policy systematically repressed religious institutions and belief.  Because of the scientific validity of the Marxist critique of the political economy of capitalism, private farms were destroyed and collective farms formed.  And when in the Soviet Ukraine moderately successful private farmers resisted, they were identified as class enemies, “Kulaks,” and defeated, leading to mass starvation and a systemically weak agricultural system.  The theory indicated that collectivization defined progress.  The Party State enforced it.  Empirical consequences and mass human suffering were ignored.  Indeed economic planning as a whole was not only concerned with performance, but as much with validation of scientific Marxism.  Grand industrial steel works, such as those of Nowa Huta in Poland outside of Krakow, were as much monuments to socialism, in this case standing as a contrast to the traditionalist city down the block, as they were part of a rational economic plan.  More precisely, the theory revealed how the monument and plan worked together.

The New Political Correctness

We don’t live in the world of such horrors. But when a religious truth forms an official state policy or a social movement, or tries to, the result potentially is quite tragic, revealed in the horrors of religiously inspired terrorism and anti-terrorism, in the history of the Islamic Republic of Iran, but also with dangers in Israel as Jewish and democratic state, which we have seen in recent posts. (link and link) And it is for this reason, not only because I am a heathen, that I worry about those who insist that the United States is a Christian country.

I also am alarmed by a kind of ideological free marketism and real Americanism.

Political leaders and activists deny climate change, turn away from economic complexity (tax cuts don’t cause deficits), and refuse to recognize geopolitical challenges (from relations with Europe, to Latin America to China) because they know the truth about the supremacy of the free market as it is tied to a wing of the Republican Party and the Tea Party Movement.

And then there is an absolute certainty that one interpretation of the American constitution, a rather odd one, is what the constitution really means.  And the equal certainty that political opponents, people who disagree with them, are somehow anti-American.

Political correctness is an ascendant problem in the United States, and this politically correct position threatens politics.