On falling in line

At the end of this post I’ll invite some readers to come to an orchestra concert with me at the National Arts Centre. Details at the bottom, after the heavy stuff. — pw

“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it,” George Orwell wrote in 1984. “It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it.”

You don’t need me to tutor you in Orwell, but to me the important parts are that this surreal demand was “inevitable” and that everyone would “have to believe it.” What’s haunting is how silly the demand is: objectively, no good can come from counting wrong. It’s a good way to wreck reflecting pools, cultural landmarks and shipping routes. But the logic of Big Brother’s position was that a person who would believe this bit of madness could be relied on to believe the next one. And that nobody who refused to believe it could be trusted to believe anything the regime needed them to believe.

On Tuesday the Washington Post reported that the Kennedy Center’s finances went straight to hell after Donald Trump decided to save the place. Of course every federal official with any connection to the Kennedy Centre swore the opposite was happening. It was inevitable that Trump would count wrong, and they would have to believe it. Later Tuesday the Post (which clearly has some life in it yet) reported that the Department of Justice insists, in court filings, that unless Trump saves the Kennedy Center some more, it will have to be torn down.

The Department of Justice. This is what the Department of Justice says.

The Kennedy Center’s only crime is to be named after the wrong president, just as the artist Kehinde Wiley’s crime was to paint another wrong president. The Smithsonian Institution got into trouble for depicting “how bad slavery was,” or rather, for devoting sustained attention to the badness of slavery. The US Attorney for the District of Columbia’s career is in limbo because she said an innocent man was innocent. The former editor of Stars and Stripes is looking for new work after he was fired for saying — simply in the abstract, absent a current case — that he would rather print the truth than not.

In her 2020 book Twilight of Democracy, expanded from this 2018 article in The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum wrote that a defining characteristic of the loose, baggy 21st-century authoritarian states is that they demand adherence to a “medium-sized lie” (a term she borrowed from Timothy Snyder). In Orban’s Hungary, it was that George Soros ran everything, which made it easier to attack the things he did run. In Poland, it was that the horrible 2010 Smolensk plane crash was the work of foreign or domestic plotters. A willingness to believe these things was a requirement of employ in the regime.

Writing in 2018, Applebaum didn’t yet have a really good medium-sized lie to apply to the then-new Trump regime. She nominated trutherism, the belief that Barack Obama wasn’t born American and couldn’t be America’s legitimate president. A few years later a better test came along: the belief that Trump was the true winner of the 2020 presidential election.

This is excellent, because it obviously isn’t so, but Trump has made it an iron law. You simply can’t be a Trump administration nominee for a position that requires Senate confirmation if you’re willing to say publicly that Biden won the 2020 election. It’s a little hole in the soul of everybody on the team. And of course that’s the point. If you’re dead inside, in this specific odd way, you won’t rebel in other ways.

I’m not claiming here that Donald Trump invented lying or has a monopoly. Party lines impose their realities, and people everywhere are too quick to sign on. Liberalopia and Carbontaxia were allies until they weren’t, and it’s just the darnedest thing. But what’s striking about Trump-world is that he seems honestly to recognize no boundary between the part of the world that is required to think like him, and the part of the world that gets to think. As we are now seeing.

I’m on the record believing we need a more thorough account of what happened in the last week of the Carney-Trump trade talks, and I’m pleased that David Herle’s Chiefs panel, who didn’t agree on much this week, agreed unanimously on the need for that fuller accounting.

But now let me go some distance toward sabotaging my own argument. I’m not sure the details matter as much as the gestalt: the general feeling over the last several weeks that Canadians were being coaxed out of the real world and into Trumpworld, from which there is, of course, no escape. Our delegates to Washington, and the government that sent them, and all of us, were expected to “fall in line,” as Trump wrote on Monday.