Inauguration day has come and gone, and it has now been a little over a week since Donald J. Trump has become huckster in chief. Throughout his campaign, Trump peddled wares as old as or older than the United States itself. Racism, nativism, xenophobia and sexism were all put on display–giving license to the the fascist ultra-right to come out and say publicly what they had previously been merely dog-whistling.
Since taking office, the administration has made clear that the vulgar threats made during Trump’s campaign-trail circus performances were not merely charged rhetoric, but rather promises made by a billionaire triumphalist seeking to unleash a program of unrestrained capitalism in a time of capitalist crisis. In order to justify its claims and actions, the administration has taken to the deployment of so-called “alternative facts.”
This may seem a feeble obfuscation to be expected from an executive branch led by a former reality star. However, just as the rise of Trumpism can be traced back to the 1970s, so too can the doublespeak of Trump and his lackeys.
Along with wage-stagnation and the waves of privatization that were part and parcel of the neoliberal program, a philosophy emerged among educated-elites that is now termed post-modernism. Breaking down the school of thought to its base, the argument goes that objective truth does not exist outside of one’s own perspective. While the theory meant to attack the notion of one objective truth imposed by the ruling class by creating different “lenses” for looking at the world from different points of view, in practice it has meant justifying the worst actions of the bourgeoisie while silencing voices of dissent, especially those like Marxists who certainly hold that there exists an objective reality independent of any individual’s perspective.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the “end of history”—this way of thinking prevailed and spread from universities to other parts of society.
So, while Trump’s ludicrous claims about the size of the crowd at his inauguration or more in a more sinister vein, his accusations that millions of undocumented immigrants voted for his opponent, Hillary Clinton, these “alternative facts” have emerged out of our already “post-truth” worl, a world where facts are taken from their context and used to support whatever perspective happens to wield them.
Do not forget in the zeal to combat the extreme reactionary forces that Trumpism has unleashed, that the Obama administration perfected the art of the spin. Even now, its apologists attribute otherworldly prowess to the “hope and change” President, despite the fact that the record tells a very different story.
Indeed, facts about lower unemployment rates and the rise in median household income have all been trotted out to lend legitimacy to the Democratic Party, but of course none of these statistics are put into context. The rise in median household income that occurred in 2016, only came after a more than two-decade decline—far from what any logical person would call a trend.
All of the jobs added to the economy that Obama touted as a part of his legacy have come nowhere near the pre-Great Recession
level, nor do they take into account the kinds of jobs that have been added. Low-wage, part-time and contract labor have been the predominant forms of employment that have emerged following the Great Recession, jobs that in no way offer security to working families.
What must be remembered moving forward, is that it will not be the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party that will deliver us from Trump and the throes of capitalism in decline, in fact it is largely the Democrats that have delivered us to demagoguery by normalizing truth as a matter of perspective. It can only by working people coming together and building a better world, a socialist one, that truth can once again become a reigning force in our world.
