I don’t remember exactly when Post-Truth became a thing. I don’t care enough to look it up. I’m fairly certain it was when Kellyanne Conway described the alternative facts on crowd sizes that people began to discuss the death of Truth. Regardless of the exact beginnings of this disregard for the sanctity of facts, it has certainly become a staple of the entire Trump presidency, and its blossoming popularity among the wannabe dictators of the world shows a global crisis of fighting facts with alternative ones.

I’ve heard blame for this pandemic of misinformation being foisted upon postmodernism: if everything is relative, then nothing is true in which case everything can be true. Except the justification for these “alternative facts” is never a glib relativism, but always fierce, vitriolic partisanship. Trump isn’t accepting alternative views: his are the only ones and all others are Democratic coups or liberal media lies. In actuality, postmodernism’s view of truth is that the powerful craft the dominant narrative which then defines what ‘truth’ is.

Pictured: Postmodernism being sexy as fuck

Remember the “Weapons of Mass Destruction” of Saddam Hussein that turned out to be a lie? How about when infamous Reagan administration official Lee Atwater let slip that social spending rhetoric was merely a cover for taking advantage of racist fears? You can no longer say n*****, n*****, n*****, you’ve got to lie. How is dog-whistle politics not post-truth? A hundred years ago, Woodrow Wilson needed to sell an unpopular world war to his country, and thus was birthed propaganda. Hell, even Plato talked about creating a myth to convince the plebs that the hierarchy he had set up in his Utopian Republic was both righteous and eternal. Those at the top, of course, were all in on the ruse. This is all prior to Trump, so there’s nothing “post” about it.

All these instances are powerful people shaping what we consider to be the “right” way of viewing the world. You know, the “truth.” Kinda sounds like the postmodernists were on to something, actually. So how have things changed since Trump was elected?

A compelling argument could be post-accountability. My own version of honesty as a virtue is that virtue requires personal sacrifice. When I have literally nothing to gain or lose by lying, like if I lie about the weather outside, then I’m considered pathological. Honesty doesn’t really fit in as a virtue in those kinds of scenarios. However, if I get drunk at a party and make out with my girlfriend’s sister, then I have a lot to lose in being honest about it. Hence, virtue requires the potential for personal sacrifice. This clearly shows that Trump is pathological, given that he, and his enabling administration, will lie about something as absurd as crowd sizes, even given photographic evidence to the contrary. However, no one holds him or the administration accountable. He was impeached, sure, but given the obstruction of justice he committed that was exposed during the Mueller probe, and the personal profit he has garnered violating the emoluments clause of the constitution, his impeachment was very lackluster. And then it was dismissed in the senate, with no lessons learned.

Pictured: bending backwards to accommodate a previous lie into a current one whilst being sexy as fuck

Except, again, no one is ever held accountable. Remember Obama “looking forward” to avoid looking at the literal torture of the past administration? Clinton’s impeachment followed a similar trajectory to Trump’s in the senate. Or how about those who managed to get charged for the Iran-Contra scandal being pardoned by Bush Sr.? Or Richard Nixon being pardoned by his successor? It’s hard to remember any proportional political accountability since the French Revolution.

So truth in politics has never really had its day in the sun, nor has accountability for any vice, whether wrath, licentiousness, or the bearing of false witness. But, something must be different, right? This must be an aberration; Trump is different from all the rest because he’s orange and says the quiet things out loud! And there is! It’s what I would like to call: post-competency.

I don’t know why I thought of this image while visualizing the competency of the Trump administration, but it just feels appropriate.

All those other liars and crooks were good at what they did. The rhetorical twists and redefinitions of the word “is” and all other manner of sleights of hand, smoke, mirrors, and all the rest have always been a roller coaster of devilish charm and the subtlest of winks. Trump was accused of pressuring the Ukrainian president to investigate the Bidens, and when asked on camera what he was hoping to get out of his phone call with the Ukrainian president, he said that he hoped that they would investigate the Bidens. And that China should investigate too, just for good measure. He literally admitted to what he had been lying about days earlier, and then went back to lying about it days later. There will be no linguistic philosophy under the Trump administration because they’re all just such terrible liars. Our brains have become so accustomed to hearing well-crafted falsities and half-truths that when someone comes along who is just the absolute worst at telling lies, we think that the very concept of truth has been abandoned.

Accountability for this brash incompetence fails because modern politics is more about tribalism than it is about policy or even ideology. The attachment most people have to their political parties is the same that they have to their preferred sports team: it doesn’t matter who they are or what they do, we support them no matter what. Trump can talk about injecting bleach or grabbing women by the pussy, and then brazenly lie about sarcasm or locker room talk despite abundant evidence to the contrary, and his fans will not bat an eyelid for the same reason the ref always seems to be penalizing your team more than the other.

The caliber of stock photo actors on full display. Their ambivalent rage is palpable.

We shouldn’t be worried so much about the abundance of lies, even as deadly as they might be. The tobacco industry lied to congress about the addictive nature of cigarettes, and the oil industry knew about climate change in the 80s, long before Trump started peddling hydroxychloroquine. Hell, even the level of incompetency is a bit of a blessing. Can you imagine a Trump administration that had even a modicum of intellect or skill? Or, to be fair, had these things that were then not stifled by sycophancy to a president lacking in both? America would actually have a Muslim ban as well as a wall along its southern border. We’re better off that they’re idiots. We should be concerned as to why people don’t seem to care when these things are so out in the open, when pathological narcissism demands impossible to believe lies, and nothing changes. Fealty to surreality is a bizarre thing to witness, and it is no surprise that we question our collective commitment to reality because of it. However, what we need to focus on is breaking away from the devastating tribalistic partisanship that allows it to happen.

The first step towards good, wholesome anarchism is the abolition of all political parties. Let’s start our focus there.