An Alternative Truth

Over the weekend a quote from “1984” was widely shared on social media. The novel is about a fictional dystopia where the surveillance state known as Big Brother controls the lives of the people. The quote is: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

The quote is being shared to highlight distrust of President Trump who initially claimed that perhaps one to one and a half million people attended his inauguration. The White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer piled on that the inauguration was the most watched in history — later clarifying he was including people who watched online.

I won’t summarize the arguments here, and there is certainly a lot to unpack with regard to President Trump’s need to be right and inability to ignore perceived slights, but I want to address the quote about “rejecting the evidence of []our eyes…”

Our eyes lie all the time based on perspective. Objects do not ACTUALLY get smaller when they move away from us, and who has not seen a mirage? From President Trump’s position on at the Capitol Building, you can see tightly packed crowds that appear to go all the way to the Washington Monument. That could be one to one and a half million people. From our perspective watching from multiple camera angles, we can see the crowd is not that dense or that expansive.

For many of us, the obvious course of action would be for President Trump to admit the mistake and learn that what he personally can see is not always the whole truth. He didn’t do that and is now battling it out with journalists about how to count internet viewers.

But I’d like to ignore that for a moment and focus on the people who hear the “truth” within statements that are verifiably false. For example, the Acela class was shocked and appalled that he used the phrase “American carnage” in his inaugural speech to describe America today. Many other people applauded.

Let’s again consider perspective. Many communities in southern Indiana were gutted by NAFTA. Statistics show that it may be automation that was a bigger factor in jobs lost, but if you see a community hollow out and jobs disappear then it is the economists and government statisticians who are asking you to “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears” about the benefits of globalization. And this is true beyond NAFTA. In San Francisco, New York, and Washington D.C. there has been recovery since the 2008 crash. That’s less true in other parts of the country.

Upward mobility is calculated by considering the percentage of people who are born in the bottom rung of the income level and make it to the top. The average in the United States is about 7.5%, which is about half Canada and much less than our counterparts in Europe. Despite the American dream of turning “rags to riches” it’s not true for most people. And it’s even less true for some people. The upward mobility rate in Boston is 10.5%, but only 5.7% in Nashville, 4.9% in Columbus, Ohio and Indianapolis, and 4.5% in Atlanta. (Source: http://economics.harvard.edu/news/new-research-mobility-studies-profs-chetty-hendren-and-katz)

If you live in a rural town or midwestern city whose factories are closed and your chance of achieving economic success is in the single digits, it probably does feel like you are looking at carnage even before you consider school debt, drugs rates, and your chances of retiring. And the people on TV who tell you things are getting better because we’re at “full employment” are the ones who are asking you “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.”

I am not apologizing for President Trump. I wish we had a President who would have said “I made a mistake, but any time we witness the peaceful transition of power is a historic day. I hope to earn the support of every American citizen beginning today.” But we just had an election and that is not who President Trump is. Rather, the purpose of this post, is to try to consider the perspective of his supporters and to understand why they hear truth in statements that sound to me like lies.

The bottom line is that there are things we can all agree on. Student debt is holding down a generation. Retirement is becoming a pipe dream. Infrastructure is crumbling. And yes, for a lot of people health care is expensive and the cost is a burden. (Remember both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump won their primaries in places like Indiana and Michigan.) If the Democratic Party wants to win elections again then attacking Donald Trump’s personality isn’t going to be enough. They need to understand these truths and offer a vision of hope that is more than just “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.”

P.S. for my progressive friends who claim that I’m “normalizing” President Trump, I’m not. I’m trying to understand and respect the perspective of someone other than myself. That’s what makes us progressive.