Taking Alternative Facts Seriously

By now we probably know about Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts”: When Chuck Todd asked her about press secretary Sean Spicer’s insistence, contrary to all evidence, that Trump’s inauguration crowd was the largest in history, Conway branded Spicer’s lie with this helpful new name. It didn’t take long for our social media feeds to erupt with creative falsehoods tagged #alternativefacts or #SpicerSays, rightly ridiculing the ridiculous. But we should take this term seriously, because it essentially describes the new administration’s core method of governing: creating the reality that calls for their pre-determined policies.

As Trump’s lay propagandists have blossomed, over the last few months, into experts, many have turned to journalist Masha Gessen for advice. Gessen has covered Vladimir Putin extensively and just after the U.S. election she published a now-famous essay in the New York Review of Books laying out rules for surviving autocracy. The first rule is, “Believe the autocrat. He means what he says.” Following this rule – and we should follow it – in the case of Trump (and Conway and Spicer) doesn’t mean that we take his words as objective truth. It means taking his words as the truth this administration will govern from.

It is objectively, verifiably true that Trump’s inauguration crowds were small compared to past years’, but he’s going to proceed as if they were historically massive, just as he’s going to proceed as if he won the popular vote. And this is the difference between “alternative facts” and “facts.” Facts point to an established past or present, while alternative facts point to a dawning future. Climate change is real and dangerous, but vigorous policy changes can stave it off. This is a fact corroborated by a community of global experts. Climate change is either a hoax or an overblown non-crisis, and making personal or societal sacrifices for it makes no sense. This is an alternative fact that will shape reality for the next several years (and is already starting to).

You could argue, as Neil DeGrasse Tyson does, that reality is reality – that no matter what you believe, it doesn’t change – and you’d be right if by reality you mean something like nature. But if reality means political reality, you’d be mistaken, because this kind of reality shifts all the time. Yet it’s real enough that it grants or takes away health care, or citizenship, or a hundred other precious things.

So while we ground ourselves firmly in Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s reality, we also have to focus on the dawning Trumpian reality of alternative facts. The past-future orientation of these two realities was laid out pretty explicitly, and now famously, for journalist Ron Suskind in 2004. An aide to George W. Bush, unnamed in Suskind’s article but later revealed as Karl Rove, said that people like Suskind were “‘in what we call the reality-based community’” – that is, “people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’” Suskind goes on:

I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That's not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Terrifying and disorienting as it is, Rove's 2004 reality is our 2017 reality. When Trump says that he lost the popular vote because millions voted illegally, and thus didn’t really lose it, we should know that he is creating a phony past that will shape a very real future, one likely governed by restrictive voting laws. The same goes for his insistence that “torture works” (it doesn't), and his plans for a wall on the Mexican border (which by all credible accounts will be expensive and ineffective).

Like James Fallows and Charles Blow rightly tell us, we have to call lies lies. Doing so can make a real difference: amid reports that the new administration is scrubbing references to climate change from the EPA's website, they've backed off. And if Obama has taught us anything it's that a president's power is finite. But we also have to see how limited calling out lies is as a political and rhetorical strategy. When you call a lie what it is, you’re implying that it's inadmissable as a piece of public discourse and must be withdrawn, and you’re right. But if you’re not taking the next step of knowing that it likely will not be withdrawn, and might very well be shaping the future as you fume, then you’ve already lost.

One of our many challenges in the coming years is to not be exhausted by this exhausting prismatic reality. We have to learn to ridicule alternative facts while taking them seriously. Doing only the former fulfills Rove’s script: they act, we study, repeat ad nauseum. But knowing that alternative facts are simultaneously lies and truths at least gets us closer to the thing we say we want more of: reality.