How the war on reality threatens democracy. From January 6 to COVID-19, if truth becomes malleable we lose America’s ability to function coherently.
In an alarming echo of George Orwell’s 1984, the MAGA movement and the Republican Party are waging a war on reality itself. If they win, you may end up questioning what you see with your own eyes, and even your sanity.
Steve Benen, producer of The Rachel Maddow Show and author of the new book Ministry of Truth, joins us on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast. From the Big Lie of the 2020 election to whitewashing the January 6 insurrection, Benen reveals how GOP leaders are systematically rewriting recent history.
He provides striking examples, such as the party’s revisionist narratives around COVID-19 responses and Trump-era economic policies, showing how they exploit cognitive biases and use their vast media ecosystems to create parallel realities.
What sets this apart, Benen argues, is the scale and audacity: Entire events are being erased or rewritten, often contradicting what millions witnessed firsthand.
He details how party officials are creating an alternate universe where facts are malleable and truth is whatever they decree.
Benen warns this goes beyond typical political maneuvering — it’s an existential threat to democracy, eroding the very basis for collective decision-making. As truth becomes a partisan battleground, we’re entering uncharted territory. The stakes? Nothing less than America’s ability to function as a coherent society.
Apple Podcasts
Google Podcasts
RSS
Full Text Transcript:
(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. In George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Ministry of Truth was tasked with constantly rewriting history to align with the party’s ever-changing narrative. What was once fiction has become an alarming reality in American politics today. As we watch the events of recent years unfold, a troubling phenomenon has taken place: One where facts become malleable, truth becomes subjective, and reality itself is up for debate.
At the forefront of this Orwellian crusade is the modern Republican party wielding misinformation and historical revisionism as weapons in a war against our shared understanding of recent history. My guest today, Steve Benen, has been on the front lines witnessing and documenting this assault on the truth. As a producer for The Rachel Maddow Show and the author of the bestselling book The Impostors, Steve has had a front-row seat to the GOP and MAGA’s increasing detachment from reality.
Now, in his new work, Ministry of Truth, he’s sounding the alarm on what may be the greatest threat to American democracy in our lifetime. Steve dissects the Republican party’s efforts to rewrite everything from the 2020 election and the January 6th insurrection to the Trump-era policies and their economic impact. He draws alarming parallels between these tactics and those employed by authoritarian regimes throughout history, warning us of the dire consequences if we allow this revisionism to go unchallenged.
In an era where facts are under assault, Steve tries to provide a bulwark against the tide of misinformation threatening to overwhelm our political discourse. Steve Benen, in addition to being a producer on The Rachel Maddow Show and the author of the Maddow blog, has had his own op-eds appear in the New York Times, the Washington Monthly, and the American Prospect; he’s received two Emmys for his work and been nominated for four more.
He’s the author of the previous book, The Impostors, and it is my pleasure to welcome Steve Benen here to talk about Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War of the Recent Past. Steve, thanks so much for joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Steve Benen: Jeff, it’s an absolute pleasure. Thank you.
Jeff: Well, it is a delight to have you here. Thank you. Certainly, politicians, for as long as we’ve known politicians, have stretched the truth, have told lies, have shaded facts and information to accomplish what they wanted to accomplish. What’s fundamentally different about where we are today?
Steve: Yes. You’re absolutely right. I mean, I think for as long as there have been historical records, there have been people in positions of authority trying to rewrite them. They try to paper over crimes, eliminate rivals. This has been a mainstay, especially among authoritarian regimes, for as long as historical records have existed. I would make the case in the book, however, that we’re dealing with a slightly new and, to my mind, even more pernicious phenomenon, wherein which the Republican party has adopted this tactical strategic approach to reality.
And they do so with a series of pillars, I argue. They are indifferent to reality, they’re indifferent to facts, they rely on repetition, and most importantly of all, they rely on allies. The reason I think this is different from what we’ve seen in previous generations is that this as part of this systemic attack where we see a party that’s relying on Fox News and conservative radio and conservative media in general to bombard your conservative base and voters in general with these misinformation campaigns and effectively trying to gaslight the public into replacing reality with these counternarratives. I think that’s the key to understanding what’s different about this entire new approach.
Jeff: So is the problem a particular individual, a particular set of views, or is it simply the evolution of this network of media that is able to constantly regurgitate and repeat all of this information?
Steve: Well, it’s a good question. I think that there are a couple of things that keep in mind here. I think the first is that for Republicans and Trump and people like him and his allies, there’s an understanding that they’re dealing with unique scandals. I think that the Trump-era controversies are not like most modern political controversies. Well, it’s not uncommon for parties and officials to deal with one kind of controversy or another over the course of all of American history.
What’s unique about Trump scandals is their severity — the devastating catastrophic nature of some of these controversies. We’ve never had a president, for example, who contested his or her defeat the way Trump did after losing in 2020. We’ve never had an assault on the US Capitol prior January 6th. We never had a federal response to a public health crisis that failed so spectacularly along the lines of COVID.
Given the severity, these devastating catastrophic scandals and controversies, I think Republicans have found it necessary to replace those narratives, to replace those stories and those factual developments with these counternarratives because they feel as if the public understood the truth, the Republicans would go a generation without winning another election. The other element to this. I think your audience is worth keeping in mind, is the fact that Republicans have found that their tactics have proven to be incredibly successful.
At this point, there’s public opinion data that shows that for most Republican voters — in fact, the vast majority of Republican voters — they have believed these counternarratives. They have come to accept the rewritten reality as the truth. And so we see most Republican voters believe Trump won in 2020. They believe that the federal response to COVID was excellent. They believe that Trump-era economy was the greatest in the history of the planet, even though it wasn’t.
And so Republicans have an incentive, a tortured twisted perspective, but they have an incentive to continue along these paths and continue to rewrite history because they have found that it works because the people that they care about most — their Republican base, their Republican donors, Republican activists — they have rejected reality to such a severity that they’re on board with these counternarratives.
Jeff: To them, that lack of reality has become their reality.
Steve: Right. That’s exactly right. I think that, especially given that Republicans over the course of many years have been conditioned to reject independent sources of information, they have said that non-Fox cable news organizations and non-Rupert Murdoch-owned newspapers, for example, are simply not to be believed.
If they see it in the New York Times, or if they see the coverage on MSNBC, they’ve been told so many times that that reality is simply not to be trusted. That for the Republican base, they’ve come to inherently be skeptical of and question anything they see from nonconservative media outlets. And that makes it all the easier for this larger gaslighting campaign to succeed.
Jeff: Talk a little bit about the superstructure, the ecosystem that is supporting this because in many ways, almost all of that superstructure precedes Trump.
Steve: Right. That’s an important point. I think that what we saw over the course of many years is in a universe of misinformation that took root episodically, gradually, and laid the groundwork that Trump was able to just take full advantage of and exploit to a dangerous degree. Obviously, Trump is just one man, and no one person can rewrite history by himself or herself. It’s impossible. It’s just unrealistic. He or she’s going to need partners. He or she’s going to need a media ecosystem: a misinformation ecosystem, if you will, that will partner with him to make this campaign work.
And so I think that it’s the rise of Fox over the course of many years and the disappearance of moderation in Republican politics as GOP politics has become radicalized; all of this has come together in this tortured way at just the right time to allow someone like Trump to step in and take full advantage of it. And unfortunately, it’s been proven to be quite successful.
Jeff: Talk about the degree to which polarization and social media and technology in this regard has played a significant role in this. That it’s part of these forces coming together in a kind of perfect storm.
Steve: I agree. Yes. I think that if you are a conservative voter… If a conservative voter right now is listening to your program, Jeff, and they’re thinking, “Well, you know what, I can create an environment in which I never see information that I don’t like. I can go on social media and follow accounts that will tell me how right I am, who will tell me how right Trump is, and who will discount all independent sources of information. And I can go about my day and my week and my month and my year, and as I prepare for the November elections, and I’ll never have to see a piece of information that makes me uncomfortable or that tells me what I don’t want to hear or that reinforces the recent past in a way that conflict with my values.”
That is an extraordinary thing. It’s not just that they are seeing news in the New York Times, for example, or the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal or what have you. And they’re saying, “That challenges me in ways I’m uncomfortable.” They’re just ignoring those outlets altogether, relying on social media to just filter out things that are just not going to challenge them at all. And that’s an extraordinary thing. And it’s fundamentally unhealthy in a democracy. Once you close off accurate information altogether, how can you make good decisions? How can you show good judgment as it relates to candidates and parties and the upcoming elections?
Jeff: It’s Interesting that when we think about how unhealthy it is for a democratic system, we also have to keep in mind that it happened, that it evolved within a democracy, and it’s worth looking at how that evolution took place for exactly that reason.
Steve: Yes, that’s an important point. I think that democracy rests on a foundation of shared knowledge. And in recent years, as reality has become the point of debate and facts have become malleable in the eyes of partisans that it creates an environment that is fundamentally unhealthy. I think that when we talk about these challenges to democracy, we’re not just talking about some academic notions of philosophical ideas related to democracy; we’re talking about practical and pragmatic considerations here.
Ultimately, what do we rely on to make decisions at the ballot box? Well, we rely on facts and rely on evidence and reports, and we rely on a objective understanding of reality. And once that’s up for grabs, well, it’s no wonder that people are challenging democracy in new and unsettling ways. Look about authoritarian regimes throughout history and the degree to which they’ve tried to rewrite history. Well, there are concerns among many, and I imagine maybe perhaps even many of your listeners.
They’re saying, “Well, I’m concerned about the rise of authoritarianism in American politics.” Well, yes, of course you are because we’re seeing Republicans at the highest levels, including Trump and including many of his allies who are borrowing from the playbooks of these authoritarian regimes. And they’re doing things like the things I write about in my new book, and they’re trying to rewrite history in ways that are fundamentally radical and dangerous. So yes, of course there’s growing concern on this front because there should be.
Jeff: To the extent that it has become embodied in one person — essentially, in Trump — and to the extent that people tire of any show after a while, no matter how successful, no matter how popular it may be, to what extent will the ups and downs and the failure and success of Trump determine the underlying failure and success of this larger narrative?
Steve: Jeff, I think that is my favorite question today. [Steve laughs] This is exactly something that I think a lot about in terms of how are we going to fix this. How are we going to get out of this spiral, this gaslighting spiral? And I think the answer is that what is wrong with democracy can be solved by democracy. I think that parties have to change when voters tell them that they have to.
And so I think that while it’s discouraging to see the phenomenon that I document in the book, and it’s upsetting to realize to see the extent to which reality is being rewritten, I also have some hope in the fact that voters… It’s up to voters to say, “No, that this isn’t acceptable. I’m not going to fall for the scam. I’m not going to embrace the tactics. I’m not going to allow them to work.”
And so I think that once, if and when, I’m describing hypothetically here, but if and when voters reject Republicans and reject Trump at the ballot box in the fall, that it sends a message to the party: “No, this isn’t good enough. These tactics aren’t working anymore. You’ll need to try something else.” I think that’s what gives me hope for the near future. I think that the more Trump is rejected and suffers at the ballot box, the stronger the incentive for his party and those around him to change. That is my hope. We’ll see what happens.
Jeff: Where should the pushback come from? Where should the responsibility for that pushback lie? It certainly can’t rely, although it would be nice if it happens, it can’t rely entirely on an individual to self-destruct or to become unpopular. There also has to be pushback from other quarters. Talk about that.
Steve: Oh, yes, absolutely. I think that the truth needs champions because the truth cannot be its own champion. And so it falls to many, it falls to… Well, in electoral politics, it falls on people like Kamala Harris and Tim Walz and Democratic Party to make the counterarguments and take a firm stand in supportive truth and reality and evidence. I think that there’s a role for all citizens to play in a healthy democracy. All of us, whether we work in media or not, have a role to play in standing up for the integrity of the recent past.
Barbara McQuade in her recent book was talking about the importance of making truth part of our national purpose, and I think that resonated with me because I think it’s absolutely necessary. And I think those of us who work in journalism or work in media organizations, we have a role to play, obviously, in playing the role of filtering out facts, filtering out the distortions, and telling people the facts. Obviously, it’s critically important in any democracy, any healthy democracy, for a strong and vibrant free press to play a role.
But there’s another thing I want to talk briefly about with you, Jeff, and that is the fact that to my mind I make the argument in the book that there are certain parallels between efforts to rewrite history and magic tricks. Now, I realize that might sound a little weird, but at the same time hear me out. I think that when we see a magician pull off an illusion, we’re amazed. How did he do that? That’s incredible. We gasp with amazement. But then, if we investigate further, and we find out how the magic trick works and how the magician was able to fool us, well, then all of a sudden it loses its power.
We’re no longer amazed. We’re no longer taken aback by how impressive the illusion is because we know how it’s done. I think that the same is true when it comes to efforts to rewrite history. If we strip away the gaslighting, and we see through the scam and recognize it for the tactic that it is, well, then it loses its potency. I make the case in the book that to expose these gaslighting campaigns is to defeat these gaslighting campaigns. And so that’s ultimately really why I wrote the book in the first place.
Jeff: We all need to re-watch The Wizard of Oz, I suppose.
Steve: That’s exactly right. We pull back the curtain; we see them — the man behind the curtain — and all of a sudden, it’s no longer that impressive anymore.
Jeff: How does the truth get out, though, in a way, and this is one of the things that journalism certainly is grappling with: to expose the truth and to expose objectivity in a way that doesn’t seem self-righteous and self-important in a way that doesn’t turn off the public?
Steve: Well, yes, that is absolutely a challenge. We have an informal slogan at The Rachel Maddow Show where we say that the purpose of our program is to increase the amount of useful information in the world. And so I think that it’s impossible to approach the public with just a laundry list of facts and details. The people won’t, simply won’t, engage with that coverage. It has to be done in such a way that people find compelling and informative and persuasive.
And so, yes, I think that all of us who work on informing the public, whether it be you, me, Rachel, or anyone else, we have a responsibility to present the information, not only in an accurate way but in a way that people find compelling and that they want to hear more of. And so I think that all of us in media have grappled with this for generations and will continue to fine-tune our efforts to make what we do as persuasive and compelling as possible, but that is a work in progress, my friend. [Steve laughs]
Jeff: How does the larger media landscape, the way people consume information today — some of it good, some of it bad — how does that fit? What has to be done to address this? Because it’s not all about policy as we’re seeing right now in the midst of this campaign.
Steve: Well, that’s true. It’s certainly not all about policy, not exclusively. I think that every election, every race, every political dynamic is going to have a variety of facets, and that’s one of them. I think that at the end of the day, there is a role to play for news consumers and that they have to be responsible, and they have to recognize the importance of credibility and fact checking and editors, and they have to have responsibility to turn to those that they trust.
Now, right now, that’s challenging because too many have been led to believe that untrustworthy outlets deserve blind faith. I think that’s a mistake; I think they’re being misled. But ultimately, a lot of this power rests in the hands of individuals and we have to hope — wait, more than hope, really — we have to make it clear to them that it’s a mistake to invest their faith and their trust in those who are trying to deceive them.
Jeff: It’s interesting that the larger framework in terms of the lies that are put forth and the revisionist history that’s put forth that one of the underlying aspects of that is this distrust of experts, this distrust of expertise, and how it’s also part of the populist message.
Steve: It is, and that’s something that I talk a lot about in my first book, The Imposters, which is about Republicans moving away from being a traditional governing party. And I talk about that very point because expertise has become something of an insult: that the very idea that people who have are fully invested in academia or in doing research and acquiring a great deal of information and establishing facts that they are somehow to be considered suspect because they are eggheads.
They are pie-in-the-sky academics, and they couldn’t possibly relate to you and me on kitchen table issues. And that’s absurd. People who invest their time and energy into becoming experts should not be discounted because of their expertise; it’s insane. And yet I think that there is an anti-intellectual element to the MAGA world and to much of the far right. And they have come to believe that those who have the most information are the least trustworthy, and I think that’s backwards.
Jeff: Is it a sign not just of the far right and the MAGA world, but it’s really a problem inherent in populism in general?
Steve: Well, maybe. I take your point and I think that there is a strain of populism that is inherently distrusting of academia and the “eggheads.” My hope is that that is a relatively small part of progressive populism because I think that in general, if you look on Capitol Hill, for example, you watch congressional hearings, and there are experts who are brought in to testify, I think that in general, even the most populist Democrats aren’t inherently suspect or eager to discount the testimony of those who are brought in as experts.
I think the opposite. I think it’s overwhelmingly on the right. I like to believe that this is an issue that is not bipartisan; let us not blame, put a pox on both houses, on this one. I think that in general, most of this is limited to the far right. Although you and I might disagree on that, but I think that’s generally my experience.
Jeff: One of the other contradictions that seems to be out there is that in some ways, there is a hunger, almost, for a kind of charismatic leadership to make the points that we’re making, that you make in your book so eloquently. And yet, it really needs grassroots efforts as well to move this forward. And those two things are potentially in conflict.
Steve: Potentially — capital P potentially — I think that there is a role for grassroots activism on this front. And I don’t think that we have to assume that that tension exists. I think that certainly all of this is playing out in real-time, and time will tell the degree to which these campaigns are successful. But I like to think that there can be a dovetail effect in which the grassroots and the elites and the academics and so forth and the media and so on that they can all dovetail together in pursuit of the integrity of the recent past and with the integrity of reality itself.
Jeff: How do we get to a place where we’re better at defining what truth is, what reality is, and maybe use different words in different language to get a broader part of the public to understand this?
Steve: Yes, that is a challenge, to be sure. And I tried to write my second book here, my Ministry of Truth book, in a way that was intended to be as accessible as possible to as large an audience as possible. I am not writing exclusively for a Ph.D. audience. This is not a doctoral thesis. It’s written in such a way… My hope is that anyone, regardless of education level, regardless of whether or not they’re engaged in the news on a granular level, that they would find this accessible and persuasive, whether they’re experts or not.
And so I take your point because it is a challenge. It has to be accessible, all this information, in terms of defending the truth, defending reality, defending the integrity of the recent past. It is a challenge to make it readily available to everyone. But I’m doing my best on that front. And given the quality of your question, Jeff, I think you are too.
Jeff: With respect to so many in the Republican world, the MAGA world, those that have gone through the looking glass and that live in this alternate reality, is there hope in your view for ever bringing them back into the real world, or is it just going to take a new generation and a whole new group of people to change things?
Steve: I wish I had a better sense of that. I think that my predisposition is one of sunny optimism. I have this naivete, and I’ve been accused of being naive more times than I can count, but I have this optimism, this stubborn optimism, that says that these folks can be brought around, that there is a tipping point, and that eventually, that they will look back at this era and say, “I think we showed some misjudgment; we trusted the wrong people.”
That day is not soon; it is not likely to happen over the next few months, for example. I have no doubt that the Republican base will continue to rally behind Trump and his allies in the coming months. But I like to believe that there will become a point in which they look back with regret at the fact that they put their faith in the hands of a con man who tried to rewrite recent history.
Jeff: Certainly, with respect to leadership, I suppose it will only change if their livelihood or their re-election depends on it.
Steve: Well, that’s often the case. Although, in candor, I will tell you that in 2020, it was my hope that as Trump failed on multiple fronts from the economy to constitutional law to foreign policy to the federal response to a national health crisis, it was my hope that even the most diehard of Republicans and the most MAGA of the GOP base would look to Trump and say, “Well, you know what? Perhaps we put our faith in the wrong person.” That didn’t happen.
My hopes were dashed, and they stuck with him anyway, and they believed re-written history. And so this first experiment was not much of a success when it came to shaking them from their assumptions. But hope springs eternal. And [Steve laughs] that was a disappointment. But we will soon see whether we see another disappointment.
Jeff: As in science, sometimes it takes more than one experiment. It takes a few to prove the point.
Steve: Quite right. Yes. We know one mistake. That’s alright. Everyone makes mistakes sometime. We can move on to the second and maybe the third, and we’ll see what happens.
Jeff: Steve Benen, his book is Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past. Steve, I thank you so much for spending time with us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Steve: Jeff, I really appreciate the opportunity. We’ll talk to you soon.
Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another Radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
