Two major themes permeate the 2024 election: “lies” and “authenticity.” Each party accuses the other of lies and promotes its candidate as “authentic.” The prevalence of these themes reveals a much deeper issue: the ability of people to create identity and reshape the meaning of truth.
Over the past 50 years, Democrats, who prided themselves as the party of the working class and common people, became dominated by their university-educated elite. A postmodern approach to reality infused their university education and was consistent with their status as “knowledge workers” who manipulate language, symbols, and software. As a result, they seem to generally believe that a person and a party can construct their own identity, prioritizing subjectivity over objectivity and imposing it as truth.
At the same time, Republicans, fitfully under Ronald Reagan and dramatically under Donald Trump, became the party of small business owners, middle-class workers, and traditionalists. They seem to generally believe that reality is objective, nature constrains our ability to shape identity, and truth is a matter of determinable fact. By and large, they work with their hands, deliver goods or services in a traditional fashion, or, if university-educated, reject the postmodern understandings they were taught.
In 2020, I argued that these different worldviews determined the path each party would take in governing: Choosing a Path, Not Merely a Person. This election further encapsulates this enormous philosophical divide between the parties. They speak the same language, but the meaning ascribed to the words is entirely different. This construction of reality avoided two glaring problems.
Republicans are typically the party of “original understanding” and traditional meanings. “Make America Great Again” resonates with the message that what freedom and democracy meant to the country’s Founders ought to be applicable to the country today.
Culminating in an almost incomprehensible spectacle over the last few months, the three and a half years of the Biden administration are hard to fathom from a traditional perspective. But they can be easily understood as the triumph of postmodern sensibility.
Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign was most memorable for what it was not—an event-filled, public outreach. It “reimagined” a campaign as a tightly scripted, carefully staged simulation. Lampooned as the “basement campaign,” it had the great virtue of allowing Joe Biden’s identity to be constructed by his party and reported as such by most of the media. This allowed his cognitive issues, which flared up when Biden’s appearances were not suffocatingly controlled, to be minimized.
Their approach to governance was similar. Despite a flood of immigrants, the Biden administration insisted “the border is secure,” and there was no “open border policy.” It reconfigured these terms as functions of language and social norms—malleable concepts, not certainties, such as counting numbers and describing consequences, like crime, homelessness, and demands on public services.
When inflation became problematic, the Biden Administration’s solution was passing an act increasing government spending by two trillion dollars. By calling it “The Inflation Reduction Act,” the Biden Administration imposed that identity, and so “wish was father to the thought.”
Viewing the world through this postmodern prism persuaded the Democrat party that it must stand foursquare behind the transgender movement, for from this perspective, sexual identity must surely be as much a construct as any other, and the ability to construct one’s own identity a right that follows naturally from that premise.
After three and a half years, Joe Biden’s carefully constructed identity as someone who is “sharp as a tack” and completely in charge, allowed him to run for reelection. But despite sweeping the primaries, Biden’s carefully curated identity grew more dissonant with the facts, as most indelibly shown in his debate with Trump.
While media accounts indicated that Biden was forced to resign by his party’s leaders, a very different narrative was promptly constructed: President Biden heroically and unselfishly concluded that he needed to “pass the torch” despite a record so good that Nancy Pelosi said he deserved to be added to Mount Rushmore.
This construction of reality avoided two glaring problems: how could Biden remain as President if he was failing in body and mind, and how could the party of democracy throw the primary election results overboard? If Biden voluntarily left the race solely because someone else was more likely to defeat Donald Trump, any competing concerns became irrelevant.
While seemingly a coup, in this case, Caesar, though beaten and bloodied, was able to get off the floor, accept his promotion to divine status, and shuffle off to Delaware. The Democrat prime directive was clear: the only true threat to democracy is Donald Trump; whatever means necessary to defeat him are in service to democracy and, therefore, actually aid in its preservation.
Having reimagined President Biden for the second time and having destroyed democracy in order to save it, it was entirely logical for Kamala Harris, the number two of the Biden team, to be the nominee. Yet, it was also incongruous. If anyone should have seen and protected the country from a President failing in mind and body, it was his Vice President. Yet her public record on this subject was crystal clear: she repeatedly insisted that Biden was fully engaged in his job and up to every challenge.
There was also a remarkable irony. Harris had been widely seen as Biden’s insurance policy. With her ill-fated stint as “Border Czar,” dependence upon “word salads” when speaking, and worst of all, her constant and often inappropriate laughter or “cackling,” no matter how far gone Joe Biden might be, having Harris take over was assumed to be worse.
So, the Democratic National Convention was not intended to reintroduce Kamala Harris to the nation but to reimagine and recreate her. The most disconcerting aspect of her personality—the laughter suggesting awkwardness and insecurity—became joy. It was a perfect fit for the event since the overthrow of the dispiriting Biden gave a palpable jolt of enthusiasm to the Democrat faithful and their media acolytes. Thrilled to have a new standard bearer, they readily forgot the Vice-President’s shortcomings and embraced the revelation that the most prominent of them was, properly understood, not a fault but a sign of a happy warrior (a favorite trope of Democrat politicians over the years). And so, joy swept away any anxiety about the old Kamala persona.
The disparate elements of her career as prosecuting attorney, attorney general, and Senator were reconstituted to demonstrate a different attitude toward crime, gangs, and drugs crossing the border. She was no longer the most far-left member of the Senate and the embodiment of the radicalism of her hometown of San Francisco, but rather a middle-class daughter from Oakland. With her seeming lack of seriousness and intellectual depth reinterpreted as joyful exuberance, moments of sober moderation were rediscovered, reimagined, and recontextualized.
Accordingly, there was a certain inevitability that Kamala chose as her Vice Presidential nominee a man who also created his own identity. Governor Walz has a penchant for offering a more accomplished version of himself than the facts suggest. A praiseworthy career in the National Guard, where he was on the cusp of retaining promotion to Sergeant Major, was presented as keeping and retiring at that rank. Service overseas in Italy was burnished to allow it to be misinterpreted as deployment in Afghanistan. Carrying weapons in the Guard was put forward with creative ambiguity as carrying weapons of war in war. Who among us does not strive to present a more heroic version of ourselves to the world?
The postmodern mindset tells us that how we see ourselves is “our truth” and, consequently, that being authentic is to be consistent with that truth. Hence, in their reimagined and recreated selves, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are “authentic.”
However, to Republicans and those not of the postmodern persuasion, it is Donald Trump and J.D. Vance who are truly authentic.
It seems axiomatic that Trump—TV Star, best-selling author, New York socialite, and billionaire businessman—would have a carefully created image in keeping with his larger-than-life personality. Yet the way he presents himself to the voters is remarkably consistent with who he is. A brash showman, he is unapologetic for his wealth and successes, never denying his days as a playboy, his business failures, or his intemperate remarks.
Probably the most damaging comment that Trump ever made, hurting him significantly with women voters, was in the leaked Access Hollywood recording. Trump never disavowed the comment, dismissing it as “locker room talk.” While an apology would have been appropriate and politically astute, the essence of his position was that “everybody knows” men engage in such talk (including the political and media elite he has known for decades), and it is hypocritical and foolish to deny reality. In this regard, he is being honest about himself and the facts.
Trump presents himself to everyone the same way. He always wears his suit and tie. He talks to dignitaries and working people in an identical voice and manner. He is not reimagining, reinventing, or recreating himself—despite periodic pleas from his advisors to do so. And in the face of attempted assassination, he has been undaunted and resolute.
In short, he embraces the antithesis of politics—he does not pretend. He knows what he is for and against and says so, sometimes to his detriment, because his style is blunt, and he is not as facile with language as others, such as his running mate, J.D. Vance.
Vance seems to have heard the siren song of the postmodern persuasion but, after a brief trial, rejected it. He grew up in hillbilly country, fatherless, with an addicted mother and poor prospects. But he managed to join the Marines, go to Ohio State, get a degree, and get admittance to Yale Law School, a breeding ground of the elite.
After writing a best-selling account of his life and gaining access to the nation’s business and entertainment royalty, he soaked up their disdain for Trump and MAGA enthusiasts. He has been quoted numerous times for unflattering remarks in that vein. Yet Vance is a man who remains grounded in the circumstances in which he grew up. He found the outlook of his fellow elites increasingly disagreeable, identifying with Trump as the champion of the deplorables with whom he still felt deep affinity. His education and successes changed him in many ways, but who he was and what he wished to be is determined by a sober assessment of the reality he experienced.
The story of Vance illustrates the difference between the old-fashioned notion of being a “self-made man” and the postmodern idea that a person can fashion their own identity without regard to the limits of nature or fact. He did not simply decide what he wished to be and then use language, symbolism and the demand for acceptance of his truth to create an identity that is unmoored to fact. Postmodern mindset tells us that how we see ourselves is “our truth.”
Some of it is the result of Trump’s persona as a promoter and a showman. Promising the biggest, the best, the most prestigious, and the most entertaining were central to his career as a developer and TV star, so he is prone to exaggeration and puffery. But whether the size of his crowds or the magnitude of his achievements are the best ever are matters of opinion, not statements removed from fact.
It is impossible to cover the catalog of alleged lies from Trump, but one example is essential. A claim repeated over and over, including by Kamala Harris (and Biden said it was the inspiration for his 2020 campaign), is that Trump called white supremacists and neo-nazi protesters in Charlottesville “fine people.” This claim is inconsistent with the unedited video of Trump’s remarks. Trump said that the protestors in favor of removing confederate statues and those opposed each included very fine people, but he condemned white supremacists and neo-Nazis unequivocally.
Even liberal “fact checkers” conclude the claim is untrue, but the Democrats repeat it because the Trump they create through their language and symbols is racist and fascist. Trump as Hitler is a negative construction of identity, a truth of the postmodern mindset that can only be expressed by treating his denial as a lie.
In making the weighty choices before us in the 2024 election, confronted with claims about falsehoods and fakes, like the cynical and jaded Roman politician who governed a province 2,000 years ago, we might also find ourselves asking, “What is truth?”. Those of us who are believers know that the ultimate answer is the one that Pilate received from Jesus. He is truth.
But in the present temporal world, we must ask ourselves, are we prepared to accept a definition of truth that transforms our understanding of what is factually and empirically correct into that which we believe because it satisfies a desire to see what we wish to see? Do we really want to replace the idea of objective truth with the belief that each of us can have “our truth”? Sadly, in my view, many have already gone too far down that road; this election is a chance to say, “Let us choose a different path.”
