The great philosophical and political issue of our time is whether there actually is an objective version of truth, or whether, instead, everything that we do is "socially constructed," a choice of what is convenient for whoever happens to exercise governmental control at the time.
While this is a conundrum actually beginnng long ago — it’s a problem that Plato faces squarely in The Republic, and one that Richard Weaver thought took a fatal turn in the 14th century with William of Ockham — the manipulation of the truth to serve partisan political purposes has never been as prominent a feature as it is right now in the upcoming election.
For some time now, Democrats have claimed that President Trump has an uneasy relationship with reality, from the time that he was accused of exaggerating the crowd at his inaugural in 2017 to the latest demand that Republican Convention speeches be delayed before broadcasting, so that they can be "fact-checked."
Setting aside the problem that what passes for "fact-checking" is often partisan spin, it's a fact that President Trump is given, in his tweets especially, to simplifying, embellishing, amplifying, and occasionally overstating for dramatic effect. One might expect nothing less from someone who was a talented self-promotor and popular television reality-show impresario before he was a politician.
Nevertheless, there always has been a solid core of reality behind Mr. Trump, as the most astute of commentators have observed, so that even if he sometimes can't be taken literally, it's a mistake not to understand that he should be taken seriously.
The serious part of Trumpism is placing the national interest above the globalist policies of the Obama administration, believing that individual economic initiative is a better means of achieving prosperity than governmental redistribution of resources, and, in general, holding to the view that deregulation, lower taxes, and reducing the federal bureaucracy are better for the American people than the alternatives offered by the Democrats.
Equally serious is the president’s rejection of the identity politics of his opponents, his battle against their "political correctness" (which would restrict the permissible range of speech and thought), and his belief in the necessity to preserve the traditional understanding of the Constitution, and, in particular, the Second Amendment provision of the right to bear arms.
There is some validity to his opponents suggestion that in all of this, what Donald Trump actually stands for is an attempt to turn back the clock to a simpler time — perhaps the post-war period of the late-1940s and early-1950s. An era when American prosperity blossomed, and when this nation was admired in a manner that has rarely occurred.
Given that our universities have almost universally preached a progressive creed, the notion of moving back to a time when equality for women and minorities were not as prominent as it is now is anathema.
However, all change is not necessarily progress, and some of the values of the 1950s — patriotism, piety, family solidarity — do have timeless validity.
Democrats argue that ours is a nation rife with "systematic racism," oppression, and inequality, but the Republicans suggest that compared to other times in our history, and to the records of other nations, such a view obscures rather than reveals reality.
Whatever philosophy professors might believe, there is an objective reality (and no one could actually live a meaningful life believing otherwise).
Thus, it's not particularly helpful when U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accuses the president of being an "enemy of the state," or when Hillary Clinton, who still has not accepted the reality of the Electoral College dictating the winner in a presidential election, counsels Joe Biden not to concede the election.
The Obama administration’s use of our intelligence and investigative agencies, in cooperation with the Clinton campaign, to create and maintain the false "Russian Collusion" narrative first to tarnish the campaign of Donald Trump, and then to explain their failure to win in 2016, was even a greater betrayal of our constitutional system.
Former FBI director James Comey has actually candidly acknowledged that he sought to take advantage of the political inexperience of the Trump administration to send agents to interrogate Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn without the permission of the White House Counsel’s office, an enterprise that is still bedeviling not only Flynn, but the federal courts in the District of Columbia.
The Flynn imbroglio will come to an end soon, and the perpetrators of the Russian Hoax will likely be exposed in the near future.
Yet, what is most important is that the American people now have an opportunity to choose between a reaffirmation of our constitutional system, and a program set forth by manipulators who would repudiate law, popular sovereignty, and reality itself.
Stephen B. Presser is the Raoul Berger Professor of Legal History Emeritus at Northwestern’s Pritzker School of Law, the Legal Affairs Editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, and a contributor to The University Bookman. He graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and has taught at Rutgers University, the University of Virginia, and University College, London. He has often testified on constitutional issues before committees of the United States Congress, and is the author of "Recapturing the Constitution: Race, Religion, and Abortion Reconsidered" (Regnery, 1994) and "Law Professsors: Three Centuries of Shaping American Law" (West Academic, 2017). Presser was a Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy at the University of Colorado's Boulder Campus for 2018-2019. Read Stephen B. Presser's Reports — More Here.
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