The right, so the thesis goes, lies and if we can show that they lie, then we can embarrass them. But this analysis and the prescription for infinite fact checks fail to grasp the purpose of a lie.
Lies create narrative fantasy out of politics. For privileged voters, this fantasy plays out through symbols — flags, living icons, songs, uniforms — that stand for political abstractions. This is why liberals are so offended by the aesthetics of the Trump administration, yet so unwilling to actually stop him. The president’s aesthetic relationship to the symbols of America is different than the liberals' relationship, but this can only be contested through a counter-fantasy. Trying to puncture an alternate reality with the Fact Check Hour hosted by Alex Hamilton on the Dignity of Office channel is a doomed venture.
The use of power by the ruling class and their state has little relationship to the symbols in play: Obama was a symbol of equality, yet school segregation remained basically unchanged, and black household wealth declined. His policies helped out big banks, charter schools and enemies of organized labor, even though he claimed the precise opposite would happen. He was a liar, just of a different aesthetic variety and not as vicious as the current president.
Okay, so politicians lie. We all know that. But dishonesty in America reduces politics toaesthetics, a key characteristic of fascism. This creates a different layer of reality: political realism. Political realism is a curtain between the real — of flat wages, rising temperatures and social dislocation — and the internal experience of politics. Whether by branding Black Lives Matter as Russian bots, or insisting the Democrats are part of a deep-state child sex cult, political realism takes a very real social crisis and turns it into a crisis of symbols or a battle over "values."
This is the only way for parties that are not interested in materially expressing the will of working masses to perform mass mobilization. It is the democratization of anti-democracy. It is also what Democrats mean when they say pragmatism — that one must work entirely within the symbolic realm where no change is possible. It doesn’t matter that any politician is lying because for tens of millions of insulated voters, political reality is only created by the battle over symbols. A crusade against invading gangs and subversive communists is more compelling than the liberal alternatives, which is why liberals lose those suburban Republicans they’ve spent 30 years trying to win.
As another socialist once said, “What are we to do if we see with our own two eyes more than honest pawns and dutiful kings?”
Politics is real. Oppressed people know this all too well, living daily through the moral and physical assault of capital. An encounter with the real annihilates fantasy. That’s what post-truth means — political reality is beginning to tear open. This tear allows a glimpse of the real behind realism. Leftist organizers must at last tear the veil asunder to produce from the state of emergency the emergency of the real.
Red Star: Shatter realism
