Is Donald Trump a “dictator?” Did the events of Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, DC, constitute an “insurgency?”
Is Joe Biden “sharp as a tack?”
Is the science of climate change “settled”?
Are Javier Milei of Argentina, Marine Le Pen of France, and the AfD party in Germany “far right?”
Is the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis a “conspiracy theory?” Was the persistence of the virus a “pandemic of the unvaccinated?” Does Anthony Fauci “represent science?”
Does Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, “promote hatred?” Do “fact-checkers” check facts?
Are “fake news” and “disinformation” a dire threat to “our democracy?”
Let’s ask a question about these questions: Why on Earth were we placed in a position of having to answer them?
In an open society, perspectives on reality confront one another in forceful competition. Each may contain some particle of truth — or at least some useful information.
So even the flat-Earthers are allowed their say. Even the Bigfoot seekers appear on the Discovery Channel. Somewhere among the nonsense, there may be something worth hearing.
Because we don’t precisely know where or when, the conversation is never over.
A vast diversity of perspectives should be promoted within the open society. It’s the intellectual equivalent of hybrid vigor.
If we all think alike, a single fatal error, being shared by all, will destroy the world.
Mandated reality
These precepts are not original. They have long been part of the American DNA. The default, for us, has always been debate.
When certain subjects, like slavery, were made taboo and removed from the possibility of discussion, towering figures arose and terrible conflicts were fought to restore the balance.
However, the past four years have seen a sustained effort to overturn the principles of the open society. The just-departed administration, of which Joe Biden was the decrepit figurehead, tried to impose by threat or mandate a version of reality that brooked no discussion.
Supported by its allies in the media, the university, and the bureaucracy, the administration became, in its own eyes, the guardian of truth.
Yet on every important question that confronted the country, it was almost invariably wrong — and I say “almost” as a kindness.
From the pandemic to the economy, from energy to war and peace, the faceless clique that ran the government on Biden’s behalf made an unholy mess of things.
The freedom of failure
But that wasn’t the worst of it. Mistakes are inevitable, particularly in government — anyone who doubts this is invited to read British economist Paul Ormerod’s charmingly titled book, “Why Most Things Fail.”
When you fail, you try something different — it’s called trial and error, also the scientific method, the only reason humanity has advanced from living in caves to driving Teslas.
The Biden people, being wrong on almost everything, decided to sanctify error. They were the keepers of reality, owners of the truth, and they told us, over and again, “Error is truth” — and they insisted we repeat it until we got it right.
Error is truth. The conversation was over.
To every question I listed above, the only acceptable answer was “Yes.” By these affirmations, the ruling caste thought they were constructing a new, improved reality — a world in which all their dreams of power and control came to fruition.
But were they the truth?
Jacinda Ardern, prime minister of New Zealand during the pandemic, said out loud what Biden’s puppeteers only whispered behind the scenes.
“We continue to be your single source of truth,” Ardern claimed for her government. “Unless you hear it from us, it is not the truth.”
In the manner of Ardern, the administration ascribed to itself a divine attribute: They were the single source of truth and light, and their many errors, they proclaimed, were the misperceptions of a deluded public.
The debate was at an end.
Disgracefully, the news media went along. They defended and parroted the government much as a person of faith might defend and quote sacred Scripture.
Academia went along, as did most corporations.
The mainstream churches went along, placing the secular word of a doddering president above their own received wisdom.
The open society was closed for repairs until further notice.
Again: The greatest danger in a closed system isn’t error but the impossibility of correcting error — of ever arriving at the truth.
For four years, we worshipped the flickering shadows of Plato’s cave, while hostile governments and violent groups, anchored in brute reality, did terrible damage around the world.
To the bitter end, whoever wrote the words for Biden’s teleprompter remained walled off in a bunker far from anything remotely resembling the real world.
In the former president’s bizarre farewell address, he railed one more time about “misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power.”
He complained about Facebook’s dismissal of fact-checkers, who were shameless instruments of projecting error as truth.
“The truth is smothered by lies,” said our departed president, and he should know (but probably doesn’t).
The justification for destroying the open society was that ordinary people can’t handle the truth. They will be misled by populists and demagogues into surrendering our inherited freedoms for a mess of pottage.
‘Our democracy’
To preserve truth, freedom, and the American way, the ringmasters of the Biden clown show believed they had a right to rule in perpetuity. They called this form of government “our democracy” — it was the possessive that counted.
Yet our country had been in this place before. John Adams persuaded Congress to enact the Sedition Act and threw citizens in jail for slandering the federal government — which is to say, badmouthing him.
Adams was roundly defeated by Thomas Jefferson in the 1800 presidential election. And luckily for us, Jefferson understood that the question of state guardianship over truth was of supreme importance.
This is how he put it in his first inaugural address: “If there are any among us who wish to dissolve this Union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it.”
“Let them stand undisturbed” — like the flat-Earthers, like the Bigfoot believers, like every eccentric and unpopular perspective in this immense multifarious country, each, no matter how confused, bringing their shred of truth to the information sphere.
Americans, Jefferson knew, didn’t need government protection from error. Truth, he understood, always aligned with the voice of reason — but rarely with the dictates of power.
Using the prevalence of lies to impose censorship merely replaced one set of easily refuted falsehoods for another that is much more difficult to expose and explode. At that moment, Jefferson inaugurated the American version of the open society, by far the freest, most forgiving, and most tolerant in history.
The parallels with the present transition, I think, aren’t trivial.
Biden and his enablers, like Adams, were crushed under the political unpopularity of their abuses. They were humiliated and removed from the election by their own people. Their designated heir, Kamala Harris, was trounced by Trump.
By Inauguration Day, most of them had shuffled out of Washington, leaving nothing of substance behind beyond a faint stench of futility.
A new crew is now in charge. This is the glory of our system: It allows the possibility of redirection and a rebirth of trust.
Will Trump and his fellow rebels succeed where the Biden cabal so dismally failed?
That’s a low bar to climb over. As an American citizen, I naturally wish them the best — but then I remember Paul Ormerod.
When it comes to government, most things fail. The new arrivals in Washington, let’s hope, will fail less catastrophically than was the habit of their predecessors.
Whether Trump’s policies turn out to be right or wrong evidently matters. But the resumption of the great American debate, of speech that is unencumbered and unafraid, of a Jeffersonian-style open society, matters much more, since it will enable progress.
Let there be fight
Let there be furious disputes among political allies, Republicans arguing with Republicans, Democrats with Democrats, inside the right and the left as well as against each other.
And let outsiders, popular or unpopular, orthodox and heterodox, join in.
I propose an easy test to tell whether we have regained the freedom to discuss every important subject: Count how often the word “disinformation” appears over the next four years.
Since 2021, we have been hearing the same refrain from those wielding political power: “What you just said is toxic disinformation and must be removed from the information sphere.”
If that continues into 2025, our swabs of the culture should turn pink as did the COVID-19 kits. The sickness is still there.
But imagine if we heard something like this: “What you just said is in error, and here is the evidence for my point of view.”
The conversation at that point would resume — once started, it will roll on indefinitely, back and forth, trial and error, into the future.
As I noted, Trump and his administration have been left an extraordinary number of messes to clean up, both at home and abroad.
Nothing, however, is more important, or will redound more to their credit, than the restoration of the open society to Americans of all persuasions.
In his first day in office, he signed an executive order that declared “Government censorship of speech is intolerable in a free society.”
It’s a good beginning. More needs to be done.
