You might have heard about Trump surrogate Scottie Nell Hughes’ recent appearance on The Diane Rehm Show, where she appeared to suggest that truth is not objective, but rather, that it is in the eye of the beholder.
She was specifically responding to questions about Donald Trump’s erroneous claim that millions of illegals cost him the popular vote. In case you missed it, Esquire has more here:
“…Everybody has a way — it’s kind of like looking at ratings, or looking at a glass of half-full water. Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth, or not truth. There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts.
“…And so Mr. Trump’s tweet, amongst a certain crowd — a large part of the population — are truth. When he says that millions of people illegally voted, he has some — amongst him and his supporters, and people believe they have facts to back that up. Those that do not like Mr. Trump, they say that those are lies and that there are no facts to back it up.” [Emphasis mine.]
One good thing about Trump’s victory is that he has liberals making sense again. After Trump “saved” 1,000 Carrier jobs, liberals came out of the woodwork in droves to defend the free market and creative destruction — and also to criticize the government for picking winners and losers. Crony capitalism, it seems, is bad.
We now have liberals happily attacking moral relativism and suggesting that there is, in fact, objective truth out there.
And just as it is ironic for liberals to attack moral relativism, it is sad and surprising that conservatives are now ostensibly claiming that the free market just doesn’t work (see Mike Pence) and that truth is subjective (see Hughes).
David Foster Wallace saw this coming a decade ago when he said: “The ever increasing number of ideological news outlets creates precisely the kind of relativism that cultural conservatives decry, a kind of epistemic free-for-all in which ‘the truth’ is wholly a matter of perspective and agenda.” [Emphasis mine.]
I have long decried the decision by conservatives to ape the worst characteristics of the Left. When there is no objective truth, it becomes impossible to hold anyone accountable or even to have a discussion. Instead, we enter into an Orwellian world where words no longer mean anything and where we are constantly questioning our own sanity. Such is the state of modern politics.