Ken Starr’s hypocritical attempt to defend President Trump at this week’s impeachment hearing was missing just one thing -- Starr’s admission that he was wrong 21 years ago to pursue abuse of power charges against President Clinton for lying about an extramarital affair, or that he is wrong now for opposing those same abuse of power charges against Trump for shaking down Ukraine to help him steal the next election. Sadly, Starr managed to be wrong on both occasions.

The ongoing Trump impeachment saga brings to mind Pulitzer Prize winning author Michiko Kakutani’s prescient and incisive book The Death of Truth published in 2018. Subtitled Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump,Kakutani correctly diagnoses the roots of our decaying social and political order and our current political impasse. She forcefully demonstrates why, in the words of reviewer David Grann, “we must rescue the truth before it is buried under a regime of lies.”

At a moment when it appears unlikely that Senate Republicans will muster the political courage to rescue the truth, America will have to fall back on its greatest resource to do so -- the American people. Those of us who are dismayed by this dark chapter in American history cling optimistically to the notion that the American people will come to the rescue by voting Trump out of office come November. I certainly hope so.

But what if the same kind of Russian collusion and interference that we witnessed in the 2016 election repeats itself in 2020? What if bad actors exploit social media and the internet even more voraciously this time around, spreading misinformation and disinformation faster than the Coronavirus? What if Americans become so distracted, so exhausted and so confused by an unrelenting stream of lies and obfuscation that they cease to resist?

Kakutani cites Hannah Arendt’s seminal work The Origins of Totalitarianism to describe how mass propaganda can be used to change people’s beliefs and wear down their faith in institutions to the point that they take refuge in cynicism, allowing totalitarianism to take hold:

“Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held that every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” (The Death of Truth, p. 140.) Arendt’s last sentence might explain the public’s grudging admiration for Majority Leader McConnell’s feckless but stern mastery of the Senate’s rules to block any and all confirmation hearings on Merrick Garland and to bar all witnesses and documents from the impeachment “trial”.

Kakutani describes how Russia “still uses propaganda to achieve these very same ends: to distract and exhaust its own people (and increasingly, citizens of foreign countries), to wear them down through such a profusion of lies that they cease to resist and retreat back into their private lives.” Anyone who thinks this could never happen in America is not paying attention.

A Rand Corporation report called this Putin model of propaganda ‘the firehose of falsehood’—an unremitting, high-intensity stream of lies, partial truths, and complete fictions spewed forth with tireless aggression to obfuscate the truth and overwhelm and confuse anyone trying to pay attention.” (The Death of Truth, p. 141.) In November 2017, the contemporary master of Russian propaganda Vladislav Surkov who’s been called “the real genius of the Putin era”, published an essay in Russia Today (the Fox News of Russia) which “ends with a portentous account about how the Roman Empire replaced the Roman Republic, suggesting that the republic failed because it became entangled in its ‘sophisticated system of checks and balances’ and needed ‘the help of a simple imperial vertical.’ [Surkov] ominously suggests that America, too, is waiting to be pulled from growing chaos ‘by a strong hand.’ An argument that echoes the thinking of a right-wing, antidemocratic philosophy known as ‘neoreaction’ or ‘NRx,’ which is gathering followers in the United States and envisions the elevation of a leader who would run the country as a kind of unshackled CEO.” (The Death of Truth, p. 149.)

Kakutani also cites Neil Postman’s 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, comparing the dystopian future in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (“in which people lead soporific lives, deadened by drugs and frivolous entertainment”) with George Orwell’s 1984 (“in which people live under the crushing autocratic rule of Big Brother”). While Orwell’s totalitarian nightmare accurately described how truth was hidden in the Soviet Union (depicted most recently in the HBO series Chernobyl), Postman argues that Huxley’s dystopia is the real threat to western democracies — “Huxley’s nightmare of a population too narcotized by ‘undisguised trivialities’ to engage as responsible citizens.” (The Death of Truth, p. 166.) Under Trump, we’re seeing both nightmares converging.

Kakutani elaborates on the ironic nature of Trump’s threat to America. “Philip Roth said he could never have imagined that ‘the 21st-Century catastrophe to befall the U.S.A., the most debasing of disasters’, would appear in ‘the ominously ridiculous commedia dell’arte figure of the boastful buffoon.’ Trump’s ridiculousness, his narcissistic ability to make everything about himself, the outrageousness of his lies, and the profundity of his ignorance can easily distract attention from the more lasting implications of his story: how easily Republicans in Congress enabled him, undermining the whole concept of checks and balances set in place by the founders; how a third of the country passively accepted his assaults on the Constitution; how easily Russian disinformation took root in a culture where the teaching of history and civics had seriously atrophied.” (The Death of Truth, p. 169.)

In her closing paragraphs, Kakutani quotes the “eerily clairvoyant” warning in George Washington’s Farewell Address of 1796 that “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men [would try] to subvert the power of the people [and] usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.” Washington also “warned about ‘the insidious wiles of foreign influence’ and the dangers of ‘ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens’ who might devote themselves to a favorite foreign nation in order ‘to betray or sacrifice the interests’ of America.” (The Death of Truth, pp. 169-170.)

As Kakutani wrote her cogent call-to-arms, I also felt an urgency to write about the larger forces threatening democracy at home in America and the climate crisis across the globe. Having spent the better part of my career in local politics, I chose to express my thoughts in the form of a novel, The Blue Sky Rebellion, which starts with a quote from Alexander Hamilton, another founding father who is even more in vogue than Washington these days:

“[T]he only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion. . . . When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, . . . despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind’.”

Alexander Hamilton, 1792

In the opening chapter of The Blue Sky Rebellion, a future presidential candidate purposefully throws the nation into confusion to “ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.” This fictional President Von Bridge plays the same game of lies and distractions that we have all become accustomed to in the Trump era. When this strategy proves insufficient, Bridge eventually casts away the constraints of the Constitution completely and conspires with foreign powers to hijack our democracy and transform the Republic into an autocracy, quickly taking America down the road to fascism. Bridge is a more serious man than Trump -- serious about doing whatever it takes to control the country and serious about keeping the world dependent on oil. Like Putin, he has the tactical intelligence, resolve and cold-blooded mentality to carry out his scheme. But, the real story of The Blue Sky Rebellion is what happens next, as a grassroots “Blue Sky” resistance movement spreads like wildfire to fight the president’s unconstitutional assaults on freedom.

The Trump era has been as unexpected and strange as fiction. By setting The Blue Sky Rebellion in the near future, I gained the perspective and freedom to write a story that challenges the reader to think beyond current events and reimagine the American dream under a new social compact that better harmonizes individual liberty with social responsibility. Whether in fact or fiction, it is clear that our generational challenge is to fight against the death of truth, stop America’s slide into fascism, and save the planet from the ravages of climate change.