Unconcealing the real truth
The function of Trump’s bombastic candor
Glenn Ellmers, in “How Trump Turns Postmodernist ‘Truth’ Against Itself” (Chronicles, July 2024), maintains that “educated liberals long ago abandoned the idea of permanent standards of truth and morality, derived from God or nature.” For the last fifty years, he maintains, “our elite universities have been promoting the postmodernist ideology that holds truth as entirely subjective, a function of power. Whoever controls the levers of authority sets the ruling ‘narrative.’”
Ellmers further maintains that, when truth is seen as subjective, “the very notion of lying takes on a new meaning. It does not mean—as it did in the old-fashioned or common sense understanding—saying something contrary to the facts. ‘Lying’ instead means opposing the official narrative of the regime.” Accordingly, Trump and MAGA supporters are accused of lying whenever they express opinions that are viewed as illegitimate, because they are contrary to the establishment narrative.
Thus, truth has become what those in power say it is. Reason has been eclipsed, suppressed by the interests of power. The real truth is concealed.
Ellmers refers to the “intellectual ruling class” and the “left-wing ruling class.” This is unfortunate terminology, because it obscures the distinction between two different social sectors. There is, on the one hand, the power elite, consisting of those who possess direct and indirect control of the principal economic, military, political, mediatic, and higher educational institutions of the nation. And on the other hand, there are the educated liberals of elite universities. The latter fancy themselves as critics and even opponents of the former, when in fact they are their unwitting allies. In my view, this dynamic of a self-delusional intellectual class is the principal source of the toxicity of our public discourse and the confusion and division among our people.
Left-wing academics of the period 1972 to 2012 thought of themselves as the sophisticated sector the people, believing themselves superior, inasmuch as they did not naively respond to appeals to “God and country.” Although by and large not hostile to religious believers, they considered themselves too sophisticated for serious attention to religious beliefs and practices. They were not blatantly unpatriotic, but they felt uncomfortable with patriotic displays, vaguely aware of the imperialist policies of their nation. These “radical liberals” and those influenced by them were called, with justice, “effete snobs” by Richard Nixon’s first vice president, Spiro Agnew.1
In spite of their vague awareness of American imperialism, academic leftists of the period did not see the importance of personal encounter with the anti-imperialist movements of the world, which would have empowered the intellectual class to appropriate the insights of the movements and to arrive to the possibility of leading the American people toward, first, the taking of power with the support of the people from the hands of the elite; and secondly, the building of a national economy that expands without depending on imperialist interferences in the internal affairs of nations.
In my view, the irresponsible and self-centered lack of commitment by leftist academics is the principal cause of the emergence of a toxic left in the second decade of the twenty-first century, and of the destructive ideological civil war today. Because the essential function of intellectuals is to lead the people toward economic, political, social, and cultural development, as has been demonstrated by the people’s revolutions of the world for the last 100 years. But in the period 1972 to 2012, academic leftists engaged only half-heartedly in the construction of a more just and better world. Any formulated belief in social justice was rationalized away, when it became inconvenient for their relatively privileged positions and salaries. With their sense of superiority, they were quick to find defects in real people’s revolutions, which provided justification for their failure to take risks to defend them.
Subsequently, the socially useless half-hearted leftist intellectual was replaced by a new generation of social justice warriors determined to become more relevant to social and political affairs. They attained relevance through superficiality of understanding and incivility of tactics, in violation of the formulated norms of the academic world. Their desire to understand the true sources of imperialism and the paths to post-imperialist construction was even less than that of the generation that spawned them.
The social justice warriors, like the effete leftist academics who came before them, serve the interests of the power elite. Being unable to unify the people on the basis of common principles and values, they have functioned to ensure the powerlessness of the people, who now would have very little possibility of united action in defense of their true interests.
The need to unconceal the real truth
In the period 1967 to 1972, my desire to understand what is true and do what is right led me to personal encounter with the black nationalist/black power movement. It led me to appreciation of the fundamental differences in understanding between a mainstream American perspective and a perspective formulated from the African-American experience. This implied that there is no objective truth, but only truth from a black or white perspective, or more generally, truth as perceived from particular social positions. If so, it would mean that truth would ultimately be defined by that social class or group that possessed the political power to impose its understanding on others. Truth, accordingly, is what those in power say it is.
As best as I can recall, I have possessed since the age of ten the belief that the most responsible human beings seek to understand what is true and do what is right, a belief deep within my soul nurtured in Catholic primary school education and in the modeling of Catholic feminine virtues by my caring mother, Edith (DiGirlamo) McKelvey. I therefore found completely unacceptable, in moral terms, the notion that, in the real world, the quest for truth is eclipsed by the pursuit of power.
I returned to the Church to find the resolution to this epistemological question. The Catholic philosopher Bernard Lonergan had already formulated it. The learned Jesuit had demonstrated that, in all fields of human knowing, understanding begins with a perspective rooted in social and cultural horizon, but the inherent limits of this initial understanding can be overcome through sustained personal encounter with persons of other social and cultural horizons, insofar as the person seeking understanding takes seriously the insights of the others, and if the desire to understand takes priority over other normal human desires, such as the desires to protect individual and group interests.2
I subsequently found through independent study of Marx that the great German philosopher had used a method that could retrospectively be defined as cross-horizon encounter, in that he encountered the movement formed by intellectuals, workers, and artisans, and he studied (encountered) German philosophy, the science of political economy, and idealist socialist currents of thought. His penetrating and comprehensive understanding was at once an analysis of human history, a critique of capitalism, and a projection for the future of humanity. It transformed the human quest for understanding, not so much in Western academic institutions, but in critical theories emerging from political practices, taking three different evolutionary paths in Western Europe, Russia, and the Third World.
Embracing the method of personal encounter with respect to the movements of the Global South, I have during the course of time arrived to appreciate two fundamental dimensions of today’s global political and epistemological reality. First, unlike Western post-modern leftists, the movements and peoples of the Global South assume that there are and must be objective truths in the realms of both fact and value. This is expressed in their collective consensual explanation that European colonialism and imperialism are the primary causes of global inequalities and the underdevelopment and poverty in vast regions of the world; in their repeated declarations and reaffirmations of the sovereign equality of nations, which grants to every nation the right to stewardship over their natural resources and national economies, without interference in their internal affairs by world powers with imperialist intentions; and in their conviction that responsible states seek to expand and develop their economies in order to provide for fundamental human needs and rights of citizens with respect to nutrition, housing, education, health care, employment, and physical development.
Secondly, like Marx, they possess an epistemological method that is a form of cross-horizon encounter, which they call the “dialogue of civilizations.” Such a dialogue has been implicit in the emergence of the Global South, in that the leaders of the people’s movements synthesized Western concepts and values with the traditional philosophies of their peoples, formulated from their colonial situation. They have practiced the dialogue of civilizations among themselves, within regions and across regions, with increasing force in recent decades. And in spite of the deafness of the Western powers, they continuously reiterate their call for North-South dialogue as the only possible foundation for arriving to universal truth and a world of peace and prosperity.
Therefore, I am in agreement with Ellmers in declaring the quest for truth as the necessary response of the people in the post-modern situation of the West. He writes: “In our postmodern and post-constitutional regime—where facts are indistinguishable from propaganda—truth can only be reached by trying to get back . . . to reality itself. The real truth, as opposed to the official narrative of the regime, has to be rescued, recovered from our neglect and forgetfulness.” He appropriates from Heidegger in arriving to understand that the deeper meaning of truth involves the “unconcealing” of reality and nature.
To this insight I would add that the truth must be rescued not only from the political establishment but also from an academic Left that has fallen into decadence. And that understanding of the truth is attained through cross-horizon personal encounter and a process of cross-civilizational dialogue that includes all the peoples and nations of the world.
The unconcealing function of Trump’s bombastic candor
The title of Ellmers’ article, “How Trump Turns Postmodernist ‘Truth’ Against Itself,” points to where he is going. He maintains that Trump senses intuitively that reality “has become hidden or obscured by the various ideological assumptions that characterize modern life.” He maintains that Trump’s “overblown exaggerations” have the epistemological function of unconcealing the truth. He writes:
Trump’s bombastic candor is actually a deeper form of truth-telling. The secret of his appeal, which the left finds both baffling and infuriating, is found precisely in those sweeping overstatements that are not only legitimate but necessary in our present circumstances. Trump exaggerates because he needs to overcorrect for, and thereby overcome, the daily barrage of official orthodoxy that suffocates our common sense. Ordinary Americans seem to grasp that he amplifies, simplifies, and clarifies because it’s the only way to pierce the relentless propaganda of the establishment.
Ellmers further argues that Trump persistently challenges the establishment narrative on two fundamental issues: his claim that sovereignty resides in the people, and not the elite; and his belief that America represents “something good and worth cherishing.”
I concur that the Trump phenomenon ought to be taken seriously as an indication of a legitimate yearning among a significant sector of the people. And Elmers has gotten to the essence of the matter in stressing the historic demand of “power to the people” and the idea of the essential goodness of America, despite its historic social sins.
With respect to foreign policy, Trump’s instincts lead him to opposition to endless wars and toward a disposition to negotiate and trade with world powers in Eurasia, realistically accepting the influence of world powers in other regions. He wants a strong U.S. military with a capacity to defend the national territory and to launch occasional surgical strikes in other regions in defense of national interests, without overextending the nation in fruitless ventures in other regions.
However, with respect to Latin America and the Caribbean, Trump possesses the outdated view that the region belongs to the U.S. backyard. Trump views Latin America and the Caribbean as a region of U.S. influence, a region that the United States, renewed in its greatness, will continue to dominate in accordance with its interests, as was done in the twentieth century. In Trump’s worldview, there is no space for autonomy for Latin American nations that seek a sovereign road. In this conception, Trump is out of touch with the cooperative orientation of China toward Asia, of Russia toward Eastern Europe, and of the BRICS nations toward Asia, Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean.
In order to become a consensual force for the renewal of the American Republic, the MAGA movement must develop a comprehensive and persistent foreign policy of anti-imperialism, envisioning Latin America and the Caribbean as a region with which the USA can develop mutually beneficial commerce, as is being advocated by the leaders of most of the countries in the region. This approach would enhance the productivity and growth of the American economy and ensure regional peace and prosperity.
As the uncontrite author of 243 sanctions against Cuba, which the Biden Administration has kept in force, Trump remains a threat to the nations and peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean, who possess a persistent and unreversible hope for true independence.
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According to the IPA Guide, effete is a disapproving term meaning decadent and self-indulgent, even useless. For example, it notes, the stereotype of the rugged Westerner is just as false as the one of the effete East Coast liberal.
The most important epistemological works of Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984) are Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957) and Method in Theology (1972). I was introduced to and taught the works of Lonergan by sociology professor Joseph Fitzpatrick, S.J., and philosophy professor Gerald McCool, S.J., at Fordham University during the period 1976 to 1978.