Deep in our hearts we all hope that our beliefs are based on facts, rationality, and a nuanced balancing of conflicting expectations of reality. Among the very few things media scholars have been able to “prove” is the ubiquity of selective perception, namely the phenomenon that our desire to support our claims is so strong that we literally see only the evidence that confirms our established views. Facts in public discourse are still frequently evoked as stable foundations we refer to in times of need. And when the world seems less stable than we would hope for, we tend to think that facts could be our saviors.
President Trump’s surprise win in the 2016 American elections has triggered a passionate debate over “fake news” as a contributing factor in his electoral success. In the mindset of those making a causal link between fake news and the Trump win, surprise outcomes are linked to nonrationality and a state of misinformation, when rational minds suddenly get lost and leave the safe pathway of facts for the unknown, the mythical, the untrue. In this way of looking at the world, myths are fictions or fairytales or entertainments, something designed for the weak, the underinformed, the “stupid.” Myths transcend facts and charm the public with foggy imaginings. The solution, thus, appears to be a better form of communication, a more efficient way of information distribution. New technological solutions, journalistic methods, and media systems are discussed to fix the mistake, to find the right way to “inform the public.” Reformers imagine that if only people were confronted with actual “facts,” they would stop believing the “myth.” But why would they?
If we accept our desire to experience something larger than life, to stand for something that is beyond the weekly paycheck, then myth is the only thing that is worth living for. Myths provide belief systems that structure our experience in a world too complicated for anyone to comprehend. Jack Lule defined myth “as a sacred, societal story that draws from archetypal figures and forms to offer exemplary models for human life.”1 Myths thus create imagined realities and highlight the power of the sacred in our social lives and national politics.
The American public—like all publics—has always been hungry for myths. Think about the ongoing love affair for the Kennedys, the Reagan myth of singlehandedly beating the Soviets (never mind that it was the careful and diplomatic elder Bush who was in power during the fall of the Berlin Wall), or the inspiring campaign of Barack Obama about “change we can believe in.” When presidential candidate Trump entered the race for president, many American voters were more than ready to believe in something. They were still recovering from a crippling financial crisis, had just experienced a series of international terrorist attacks, and had come to recognize and worry about the processes of globalization even in their own neighborhoods. Candidate Trump offered a very powerful myth embodied in three key slogans “Make America Great Again!,” “We Will Drain the Swamp!,” and “We Will Build a Wall!” This myth promised a successful and homogenous America within reach, in which life would be easier, dignity for the worker achievable, and globalization at least somewhat controllable.
“Make America Great Again,” condensed into MAGA in tweets and on bumper stickers, imagined an America that has never existed, but was nonetheless about to be “re-created.” The slogan was simple and powerful, starting with a vague action word and ending in both the promise of greatness and the imagination that we are only rebuilding what was once already there. The slogan also embodied the massive anxiety Americans have always experienced from outside powers threatening the country’s global prominence—this time mostly from China. The fear of China stands for a fear of global competition in general, in which faraway, hard-to-decipher foreign “aliens” will score better on standardized tests, take over jobs, and occupy one crucial industry sector after the other. In addition to being an anti-global message, “Make America Great Again” had a clear racial and class message as well: greatness was linked with whiteness and wealth. “Make America Great Again” pictured an America from the early episodes of Mad Men, when beautiful white women in pink steel kitchens awaited their handsome husbands in a dreamlike American home, while the kids were admiring the newly bought television set.
As part of making America great again, candidate Trump also promised to provide workers with dignity again. As Katherine J. Cramer so astutely detected in her book The Politics of Resentment, rural consciousness was boiling with resentment against elites well before the election of Trump. Trump’s promise of “draining the swamp” offered a new beginning, when hardworking everyday Americans could take back Washington and other power centers from those, as one interviewee of Cramer says, “who shower before work, not afterwards.”2 For Americans worrying about their jobs, the educational prospects of their kids, and a dizzyingly complicated global economy, Trump presented a chance of things becoming controllable again. While ironic that a multibillionaire from a golden Manhattan apartment emerged as an icon for rural resentment, somehow even Trump’s extreme wealth stood for the possibility of prosperity for everyone, regardless of their current social standing.
“Make America Great Again” and “We Will Drain the Swamp” were smartly combined with another promise: “We Will Build a Wall.” Note how all three campaign slogans were inherently iconic scenes, as if we were reading the Bible or other foundational myths of mankind. Candidate Trump did not talk of a “fence,” a “border control regime,” or something similarly technical. It was not until after the elections that he admitted that some parts of the wall would actually be a fence. Throughout the campaign, he talked about a mythical wall, an imagined barrier from a fairy tale. Political leaders after the fall of the Berlin Wall have tended to call their border barriers “fences,” while those opposing the barriers have named them “walls.”3 Why? The specter of the Berlin Wall had to be avoided. While many countries have desired and more than forty, in fact, have built separation walls since 1989, they did not want the symbolic power of the Berlin Wall to work against them. Candidate Trump had a different vision. More than anything else, he wanted the mental imagination of a “wall,” an impermeable barrier. Building the wall in minds was more important than building it from bricks. Other than a vague promise that Mexico would pick up the costs, Trump’s proposal did not include any actual policy details, construction plans, or an itemized budget. The wall had to be imagined, whether it could actually be built was secondary at that point. The wall was above all a symbol of division, an imagined way to keep “them” out.
While constructing this mythical universe, Donald Trump was not without historical precedent. Many describe his win as an unprecedented triumph of “lies” over “facts.” But has history ever been about the triumph of rationality over desires and dreams? Consider one of the most successful American global visions, the Marshall Plan. While the Marshall Plan in hindsight is often described as a mere economic plan to rebuild certain parts of Europe after World War II, it was, in fact, a project of hope. The Marshall Plan meant to capture the hearts and souls of Europeans and prevent the spread of communism. The United States ran an extensive communication campaign in Western Europe focused on the prospect of change and a belief in the future. At the end, the famous success of the Marshall Plan was as much about captured hearts as about well-spent dollars.
Or take another icon of “Western success”: the fall of the Berlin Wall. While the fall of the Berlin Wall was part of an ongoing, confusing, and contradictory political transition in the Eastern bloc, it is still remembered as a historic moment of mythical proportions: a magical, split-second “event,” not an occurrence of an ongoing “process.” If any previous process is highlighted, then it is bombastic iconic scenes, like Reagan’s announcement in front of the much-guarded Brandenburg Gate: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” The slow, clunky, and occasionally accidental political processes faded in memory and a myth of the power of ordinary people emerged as the event’s dominant interpretation.
This tendency to look for hope, belief, and emotion in politics is still with us today. Just before Trump’s win, another unexpected event shook the globe: Brexit. In the passionate Brexit campaign, the “Remain” (in the European Union) camp provided a toxic combination of fear, anxiety, and countless incomprehensible facts. In contrast, the “Leave” campaign envisioned a mythical “Independence Day,” when a New United Kingdom (or Britain) would emerge from its ashes to be sovereign, influential, and prosperous. Many voters chose this promise over the contradictory current reality of their country.
In all these historical precedents, we see the desire for something larger than life, something people can aspire to. In all these examples, we see the presence of “affective publics,” as Zizi Papacharissi put it, a desire to “feel” politics, events, and social processes.4 While in common wisdom emotions may be separated from reason, in our everyday online and offline interactions these sides of human existence are deeply intertwined. Social media provide an ideal set of platforms for the spreading myths, where hierarchies are often flattened; expertise is increasingly suspect and emotions quickly run high and low. Many of our contemporary myths are born in offline settings or in legacy media, only some are born digital. Still, on social media myths get reconfigured, recycled, visualized, and spread to further communities. Social media’s permanent outrage culture also provides myths with much-needed passion.
In light of these examples of mythical, nonrational power, what could have brought a different election result in 2016? On thing is clear: Trump’s carefully built up mythical message could not have been beaten by a set of carefully aligned facts or a series of detailed spreadsheets. Only a powerful counter-myth would have been able to win the day. Hillary Clinton’s myth of “Stronger Together” was an effort in this direction, but it only suggested that the world would remain complicated and globalization would continue, but at least we would be in it together. This counter-myth was professional, rational, and fact-based, but it was weak in its battle for hearts and souls. It was as large as life, but not larger than life as any good myth has to be. In an ideal world, a professional woman with decades of experience and relentless dedication to public service would have easily won against a man who has never held any public position before and presented quite a few major character issues. In a rational world focused on calm deliberation, his win simply does “not make sense.” But once we accept the power of the mythical over the factual, it all seems to come, at least somewhat, together.
If you combine the hope of a “great America” with the promise of a protected America and a renewed Washington, the vision of Trump seems rather irresistible. Still, once this vision won on November 8, 2016, the media and other opinion makers were frantically searching for reasons. It would have been possible to blame the outcome on the naïve belief in data science and polling that dominated discourses instead of sophisticated qualitative and mixed-method studies like Cramer’s. Analysts could have focused on the lack of vision on the Democrats’ side. Even realizing the tragic influence of the longlasting Sanders movement on Clinton’s prospects would have been a brave attempt at understanding. Instead, an unlikely candidate for blame quickly emerged: fake news.
We still do not know how many voters changed their preferences based on any false news item. Fake news may have only reinforced existing beliefs in voters who already had strong voting preferences. Still, fake news as a concept has dominated discussions of the Trump win and presidency ever since. It led to an obsession with fact-checking and a constant frustration that even the best fact-checking is not enough to convince the voter who “believes.” In the meantime, perhaps unsurprisingly, President Trump has hijacked the fake news debate quite brilliantly by realizing that “fake news” is also a belief system you can use for your own purposes. If facts are in the center of discussions, it is enough for him to destabilize the source or the article, and the argument for many voters is simply “gone.”
Overall the fake news debate assigned a bigger role to media in public life than it deserves, while ignoring larger processes that are influencing politics in the United States, for instance income inequality, anti-immigrant sentiment, racism, and a deep feeling of economic, social, and cultural uncertainty. The fake news debate reduced voters to failed rational beings, while ignoring the “fact” that we all desire something more from life than reason. Facts, professional experience, and reason suffered a tragic loss in the elections of 2016. But they lost against something meaningful: a mythical promise of hope, prosperity, and dignity.