Time to Turn Off the Gas in Political ‘Gaslighting’

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on Dec 2, 2022

Interest has been rising for years as “gaslighting” seeped out into the linguistic mainstream. It won the Most Useful/Likely to Succeed category in the American Dialect Society’s 2016 word-of-the-year competition and became a runner-up for the Oxford Dictionaries 2018 word of the year, just behind the winner, “toxic.”

Nevertheless, we can only hope that apparently rising interest in the term “gaslighting” shows a continuing interest in reality, as opposed to what former Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway famously offered in the early days of his presidency as “alternative facts.”

“As we noted when we awarded Trump our 2015 Lie of the Year award for his portfolio of misstatements,” said PolitiFact in 2016, “no other politician has as many statements rated so far down the dial. It’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen.”

Of course, lying is hardly limited to any one political party. Neither is self-deception.

The competition between facts and “alternative facts” has become increasingly ferocious. The mixed blessings of alternative media and social networks make it more possible than ever to not only choose one’s favorite media — or propagandists — but also to construct our own alternative realities.

I am reminded of Trump’s own zealous efforts to exaggerate the size of his inauguration crowd, claiming it was the largest ever, undaunted by the many eyewitnesses and photo evidence that showed former President Barack Obama’s crowd, among others, to be much larger.

But we were not as shocked as we might have been had we not been conditioned by Trump’s alternative facts going back at least to his early fruitless campaign to cast doubt on Obama’s birth certificate.

In its more extreme forms, the pursuit of “alternative facts” can feed what George Orwell called “doublethink” in his classic “1984.” It described a process of indoctrination in which subjects are expected to accept two conflicting beliefs as truth, even when it conflicts with their own memory or sense of reality.

But maybe, after the surprises of the recent midterm elections, we may see a cresting of the current rise of Trump-style doublethink.

The collapse of the widely anticipated “red wave” of Republican victories in the midterms looks a lot like a wake-up call to those who relied too much on the realities portrayed by the conventional media and political wisdom.

Reality, as exhibited by voters in a fair election, can cut through the malarkey and turn off the gas in gaslighting, if we care enough to stick with reality.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)