The Short-Circuiting of the American Mind

In a 1995 episode of Seinfeld, an extremely Seinfeldian series of events leads Jerry to a problem: He has to take a lie-detector test. Specifically, he has to beat a lie-detector test. He seeks advice from his friend George Costanza, whose personal flaws render him uniquely suited to the task of polygraph cheating. George initially rejects the idea that conscience-free lying can be taught (“It’s like saying to Pavarotti, ‘Teach me to sing like you!’”). But he relents. “It’s not a lie,” George says, with a melodramatic flourish, “if you believe it.”

The joke, in the episode, is at George’s expense: Only in his upside-down world would sociopathy amount to a moral. These days, though, his advice might as well be political theory. To participate in American politics is to navigate, every day, an avalanche of falsehoods—lies issued, with Costanza-like ease, from the highest levels of power. Fact-checking was a theme of Donald Trump’s first presidency. Journalists kept count of those first-term fictions—30,573 in all, per one count—guided by the optimism that checking the president’s words might also serve as a check on his power. In late 2020, when Trump claimed victory in the presidential election he had lost, scholars saw in his declaration the kind of propaganda typically found only in authoritarian regimes. They gave the fiction an epithet befitting its magnitude: “the Big Lie.”