Welcome to Life and Art from FT Weekend.I'm Lila Raptopoulos.We are about a week out from the American presidential election.We're not a politics show, we're a culture show.But here in New York, the anxiety is palpable.It's right on the surface.
Probably the weirdest part of this campaign season has been this feeling that we're living in different realities, that even us journalists are having trouble giving weight to the news that we're getting.
It's a bizarre dissonance when things that are clearly next-level false are also very good at mobilizing people.
For example, our former president alleged that immigrants are eating their neighbors' cats and dogs in Ohio, and the race is neck and neck.
When I recently wrote to the esteemed historian, Sir Simon Schama, to ask him to join me ahead of this upcoming election, the thing he most wanted to talk about was basically this, the unprecedented collapse of truth in America.
Simon is a professor of history and art history at Columbia University.He is the host of multiple documentaries and documentary series, and one of the most influential living thinkers and scholars.
He's also, lucky for us, a regular contributor to the FT, so he has kindly joined me today to talk about why he's so worried about misinformation now.Simon, hi.Welcome to the show.
So you and I emailed last week, and I know as we get closer to the election, there's more you're thinking about, but I wonder if you can start by telling me why disinformation and what you called in your email the ruins of reality are top of mind for you days before the vote.
Well, being an old geezer and historian, and someone who constantly is going back to Hannah Arendt, not actually to her most famous book, Eichmann and Jerusalem, but her essays.
She wrote an extraordinarily influential, at least to me, essay in the 1970s called Truth in Politics, which was actually about lying as well as truth. And the basic takeaway, well there were two interesting takeaways.
The major one was that democracy actually can't survive without a consensus amidst all who are participating in it in what the truth is.
And that obviously, that assumption really has been undone by Donald Trump's absolutely unrepentant refusal to admit that he lost the 2020 election.
There's something else that she said I've thought about a lot as I've seen him become, if anything, more successful since his catastrophic debate with Kamala Harris.She says at one point, well, defenders of the truth are always on the back foot.
They're required to solemnly defend abstractions, even if they're very important abstractions, I can say parenthetically, like the survival of the Constitution, for instance. Whereas to lie is to both be excited yourself and to engender excitement.
And lying is sort of liberating for those who do it.
You know, you only have to look at the kind of disingenuously beaming face of JD Vance, who knows he's lying, but still goes for it because lying actually, you know, makes people happy and excited and participatory and start shouting and feeling good about the glee of hatred.
Yeah, and somehow the truth can come off as condescending or something.
That's right, exactly.I will tell you what the truth is, and the refutation courtesy of Elon Musk and social media and all the rest of it is, well, that's just what you're saying.It's just an opinion.
Yeah, yeah.To situate listeners in the type of lying that's happening in America, we recently had two major hurricanes in this country.They hit the South along the East Coast, as hurricanes do.
And Simon, you can tell us, too, in the wake of them, there's been these like disturbing conspiracy theories that have been spread by actual members of Congress.
The worst was probably that the government can control the weather and sent these hurricanes specifically to Republican leaning states.
In your sense, Simon, this misinformation, it feels like almost par for the course now, but it also feels disturbingly new.
Yeah, we've gone from Nero to Caligula, as it were, actually, with Bayeux's pausing.I know they were in the opposite order in the history of the Roman Empire. But the crazier and crazier it gets, the more excited and more traction it gets.
For example, it's not just that hurricanes were invented by Democrats, these hurricanes, to affect disproportionately red states, but the Jews were also behind it.
There was a wave of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories going on there, whether it was George Soros or somebody else.The other very, very important immediate thing, which is an example of the way in which
fantasy paranoia is quite cleverly wired into a particular theme of the MAGA campaign.And that's the story that FEMA, the federal agency of the government, was diverting funds to help illegal migrants cross the border.
I mean, it was just absolutely extraordinary.Despite the fact that Republican governors, as well as the Democratic governor of North Carolina, Roy Cooper, said,
No, President Biden has given us absolutely everything we asked for, and in a very timely fashion as well.But this cuts no ice whatsoever in Rallyland.You can see these as the scenarios of really bad films, bad movies.
The Deep State is a cheap, budget, gruesome, bad movie.We'll have people streaming through the turnstiles.
You know, Simon, I know you're also thinking a lot going into the election about the likelihood that it's not going to be decided on November 5th.
What are the scenarios that you're most worried about?
Wow, well, so many.In the first instance, it's known, really, the attempt to stop certification of the votes, which in turn would produce electors for one slate or another, for one candidate or the other.
You know, there was just a tryout of that, largely improvised, you know, by the gang that couldn't quite shoot straight, but was tried out nonetheless in Michigan and in Arizona, for sure.
So the people running the MAGA campaign learned lots of lessons like that.So they have been trying to actually do things, which have been frustrated, I have to say, by the courts.
But I think actually we're talking about the election being in all likelihood decided by 100,000 people at most in 22 counties across the entire country.
So really, you can really kind of target your certification blockage strategy quite far in advance. Another strategy which is going to be tried out is for state legislatures to be able to block certification as well.
And we may not really know the results until deep into the new year.
The interesting complication about that is actually if in fact Trump and Kamala Harris are tied in the electoral college count, the election could be thrown to the House of Representatives.
But it's the new House of Representatives, and this makes whether or not the Democrats can retake the House.And my hunch is they'll lose the Senate, absolutely for sure, because the arithmetic is so against them.
But it's more likely than not they will retake the House of Representatives.So that will be a very interesting situation, another incredibly interesting situation.
My goodness. Thank you for helping me visualize all of these possible realities.I want to ask you what may sound like an obvious question, but I'd be curious how you would answer it.
Just how these fit together, this climate of misinformation and those likely challenges.What is the relationship between the two?
Well, if you step back a bit and look at actually some of the controlling factors of this astonishingly polarized electorate, some of it has to do with the nature of social media, but the nature of the internet.
And after all, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, who is the owner of X, And that is that you don't make money out of calm reason, out of the old politics.
In fact, by fanning the most extreme gladiatorial combat possible, irrespective of what you have to do to fan those flames.And what you have to do, of course, is invent fairy tales about
immigrants being mostly responsible for violent crime, which is the opposite of the truth.Immigrants, as Donald Trump says, coming into your house and slitting the throat of your daughter in front of the parents.
I mean, sort of insane stuff like that.That actually gets the juices and more importantly, the money flowing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, Simon, when we emailed before this interview and I asked you if there was any historical context for the current moment, you basically said that this is unprecedented and there is no historical context for this.
And that struck me.I've been thinking about it all week.You know, you've written about American history from the revolution.You've written about the French Revolution.Can I ask why you said that and what you mean by it?
Well, historians are often consulted, really, on the assumption that if you try hard enough, you'll find a comparable situation.
But strong historical intelligence knows when history is beaten as a guide to anything, and actually things change incommensurately.And we're talking about the determinants of allegiance here.
Of course, I can easily give you an instance of when a change in the media made a radical difference to the nature of allegiance.
The obvious one is the invention of printing press and rise of anti-Papal, anti-Roman version of what Christianity and Christian theology was, so that Protestants, for example, were able for the first time to use graphics, whether woodcuts or printing,
to portray the Pope as a kind of demon controlled by Satan and so on.
So that actually is bound to have an influence, but the speed at which it could have an influence was really horse and cart, and now lies go around the world before you have a chance to lace your boots.
I can't remember a bad professor who said that, but it's instantaneous now, and it has absolutely no precedent whatsoever, I think.
Yeah.Yeah.You know, Simon, I read an article in The Atlantic recently called I'm running out of ways to explain how bad this is.And it does feel a little like we've been calling this the worst it's been for so long that you can start to just.
lose your mind a little or just start to like, give up, you know, I know that many of our listeners are not giving up, but, you know, nobody out there don't give up, don't give up, you know, put up signs, do absolutely whatever you can.
For once in our lives, the political hyperbole about what will happen under Trump is not in the slightest bit exaggerated, in my view. I mean, the attempt to deport, what is Stephen Miller promising, 10 million, 20 million illegal immigrants?
This is Stephen Miller, Trump's far-right advisor.
I mean, obviously he's not going to be able to do that, but it'll completely crash American agriculture and the construction industry, quite apart from the cruelty and inhumanity involved.
You know, Donald Trump keeps on saying his favorite word in the English dictionary is tariffs.
And either it should, again, be a disqualifier that he doesn't seem to understand who pays for tariffs, namely a shipper and an importer, not actually a foreign economy or a foreign government.
Or he does understand it, but is very happy to say, no, it's not going to be what it undoubtedly will be, an inflation-pumping sales tax. So he has an unerring way of actually making actual policy positions into a kind of edible cartoon strip.
That's the way people want to digest it.
Yeah, that's a good way to put it.You know, we started with this idea, Simon, that the more bombastic, the better.The more bombastic Elon puts it or Trump puts it, and as you're saying now, the more likely it is that people will believe it.
I'm curious whether you think that's a function of the medium, just of social media, or do you blame Elon Musk, who has so much control over it?How do you think about it?
It's not just Elon Musk.Yeah, well, I think actually there's a lot of blame to go around if you think this is all Very bad news.It'd be utterly disingenuous for me to pretend to be neutral about this, Lila.But no, no, it's not just Elon Musk.
It's actually very senior members of Trump's own party who've either capitulated or been eager enablers.
So that really is a kind of betrayal of constitutional norms as the founding fathers and as really political generation after political generation would have understood them, with the exception of the secessionists of 1860.
They too, I think, when the history comes to be written, there'll be a special place, not just in hell, but Dante's version of it for them.It's not true that Donald Trump is Hitler.Those sort of analogies are idle and stupid and crude.
On the other hand, there were plenty of enablers between 1930 and 1932 who thought that Hitler could be controlled, that the Nazis, even if they couldn't be quite controlled, would serve the interests of industrialists and so on and so forth.
And that certainly is happening right now.And that is a source of despair and shame, I think.
I'm so happy to have you on the show.Thank you.
I'm not making you happy, Lilo.
You're not making me happy, but you're just putting it the way, you know, it's just helpful to get it all in order.
Catastrophe has a clarifying effect.It does.Especially on historians.
What does money have to do with politics?Well, everything.That's why on Swamp Notes, the political chat show from the Financial Times, we look at how business and the global economy is shaping the U.S.presidential election.
Trade wars, interest rates, we've got it all.Listen to Swamp Notes by following the FT News Briefing wherever you get your podcasts.
Simon, I want to ask you, you know, we're an arts and culture show, and for a long time now, we've been circling this idea that there's no canon anymore, at least not like there was.
Like how, you know, in the past, if you read these 20 books, you were considered educated.Now we're also reading books from places that were never translated before this generation, and we're watching things from different points of view.
We're cooking from cultures around the world.And, um, there's some interesting tension there that like more options mean more voices, uh, and also means fewer shared reference points and sometimes more longing for a time.
Um, you know, cooking Roha and Ghosh, which I do a lot of time, does not preclude reading Shakespeare.
We thought you might say that. Surprise, surprise.Yes.Keep reading your Shakespeare.
I tell you, there's a subset of the very important point you're bringing up, which really does upset me and other people who weigh in on this, like my friends Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith, which is the notion that actually you must only write or read about versions of yourself.
I think anybody who's a serious writer, including, I think, writers for the FT, want to write about people as unlike themselves as possible after due diligence and research and all the rest of it.
Of course it's wonderful that work in Asian and African and Latin cultures, I mean we've had magnificent translations of of Latin literature, Latin American literature, for a long time now.I absolutely welcome that.How could you not?
But it need not necessarily be at the expense of Dante and Shakespeare and Dickens and Herman Mill and so on.
So it's sort of an and-and.We're in sort of an and-or time.But actually, ideally, we get to a place where we're both are true.Yeah, I agree with you.I'm curious how much you think this translates to the media and information space.
I wonder whether there's a comparison here to the fact that we can't agree on what's true.
Oh, sure.Well, I think it's a slightly different point, but maybe not that different.
One of the most horrifying pieces of news that we've heard over the last month or so is that students at colleges, not my students, I have to say, students are being surprised that they're asked to read whole books.
Because in high school, all they've ever got is extracts. And they're expecting extracts again, or a single chapter or something like that.
And that's to do with the concept, all your listeners are going to be familiar with, the so-called economy of attention.That actually, again, the relentless clickbait, revenue-producing power of media is catering to inattentiveness.
It's catering to the short and ephemeral is catering to billboard version of complicated truths, absolutely not invested in the complex gray areas that you can hold two thoughts in your head at the same time, and to go to a kind of tragic
situation, exemplifying that, it ought to be possible to feel distraught compassion for the face of innocent Palestinian civilians, and horror at what happened to Israelis on October the 7th, at the same time.
The kind of culture that you and I have just been talking about won't allow for that.And that produces more danger, more distress, more ignorance, and more fury.And the more the clickbaiters love it,
You know, I've been thinking about this on the media side, and I really felt that, like, the promise of the early Internet was that it would somehow democratize information, that, like, facts couldn't be hidden from citizens if people could talk back.
And that was part of what excited me about getting into journalism.But it didn't really turn out that way.
You know, it was like social networks replaced real fact-checked information, and people started getting suspicious effects wholesale, and we started living in different realities, sort of uncontested.
Yeah, it's a matter for great sorrow, if not despair.
What turned out to be the case was, of course, the internet was unbelievably auspicious for conspiracy theory, for tribes of fantastic thinking, all of whom who could reinforce each other's fantasy without the need for any empirical evidence.
And the craziness you know, would just be nourished by the internet instead of depleted.And we've barely begun to wrestle with that.And it's going to get worse with AI.
Yeah.I'm a little suspicious of sort of like individual action, like, you know, turn your phone off at night and put it far away from you and those sorts of things.But is there any way in your mind that we can be kind of pushed past
consuming things that will just confirm what we already know, pushed past, I don't know, the dangers of this.
No.Which isn't to say you're just asking the wrong person.You're asking a kind of unbelievably low-tech person.Are people thinking and working about this?Of course they are.Yeah, absolutely.Have they revealed the answer? I don't know.
We need a combo of Aristotle, Einstein, and Gandalf the wizard.I sure don't know.I mean, I guess that's the split.Do you actually, in respect to the election campaign we've been talking about and the cultural kind of temper around it,
do you get in and down and dirty?I don't mean to say you make things up, but you actually find a way really to be part of the short attention span culture.
I mean, people have been making pro-Kamala Harris and Democratic TikTok pieces, some of them very good.They've been doing deadly brilliant satirical ridicule of Donald Trump and so on.But the notion that really,
you know, we can beat them at their own game.As I say, it all goes back to that extraordinary insight that Hannah Arendt had a half century ago, that lying both engenders excitement and is exciting for the people who do it.
If you had to say the most ludicrous headline after this election over, you know, that I've sent around is, how to make truth sexy, how to make truth exciting.
It should be, I will say this to you, Lila, that it shouldn't be that hard to make the defense of democracy thrilling.At the moment, it's in the mouth of suits. or who are members of governments in European countries or wherever.
It's broadsheets speaking unto broadsheet, or op-ed academics speaking unto the converted.
What we've really not thought of, because it's not temperamentally suited to an op-ed writer, is how do you do what Donald Trump's doing, but for the sake of truth and democratic freedom?
Right, right, right. Simon, I'm a little afraid to ask you this question, but I'm going to try it.
And that's that part of what makes watching a lot of this kind of scary to me is that it can be hard to know how bad things really are just by nature of the way that it's presented online.
The scale can be hard to get a sense of, you know, like, is this hurricane resistance militia huge news or just a few people?Some people think we're at the brink of a civil war.
Others think that the vast majority of Americans will want to protect democracy at the end of the day and we'll probably be fine.I guess I'm curious from you what a useful way to think about this is.
Well, the most useful is probably I was going to say a mixture of anger and panic.I don't think panic is useful at all.I think anger and determination, really.I think, I mean, it's sort of a two-part question, isn't it?
One, are things, should Donald Trump be elected again, really going to be as bad or somehow are we going to sail through?My feeling with many of My colleague says that, buckle up, they are going to be very, very difficult.
And there is a distinct true possibility that democratic election politics, at least as we've known them, are not gonna be like the way they've been for a couple of centuries and more.
And I think is, again, you're asking a historian to be a prophet, but that's my strong feeling.On the other hand, the good news is, I think, Partly because Trump has no interest in governing at all, but he'll let other people do terrible damage.
I think in the end, there'll be a tremendous recoil from the politics of the strong man.
And actually, the notion that Christian nationalists can take over the country, that you can actually criminalize people from going from a non-abortion state to an abortion state, I actually think that's abhorrent to a majority of Americans.
but they will need to gather their forces for the next time round, and you just cross your fingers and hope to God that things aren't irreversible.
You know, most usually things are reversible, although history is replete with catastrophes which were only reversible by war, and we don't want that to happen.
Right, right.Determined.Simon, my last question is, and thank you so much, is just where will you be during the election?How will you be watching?
I'm either going to be with my children and grandchildren in Brooklyn, although they'll be in bed, I think.Or else I'm going to be, I live 30 miles away from New York, but I am part of the BBC One coverage.
But I'm certainly going to be right at the beginning when the first exit polls are out.And then I've been told to come back each hour on the hour. And if I were you, I would have a very good bottle of single malt whiskey by the bed or by the couch.
I know on BBC One or not, I sure as hell will.Good luck, everybody.
No kidding.I will be watching probably at a bar with as many other people as possible.Perfect place.Truly.Simon, what an honor.Thank you so much for your time.Thanks for being on the show.
You're very welcome.Thank you.Bye.
That's the show.Thank you for listening to Life and Art from FT Weekend.Take a look through the show notes.I have linked to Simon's latest column and some other relevant pieces.
As always in the show notes, also there's a link for a discount to a subscription to the Financial Times and places that you can find me on email and on Instagram.I'm at Lila Wrap there and love chatting with all of you about culture.
I'm Lila Raptopoulos, and here's our exceptional team.Katya Kumkova is our senior producer.Lulu Smith is our producer.Our sound engineers are Breen Turner, Sam Javinko, and Joe Salcedo, with Original Music by Metaphor Music.
Topher Forges is our executive producer, and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley.Have a wonderful week, and we'll find each other again on Friday.
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