By Cord J. Whitaker
We have heard a lot about lies in the past month. Politicians have lied that FEMA isn’t helping victims of Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Or that $750 is the only help they are offering. Or that the government orchestrated the hurricanes in the first place. Or that Donald Trump never was against women’s reproductive rights. Or that calling Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage” was just a joke. Other politicians—Republican and Democrat alike—have pushed back. In speeches and press conferences, President Biden and former President Obama have called out lies and pointed out that they affect victims’ behavior. People may not seek the help that’s available to them. This dynamic is not new, and the creative power of lies influences far more about our American experience than the past month’s responses to two devastating hurricanes. It affects far more than this election.
On May 14, 2006, when the War on Terror was at its height, the series finale of The West Wing aired. Josiah “Jed” Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen, is the favorite TV president of every liberal—and anyone who enjoys a good political narrative. He was leaving office after two terms. His staff was packing up his personal things. Among them was the English translation of French historian and theorist Michel Foucault’s lectures delivered in 1976 at the Collège de France. The volume’s English title is Society Must be Defended. The camera lingers on the book.
An editorial in The Nation the next day asserts that the book is not, as the showrunners may have thought, a how-to manual. Foucault argues that modern society appears to be in a constant state of war: “a battlefront runs through the whole of society, continuously and permanently…and puts us all on one side or the other.” Foucault’s point was, however, that this is not a natural state. Instead, it’s the story we have told ourselves and the condition we have created.
Creating reality is a normal human activity. Drs. Amy and Arnold Mindell coined the term Consensus Realityfor the everyday experience we share—or assume that we share—with others. These are the aspects of reality that we can reach consensus about. We build Consensus Reality together, usually from visionary ideas such as the light bulb or the airplane or the computer. We also shift it together. There was a time when slavery was a normal part of U.S. culture. Today we lionize abolitionists and freedom fighters, but before the mid-1800s, they were a minority and often maligned. Constructing and shifting realities is a fraught process. In the case of slavery, it has required war and revolution.
The continued presence of MAGA and events leading up to November’s election have brought us to another moment when consensus feels hard to come by. Just the other day, a friend pleaded that he wants to believe that he must have something in common with the MAGA faithful but it is too hard to imagine what. For years now, analysis after analysis has puzzled over how American viewpoints got so divided between MAGA and the center-left. The short answer is that we have two Consensus Realities.
These two competing realities are able to operate in our country simultaneously because they overlap. The MAGA view, presaged by the War on Terror and typified by Trump’s infamous “American Carnage” speech and his many reprise versions since, takes America as a dangerous hellscape in desperate need of restoration to its former glory. The center-left’s perspective is not as different as you might think: the state of the U.S. is fundamentally good, but unless we “battle for the soul of the nation” it will quickly become a dangerous hellscape at the hands of the very MAGA folks who think it already has. We differ on whether it’s already here and who’s bringing it, but there is consensus that there’s a horrifying version of America.
The binary Foucault spoke of is a myth. A powerful myth. He declares that the person who speaks using this binary discourse might speak of rights, but they are not universal. They are “singular rights…strongly marked by a relationship of property, conquest, victory, or nature.” He speaks of the “rights of his family or race.” The person Foucault theorizes speaks the truth of these rights, but it’s a truth that is “perspectival…one-sided” and “can be deployed only from [a] combat position.” In this regard, to some, it is a truth, though not objectively true, that the Democrat-led U.S. government doesn’t help hurricane victims in Republican-leaning areas. It is a truth, though again not true, that the U.S. government can control hurricanes and send them where it wishes, as Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green claimed in recent days. What makes it “true” is that people believe it and act accordingly. They make it true, at least for themselves, and then the hellscape becomes real to them. It is equally the case that believing in the myth of the binary—Us vs. Them—makes the binary real.
The Us vs. Them binary drives racism, misogyny, nationalism, ableism, and more, and its power is self-serving. Not just for the people who come out on top, but for the binary itself. Take racism. In my work on race, I regularly point out to students, colleagues, and clients, that racism is an insidious shape-shifter. The enslavement of 1790 looks very different from the microaggressions of 2024, but racism is the heart of both. The binary strives to keep the war going. The details are window-dressing, even when they’re deadly.
Now that we have two Americas, the odds are stacked that we will continue to have two (or more). The Us-vs.-Them binary resists resolution because if one side or the other finally wins, then the binary itself ceases to exist. Pitting one truth against another truth keeps the binary going strong. But if one side wins and no one argues or even believes the other claim anymore, then how could one side define itself as good? Binaries are how we define things: big or small, black or white. We are so used to living in binaries, it’s hard to think outside them.
But all hope is not lost. We have created the reality of American division, and we can create different conditions, too. The problem with lies is not that they’re untrue. It’s that they and the rebuttals against them keep the state of war going. Lies are truths for those who believe them and act according to them, so much so that they dictate material reality. If, however, lies are not called out for departing from truth but instead for misinterpreting Consensus Reality—the things we all agree on—then there is hope for unification. It becomes possible to see what we on the right and we on the left do have in common. We can then engage one another from there.
Foucault argued that a constituent element in Greek philosophy was a median position, a point where agreed upon truth represents peace and neutrality. The perspective that America is already in a degraded state of calamity is not such a point. Nor is the notion that those who believe the former will drag us into a disastrous hellscape. This usually brings with it the idea that MAGA believers are perfidious or otherwise defective. But there is a space of agreement. None of us want the horrifying hellscape America that MAGA believers see and that those in the exhausted majority fear. Starting from there, it becomes possible to have a conversation.
The point of calling out lies is not that they’re lies, it’s that they leave us living in different worlds. We can invite those in the other world to join us and create something new together.
The invitation, and creating something new together based on our shared desires. That is the work of diversity. In other words, establishing that there is a truth we can all agree on might allow those of us who are exhausted (and anxious) to get a little rest. What’s even better, it will help us to build communities that rarely become so exhausting in the first place.