You’re Being Manipulated

America is in the grips of an epistemic crisis—an assault on reality, a rising inability to distinguish fact from fiction, an effort to shut down free inquiry—that poses an existential threat to liberal democracy. Which is why Jonathan Rauch’s new book, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, is so timely and so essential. It helps us understand this moment better than anything else I’ve read and offers insights into what can be done to strengthen what Rauch calls a “reality-based community.” Rauch’s “constitution of knowledge” is a structured system of institutions and rules that we depend on to settle disagreements and discover truth. As Rauch puts it, “Free speech is not enough; you have to get a lot of the settings right.”

I first met Rauch—an award-winning journalist, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a contributing writer for The Atlantic—in the mid-1990s. I quickly came to admire his intellectual fair-mindedness and integrity, his calm disposition and generosity of spirit in public debates, the precision of his arguments and his willingness to engage with me on any topics, including ones on which we disagreed. He’s since become a close friend and part of a community of writers and public intellectuals with whom I often interact and who have imparted to me knowledge and wisdom.

I called him recently to talk about his book, and about polarization, epistemic disruption, and the blast radius of Donald Trump, whom Rauch describes as “a genius-level propaganda operative.” The Republican Party has become “an institutionalized propaganda outlet,” he argues. But we also talk about the dangers of so-called “cancel culture” and the left’s “totalistic ideology,” what cognitive psychology can teach us about politics, the writers who have shaped his political sensibilities and philosophy, his pivotal role in the gay-rights debate and his concerns about where it’s heading, his thoughts on atheism and Christianity, and his aspirations as a writer and a public intellectual.

Our conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Peter Wehner: What’s different and more dangerous about American politics today than before, and why is this epistemic disruption so much worse now than ever before? Or is it worse now than ever before?

Jonathan Rauch: It probably tracks polarization, to which it’s closely related. And indications are that polarization is at its worst since approximately the time of the Civil War. That’s not a sentence anyone enjoys saying or thinking about. And I think the same is true of the epistemic crisis.

There was a big one in the 1850s. The South engaged in a campaign to create an alternative reality in which the North was the aggressor and it was coming down to destroy the South and its lifestyle. And that was very effective in ginning up war fever, which was the intention. I don’t think we’ve seen anything remotely like that since that time in terms of magnitude and danger. And the present crisis, of course, is of a very different nature.

So why now? It’s been building for a long time. Polarization per se is not new, but the more polarized a society gets, the easier it is to manipulate people by hating on the other