It’s not that Turmp’s followers don’t recognize or don’t care that he’s lying. On the contrary: they do know it and they do care, because the more he does it, the more they like him. They want someone who can do anything – who can get away with anything. All of Trump’s contradictory statements are a “performance” – a performance of getting away with things.
I think this whole way of performing in public was really perfected by Rush Limbaugh. His whole schtick is taking literally any data point and spinning it in his favor. That’s the Limbaugh “stunt” – moving the goalposts as the central argumentative move. Sophistry as entertainment.
The highbrow version of this is Antonin Scalia. The very arbitrariness of his arguments was the whole point. He was “performing power” – power defined as the ability to be arbitrary.
Calling Trump out on his lies just strengthens the narrative of his power.
The old Amerikan traditions of trusting concentrated power and rooting for the Uberhund…
But the postmodernists, like foucault were also right about a lot of things, that truth is often used as a weapon. He points out things like the defining and categorization of sexual practices and the mentally ill, among other things, led Western society to pathologize them in the first place. Scientific developments often under girded colonial endeavors. This idea that our modern way of thinking about and organizing world indeed does need scrutiny and it hasn’t all been good news for humanity. I don’t agree in throwing the baby out with the bathwater, here, but I do suggest that labeling something as “objective truth” can and has been done as a political act as much as a scientific one. Fascism takes on multiple forms, it’s not just an anti-objective world view. Fascists embraced the modern and put it to bad uses. In addition to @MarjaE’s example of the criminalization of the Hijras in India under colonization, we can look at pretty much any other colonial endeavor, which were often justified in the name of civilization.
It makes more sense to look at science as a tool, which can be put to multiple uses and is hence subject to human misuse and abuse, as much as to human enlightenment.
[ETA] Henry Louis Gates puts some of this discussion of the enlightenment into prespective of American history and the debates around who gets a history - worth a read:
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