Every civilization depends upon an invisible foundation. It is not military strength, economic prosperity, or technological innovation. Those are expressions of a civilization’s vitality, not its source. Beneath them lies something far more fundamental: a shared confidence that reality exists independently of ideology and that facts, however inconvenient, deserve allegiance before political loyalty.

When that confidence erodes, societies do not merely become polarized. They lose the capacity for self-government.

This was the central warning of Hannah Arendt, one of the twentieth century’s most penetrating political philosophers. Having witnessed the collapse of European civilization and the rise of totalitarianism, Arendt understood that the greatest danger to a free society was not simply propaganda or political deception. Governments have always lied. Political movements have always manipulated language. Her deeper concern was the gradual destruction of the distinction between truth and falsehood itself.

In her essay Truth and Politics, Arendt argued that factual truth is uniquely vulnerable because it depends upon institutions and citizens willing to defend it. Facts cannot defend themselves. They require historians committed to evidence, journalists committed to verification, courts committed to testimony, and ordinary citizens willing to distinguish what happened from what they wish had happened. Once those institutions abandon that........

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