Surface Facts

One of the handicaps I had as an English  professor was my secret belief that much of the literary theory and criticism of my time consisted of paranoid inventions of patterns that did not exist.   No poem said what it seemed to say. Poems had to be unpacked to make clear the hidden conspiracies. 

This approach came from several sources at the end of World War II, some of them European Fascists. They had a compelling reason to argue in 1950 that facts should be deconstructed. In a world without solid facts, your former membership in the Nazi party would not matter. 

Such views eventually degenerated into Republicans mocking a "fact-based" view of things, promoting "alternative facts,"  attacking the "deep state" and labelling the truth as "fake news."