There’s been a lot of commentary in the press this past week about the role of lies in politics.
In his Tuesday column on Donald Trump’s lies about the federal response to Hurricane Helene, Jamelle Bouie wrote: “Politics is not the place for perfect honesty, but some measure of truth telling is necessary to the project of collective self-government.”
We all know that politicians bend the truth in making their case. Joe Biden and Tim Waltz, to name two prominent examples on the other side of the isle, have gotten caught in some whoppers.
If lying is an unavoidable part of politics, where is the line between what Bouie refers to as “some measure of truth” and lying that could destroy “collective self-government.”
It's a question that has become particularly urgent this hurricane season as Trump-flavored politicians circulate lies as brazen as Margorie Taylor Greene’s suggestion that the government is somehow causing catastrophic weather events.
Bouie vaguely suggests the line between acceptable and unacceptable lying is whether politicos “strive for some correspondence to reality when they make their case to the public.”
You-tuber Vlad Vexler is more precise. He defines the unacceptable liars as “post-truth populists” who “have consciously given up on trying to make their lies internally consistent,” so that it becomes impossible to tell the difference between truth and lies.” Their goal, he argues, is to destroy faith in institutions and politics itself and to foster the feeling that leaders “prioritize others over you.”
Vexler said this before Trump started claiming that FEMA disaster relief money was being channeled to illegal immigrants.
Where Bouie argues that brazen lies are anti-democratic, Vexler suggests instead that they are anti-political. They lead citizens to believe that “there is nothing you can do to inflect the political process.”
I think that’s a better explanation.
Bouie writes that without access to the truth, we can’t perform what he says is an essential part of democracy : reasoning and deliberating with fellow citizens.
In his book, In Defence of Politics, Bernard Crick separates democracy from politics, and the book includes a chapter with the title “A Defence of Politics Against Democracy.”
The democratic concept of “sovereignty of the people”—the right of “the people to choose the government they want”—suggests that in democracy, the people get their way. In theory, “all power is supposed to stem from an undivided and indivisible ‘people,’” Crick writes.
But another essential concept of democracy—“majority rule”—means that minorities—the losers in elections—do not get their way.
“Sovereignty of the people” doesn’t address Crick’s incisive question: “which people?” (Crick, 59-60).
A key feature of populism is to define “The people” against an enemy. Trump has referred to journalists as “enemies of the people”; Bernie Sanders’ to “billionaires.” Enemies like that must be suppressed, populists say, but Crick defines politics as “the activity by which differing interests within a given territory are conciliated,” not suppressed.
But if democracy is elevated over politics, democracy is at risk. Tocqueville spoke of "democratic despotism" and worried that if ever the free institutions of America are destroyed, that event may be attributed to the omnipotence of the majority."
Hannah Arendt, a survivor of totalitarianism, was quoted in my local newspaper last week on how the destruction of politics in a democratic system leads to authoritarian government: “Keeping listeners constantly trying to defend what is real from what is not destroys their ability to make sense of the world. Many people turn to a strong man who promises to create order. Others will get so exhausted they simply give up.” Established authoritarian dictatorships, Anne Applebaum wrote in the June Atlantic, suppress citizens yearning for democracy not by discrediting the notions of popular sovereignty or majority rule, but by promoting apathy and cynicism about the potential of political action to create a better world. “Their goal is to persuade people to stay out of politics.”
Leftovers
Hannah Arendt was quoted by Lynn Wurzburg of St. J. Oct. 9, 2024, Caledonian Record Crick talks about the problem of sovereignty on pp. 59-60 of Defence of Politics. Danielle Allen also confronts this problem in her book on citizenship, which I wrote about elsewhere on this blog:
One of the most important lessons students need to learn to become democratic citizens is that in spite of the individual freedom and sovereignty that democracies promise their citizens, we don’t always get our way even in a well-functioning democracy and are often asked to sacrifice our personal preferences and interests for the good of the whole, the survival of democracy, and the maintenance of peace. When our candidate loses the election, when we are drafted and sent into battle, and when policies favored by the majority disadvantage us or go against what we think is good, we are sacrificing something. https://www.billjordan.net/2022/08/teaching-citizenship-in-polarized.html
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