The Way We Lie Now

Let’s talk about lying. Or the way we lie now. In other words, what happens to a free society, and supposed democracy like the United States, when our discourse and our collective dialogue are saturated with lies. Certainly, history is full of examples of the way in which lies, which can include propaganda and other nationalist sentiments, come to erode a democracy’s very foundations.(Think Stalin’s Russia and the Nazi regime, to name just two regimes built on lies.) Lies, if told repeatedly and insistently, don’t just waft through the air and eventually disappear into the ether.  To the contrary, they calcify into their own iteration of “truth.” And those same lies come to substitute for truth until a far too sizable portion of people no longer are able to discern fact from fiction. It’s a dystopian reality, not one far from George Orwell depicted in his haunting, cautionary works like “1984” or “Animal Farm.” Democracies don’t necessarily perish at the barrel of a gun or with tanks rolling into the city streets. Lies and untruths can steadily undermine, slowly and gradually, a long held set of agreed upon principles as well as a collective commitment to the rule of law Students of political theory, might recall the work of a German emigrant and brilliant political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, whose writings from the middle of the twentieth century and the postwar era remain both perceptive and evergreen. Think democracy is indestructible in the face of leaders who won’t or even can’t tell the citizen the truth? A look back at Arendt’s words might convince you otherwise.

In her seminal 1967 essay, “Truth and Politics,”  Hannah Arendt observed:

“Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute.”

Though she died in 1975, Arendt’s writings on political philosophy, and lying in politics in particular, feel like essential reading right now. Indeed, truth and politics have been long engaged in a relationship, albeit a dysfunctional one. Indeed, as the Washington Post reported on July 13, 2020:

“It took President Trump 827 days to top 10,000 false and misleading claims in The Fact Checker’s database, an average of 12 claims a day.

But on July 9, just 440 days later, the president crossed the 20,000 mark — an average of 23 claims a day over a 14-month period, which included the events leading up to Trump’s impeachment trial, the worldwide pandemic that crashed the economy and the eruption of protests over the death of George Floyd.

President Trump made more than 13,000 misleading or false claims over the 1,000-plus days of his presidency.” This legacy of of lies, of “fake news,” of “alternative facts,” of “post-truth,” continually threaten to swallow any notion of an objective reality.

Hannah Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany in 1906, and she fled the Nazis in 1933. She lived briefly in Paris, before emigrating to the US. Her work in the middle of the 20th century, particularly post-World War II, is legendary. Both “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” which assessed the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism, and “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil,” remain crucial guideposts for the insidious nature by which totalitarian regimes seize and maintain control. Arendt’s remarks on the means by which societies shore up their despotism feel eerily prescient:

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

Ever since Plato defended his concept of “the noble lie,” politicians of varying stripes have sold braggadocio and delivered bupkis. Yet, it’s not merely that Trump lies. It’s that Trumpism and its willful cabal of enablers, cheerleaders and cultists, have turned lying into its own poisonous bread and circus. Farewell Republican classic, we hardly knew ye.

In 1972, Arendt wrote a collection of essays entitled “Crises of the Republic,”which included, arguably the best examination of the kind of BS which can essentially sabotage democracy called “Lying in Politics.” “Lying Politics” perceptively examines the public relations angle of Vietnam —(yes, our government lied about the war.) Her essay is cautionary, both in its concern that history could be oversimplified into binary categories of liars and truth-tellers, but also that a manipulative theatricality in politics engenders a fundamental distrust in government. In an analysis that may register in our nation’s ongoing Trumpian moment, Arendt warned that lies in politics do not simply deceive the populace, but those lies are predicated on injecting fear into the body politic. Indeed, the all too large gallery of craven Republicans quiver at the thought of crossing Trump or opposing MAGA talking points, even at the expense of the American experiment.

The power of the lie as a weapon of power is nothing new, but where lies have traditionally been deployed against one’s opponents, they are now aimed squarely at our democracy itself. As our politics grows indistinguishable from spectacle, the liar can no longer be differentiated from the truth-teller. Our founders’ doorstop against runaway executive power was a robust separation of powers. Consequently, our political discourse is now replete with lies, and our long held democratic consensus—of agreed upon facts and holding our truths as self-evident— has seemingly morphed into a propaganda lab.

Congenitally amoral and playing the role of a lifetime, Trump has come to represent his own spectacle, though his vindictive brand of showbiz moxie doubtless comes at our nation’s expense. If the liar accomplishes anything, Arendt long ago warned us, it’s invariably the collapse of consensus. In the inverted Trump era, patriots are cowards, heroes are villains, political adversaries are “human scum,” and January 6th was the work of BLM and ANTIFA. Honesty in politics might sound righteous or perhaps naive, but Arendt saw that all we can do in the name of democracy is to bear witness to the lie. That is to be able and willing to call a lie out for what it is. For a nation born of revolution, telling the truth may just be our most defiant act yet.

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