We have known ever since the 1948 Elmira, New York voting studies that party affiliation drives most voting decisions. Partisanship also affects how people judge what is real and what is false. For example, a 2016 Fairleigh Dickinson Universioty poll found that "almost 90 percent of Trump's and Clinton's supporters believe in conspiracies that smear the candidate they don't like, even in the absence of credible evidence. Many Republicans believed that Barack Obama was hiding important information about his background, while many Democrats thought that President Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks before they happened. Almost 1/4 of Americans thought that the Sandy Hook school shootings may have been faked. That such opinions are absurd should, but does not, go without saying.
Reality seems to take a beating, does it not?
So, it comes as no surprise that Senator Jeff Flake's impassioned speech for truth, in which he criticized President Donald Trump's many falsehoods, generated partisan reactions. Controversial Arizona politician Joe Arpaio claimed that Flake committed treason, which seems highly unlikely. The normally staid National Review published an article that attacked Flake for comparing Mr. Trump to Stalin, "while ignoring pervasive media bias." The White House claimed that Flake attacked the President "because he has terrible poll numbers." A classic ad hominem attack.
Over the past several months, some liberal critics wonder how Senator Flake can support the President's agenda while opposing his rhetoric. That misses the point. Flake did not turn against the President because he disagreed with his policies, but because he disapproved of Trump's falsehoods. In the meantime, there is, indeed, evidence that Mr. Trump is speaking falsely more often than previous presidents. Recently, he caused an international incident by retweeting a right-wing video about a Muslim attack that didn't actually happen, and falsely claimed that money was pouring into NATO (which simply misrepresents how NATO armies are funded).
If your policies are good, support them with facts. If your policies are so bad that you need to lie about them, change your policies. As long as people believe falsehoods, well . . .
Suggestion for politicians: stop exaggerating. Tell the truth even if it does not fully support your view. Give the liars no room to criticize you, and you will be in a better position to criticize them. In the short run, yes, lies are persuasive. The way to deal with a post-truth world is to tell the truth. No shortcuts. In the long run, truth wins.
Not everyone wants to deal with truth. But many people do, and they must have a clear choice between liars, on the one hand, and truth-tellers, on the other. It was said that Caesar's wife needed to be beyond reproach because the public noticed everything she did. The truth-tellers must be like Caesar's wife: beyond reproach.
No comments:
Post a Comment